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page 70

then-unknown Dylan took the
stage at a New York folk club
and sang a sarcastic version of
Hava Nagila, a deliberate coun-
terpoint to the legion of
folksingers who felt that a He-
brew song or two gave them a
properly proletarian image.
Early Dylan songs were re-
plete with biblical references. Un-
fortunately to some, many of
those allusions were to the Chris-
tian Bible.
In the early 1970s, Dylan be-
gan exploring his Judaism more
actively. Those piritual yearn-
ings led to his highly public
conversion to born-again Chris-
tianity, which is documented in
gory detail — and then, in the
1980s, his much lower-profile de-
cision to study with the Lubav-
itchers in Brooklyn, a spiritual
shift that Yudelson tracks in Dy-
lan's lyrics.
In one section, Yudelson doc-
uments what he sees as a strong
connection between Israel's ups
and downs and Dylan's lyrics.
The 1967 Six Day War, for in-
stance, coincided with one of the
most fertile periods for the song-
writer, as well as a burst of bib-
lical allusions. The 1973 Yom
Kippiur war was quickly followed
by Dylan's first "comeback."
But in 1978 — the year of the
Camp David accords — Dylan
embraced
Christianity; since 1991, when
the Madrid peace talks began,
Dylan has released albums, but
written no new songs.
Yudelson's conclusion? Dylan's
muse is stimulated by Israel's
desperate heroism, but peters out
when Israel is at peace.

Also at the Dylan site: some
parodies of Dylan songs, in-
cluding this gem: "I Dreamed I
Saw Maimonides," a Jewish an-
swer to the early Dylan classic,
"I Dreamed I Saw St. Augus-
tine."
Using the Web as a two-way
medium, Yudelson asks visitors
to help add to his collection of
Hebrew versions of Dylan songs.
The site even features a peri-
odic raffle for visitors. The latest
prize? A tape containing various
Hebrew "cover" versions of Dy-
lan classics like "Blowing in the
Wind." Still another section of-
fers a collection of anecdotes
about Dylan's life, including ac-
counts of his bar mitzvah —"the
biggest bar mitzvah in Hibbing"
— and his flirtation with moving
to Israel and living on a kibbutz.
And there is some intriguing triv-
ia about Dylan's encounters with
the sons of two great Yiddish
writers — Shalom Aleichem and
Sholem Asch.
One of the pleasures of the
World Wide Web is its hypertext
feature, allowing you to jump
with the click of a mouse to oth-
er sites around the world that of-
fer related material.
So the Jewish Dylan Web site
provides instant access to other
sources of Dylan profundity and
trivia, including an Internet site
devoted to Israeli popular mu-
sic. El

Next month: Shmoozing with
Bibi: Inside CompuServe's Israel
Forum.
Know any interesting Jewish
cyber-sites? Send an E-mail to:
jbesser@clark.net

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72

Shaken Holocaust survivors in Ramat Gan react to
'July bus bombing with fear and anger.

LARRY DERFNER ISRAEL CORRESPONDENT

R

amat Gan is known main-
ly as a bedroom commu-
nity of Tel Aviv. A city of
some 125,000 people, it
has the Israel Diamond Ex-
change, where a suicide terror-
ist blew up a bus and killed five
people plus himself in July. It
also has Canion Ayalon, Israel's
first shopping mall, where the
bomber evidently boarded the
bus.
The city is well remembered
for the awful scud missile attacks
it took during the Gulf War. It is
less well known for having one of
the highest concentrations of
Holocaust survivors of any city
in the country.
On the day of the bus bomb-

ing, the Ramat Gan branch of
"Amcha," the Israeli Center for
Psychological Support of Holo-
caust Survivors, received about
60 calls from- clients — twice the
normal daily number. Its group
therapy sessions and social club,
however, had an unusually high
proportion of no-shows. "A lot of
people called and said they
weren't coming. They would say,
`I'm afraid to leave my house, I'm
afraid to walk down my own
street,' " said branch director
Sima Weiss.
A person can negotiate his way
around Ramat Gan fairly easily
in Yiddish. Aged Holocaust sur-
vivors sit and talk on benches in
the park and square in the mid-

tN