Alice

Alice Wiesz is a bit of a surprise package. Michal suggested that I do a story on her on the strength of a newspaper article she’d read. So I read it too. It was about an Australian woman called Alice and her ground roots environmental activism on Churshat HaYareyach.
If you’re not from southern Jerusalem you probably don’t know the place, Churshat HaYareyah. It’s about a couple of acres of bushland, a pocket by Australian standards, stuck in between some of the best residential areas in the holy city. It’s more a rocky mini savannah outcrop than forest; there are some trees there so by Israeli standards that makes it a small wood.
As they used to say in the army, “When you’re in the desert, any thorn bush looks like a flower.”
But I’ve always been more than fond of it. There were many years that we survived without a car so I used to love walking there with my infant kids on Shabbat to romp around and revel over the various wildflowers which would pop up out of nowhere during different seasons of the year. For my money no man made playground could come up to scratch compared with nature’s effort. Sorry if that offends your sensibilities. Its like a little patch of country slap bang in the middle of suburbia. It was here that my infant son, barely walking, made up his first pistol with a broken pine branch, innocently defying our attempts at politically correct education. In later years as he graduated from primary school it became his favourite site for Lag b’Omer and all night bonfires and other things.
The interview seemed like a good idea. But I took my time about making contact. I’m not used to ringing up total strangers and asking for an interview. And you’ve never heard anyone clumsier on the phone with an introductory line than me.
Overcoming my tongue-tied bumbling over the phone, I managed to introduce myself and explained my purpose in light of that short article in a local paper. Notwithstanding my mumbling we set up a meeting. I was expecting the saviour of this patch of urban countryside to be a young woman in her twenties or thirties in patched overalls and shearers’ boots, with a bandanna in her long brown hair, wavy and unkempt or else braided. She for her part informed me with an authoritative tone and feisty patience that the two halves of Churshat HaYareyah each have separate names, referring to the second half as Churshat HaCalaniot. She had me there because my two adolescents, whose school is right next door to this space, have never called it that. This only went to enhance my premonition, though her insistence in repeating “Shabbat shalom” at least twice, did cause me some dissonance. It was a Friday morning.
When we finally did meet at her place more than a month later Alice was nothing like what I was expecting. Excusing herself for being on the phone to Australia, she ushered me inside. Here was an elegant middle-aged lady in a slender full-length black dress with a sharply renovated apartment with clean lines, bathed in the autumn sunlight. The view from the third floor window is something to make any Israeli city slicker jealous. From my place you look straight out onto the neighbours laundry. From Alice’s place you have to strain your neck to find another building, and that's the Jerusalem theatre half way up the hill to Talbieh. All you really see are emerald pine treetops craning into your field of vision from the inclined grove known as Churshat HaYareyah.
Alice told me part of her atypical story. Her Yekke father had been deported from England to Australia on the HMT Dunera as an enemy alien and her mother had arrived with little more than a fur coat, which sent her employer into fits of jealousy. Later Alice veered from academia into naturopathic medicine, influenced by overhearing her mother’s friends discussing home bred herbal remedies. For her part Alice came to Israel only 6 years ago from Sydney’s northern suburbs, brazenly challenging her family to join her. She's a religious woman, I would say modern orthodox. She also believes that Israel’s diminutive size is not an impediment to environmental activism but rather makes it imperative. She let me in on some of her views; on shmita and composting, on constructing self-sufficient housing and reusable water reticulation. The list doesn't stop there. Alice is a woman with strong beliefs and fortitude.
Last year in preparation for Lag B'Omer, the city government was spraying the forests in order to kill the undergrowth and limit the chance of fires spreading. It just so happens that Alice spotted the spraying start over the road from her place. Alice, who has been an environmental activist for over 40 years, took it upon herself to help protect the forest. Firstly she dissuaded the workers from continuing with the spraying. "The problem is,” says Alice, “that the pesticides were also killing the beautiful wild flowers and eroding the forest." That only turns the grove into a thorny weed patch and discourages people from using the space for recreation. Which in turn only helps the developers. The municipality, for reasons one can only take a jingling guess at, has recently carved out and allocated 5 blocks for construction on this rare pocket of urban countryside. Alice wants to see it rezoned as parkland. For the moment it’s just open territory.
I had always imagined that religious people living in the neighbourhood would want to protect it from real estate sharks for all they were worth, like a lioness protecting her cubs, so that they could go on enjoying it on Saturdays while everyone else was out of town tearing up the countryside in those over inflated 4 wheel drives which Elsa wouldn’t know from a hearse. But unfortunately they are as a whole still pretty apathetic about it, or so Alice thinks.
Alice’s concern is not just for the grove but also for the kids hanging around the Lag B’Omer bonfires all night without any supervision. The kids being kids are careless and one minute’s recklessness could wreak disaster. Alice, the former social worker, organised a small group of volunteers to clear away undergrowth on the block and set up fireplaces to build bonfires away from the trees that could catch fire and spread fire. Alice patrolled the area all night with water and a first aid kit keeping an eye on other people’s kids.
“How do parents just dump mountains of wood and then disappear?” she wonders. It’s not easy policing prepubescent kids and groups of teenagers, in mobs around 2 meter high bonfires, especially when you’re coping in a second language and your only authority is your personal set of moral standards. Of course the kids give lip. Sometimes she explains the danger and that’s enough and sometimes she just has to face them down. Occasionally she even comes close to losing her temper.
One volunteer surprised her and accompanied her in her patrolling all through the night right until the morning. When she asked him why he volunteered so selflessly he replied, “You didn’t catch what the kids say behind your back as you go passed. That’s why I stayed on.They say, oh that’s Alice. She’s looking after us.”
But don’t expect Alice to stop there. She’s idealistic, energetic and an experienced campaigner and organiser. She’ll be battling the land sharks to save the Churshot and no doubt be taking on other environmental issues in and around Israel. As I said Alice is a woman with strong beliefs and fortitude.

(if you're looking for a naturopath find Alice under Complementary Medicine, Naturopathy and Lymphatic Drainage in They Come Recommended)