Ore's Album

I never show a card or album here until after the date of the celebration has passed and so I have several albums to show you all in due course. Ore's Bar Mitzvah party has now taken place so I can start by showing you the one I made for him. He actually celebrated his Bar Mitzvah here in Israel at the end 2014 but his party was in London at the end of May! Working out which date to put on his album was a bit tricky, so my solution was to simply put the Jewish year.

The Jewish calendar not only has its own unique months, but it also numbers years differently from the Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian year 2015, for instance, is roughly equivalent to the Jewish year 5775. The Jewish Year does not begin on January 1st but on the festival of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year). This year Rosh Hashanah fell on September 2014 and marked the transition from 5774 to 5775. The date I put on Ore's book is תשע"ה. Hebrew letters are sometimes used to express numbers. For example, Aleph stands for 1, Bet for 2, and so on. When a Hebrew year is written using letters, you simply add up the values of the letters. Often the year is written with an implied addition of 5,000. So the year 5775 is written as 775. The year number on the Jewish calendar represents the number of years since creation, calculated by adding up the ages of people in the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) back to the time of creation. To calculate the Jewish year from the Gregorian calendar, you subtract 1,240 then add 5,000. For example, if the year is 2015, subtract 1,240 to get 775, then add 5,000 to obtain the Jewish year of 5775.

Ore is into his computer, making films and using the microblogging platform Tumblr and the video-sharing website You Tube. He apparently likes eating lemony things and has a thing about Nutella hazelnut chocolate spread too! I have shown Ore sitting at a desk, using his computer. The screen on the computer is open on Tumblr and there is a photo of an iPhone on it, another of his great interests. On the desk there are a couple of lemons and a jar of Nutella. To his left is an Israeli flag and the You Tube logo, and above the computer is his school's badge.

I decorated several pages inside the album based on Ore's hobbies. The opening page shows his school's badge, some pencils and a sharpener (top). Next I crafted a paper version of the Jerusalem skyline, since Ore has strong links with Israel. More Nutella and lemons follow, along with the Tumblr and You Tube logos, and, finally, a hand holding up an iPhone completes his list of favourite things! I added a gold Star of David (Magen David) to each page, and featured them on the cover too.

My customer emailed to say "It's amazing! We love it!" when she received the album.
Happy dance.