Israeli independence from England was declared on Lyar 5th, 5708 which translates to May 14th, 1948. The Jewish calendar, used in Israel, is lunar based while our western calendar is Solar based. Therefore, the 5th of Lyar will fall on one of several days in our calendar. For 2017, this day was May 1st. The Beth Sholom volunteers, who were meeting on that Monday, decided to go all out to celebrate this holiday. Many of the Israeli dancers at Beth Sholom are Israeli ex-pats for whom this day is of especial importance.

Our web site decided to cover this event and we brought several cameras for would-be photographers (and several perople brought their own cameras and shared the pictures with us). The following montages are broken up as follows: the first are pictures taken by Wendy Friedman, the second is by Yona Dansky. Marc Rauer did the third and the fourth is using our own camera.

As usual this preliminary script will be superceded by a permanent script to be produced sometime in the near future of May 4th when this script is being created.

These pictures directly below were taken by Wendy. Notice that Wendy went inside the circle to photograph dancers. Wendy is very artistic and it is not surprising that she has a superior eye in lining up these shots.

Yona Dansky used her cell phone and an app designated a google pictures to take what is shown directly below. Yona deals professionally with layout so we would expect the set up of the pitures to go well but we were also surprised at how well, in terms of accuity, were her cell phone camera quality

These pictures are by Marc Rauer. Marc generally concentrates on the dancing (and specific dancers) from afar and you can see some of this here. Of course, if you are detailing events featuring Israeli dance, the participants do enjoy being there and we guess this is what Marc generally tries to capture. However on this night there was a special guest and Marc caught the guest's speech and the crowd's reaction.

These photos were done by whoever had control of this camera. We've noticed previously that the flash attachment used here has problems with the lack of light and room dynamics of the Fleishman auditorium at Beth Sholom so some of the picutes are quite dark. We will try to rectify this if any of these pictures are used in the permanent script.