Aliyah

A customer admired my Am Yisrael Chai papercut and asked me to make a card with the same message on it for her daughter who was making aliyah. The Hebrew word aliyah literally means ascent or rise, but for generations it has been used to mean "moving to Israel". My customer wanted a nice card for her daughter to find when she arrived at her new home here.

Jewish tradition views travelling to the Land of Israel as an ascent, both geographically and metaphysically. The opposite action - emigration by Jews from Israel - is referred to in the Hebrew language as yerida (descent). The Law of Return that was passed by the Knesset (the legislative branch of the government of Israel) in 1950 gives all diaspora Jews, as well as their children and grandchildren, the right to relocate to Israel and acquire Israeli citizenship on the basis of connecting to their Jewish identity. 

I created a card with the blue and white flag of Israel on it. The flag consists of a white background with a blue Star of David in the centre and two horizontal blue stripes at the top and bottom. The Star of David is a widely acknowledged symbol of the Jewish people and of Judaism. The stripes recall the design of the tallit, the traditional Jewish prayer shawl. A white dove with an olive branch in its beak, a symbol of peace from the biblical story of Noah's ark, is hovering in front of the flag. Noah released the dove to find dry land after The Flood, and the dove returned carrying an olive branch, signaling that the flood had receded. I added a bright red pomegranate, one of Israel's Seven Species. In Jewish tradition, pomegranates are, among other things, a symbol of love. Finally, I cut out the Hebrew letters spelling out the words Am Yisrael Chai, "The people of Israel live". The slogan is used as a patriotic phrase, an equivalent of "Long Live Israel." The word "Chai" - meaning life, living, or alive - itself has a very special meaning and long history as a Jewish symbol, all explained in my Chai blog post.

My customer's daughter was delighted with her card. "Thank you for this gorgeous card!" she wrote to her mum. "I don’t know how you managed to get it posted here successfully!" she said. And that, dear readers, is a whole 'nother story...

* This post has been shared on Wonderful Wednesday Blog Hop

Thank You

I belong to the Facebook group IWEN (Israeli Women Entrepreneurs' Network). Once a week we are allowed to advertise on a thread in the group and one of those weeks a lovely lady contacted me about making thank you cards for her. She organises private tours of Israel and wanted some cards to thank her customers for choosing her business.

My new customer had spotted this card on my Facebook business page and decided that she liked the idea of a papercut card with Thank You as the text. She wanted the cards to be large because she wanted them to make a statement. She also asked me to line the cards with a blue paper inlay which would make them blue and white - the colours of the flag of Israel.
This was a fun project to work on. Occasional repetitive work like this can be quite relaxing once I have come up with the initial design.
"Thanks again for the super quick turnaround - I really do appreciate it." she wrote to me. I hope her customers like their handcut papercut cards.

* This post has been shared on All Seasons, {nifty thrifty sunday}, Happiness is Homemade, Creative Mondays, The Good. The Random. The Fun.