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In a truly miraculous story, a Chassidish woman of 65 gave birth to a healthy baby boy this week. Chaya Sarah Shachar became a mother for the first time at the Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba. The ecstatic parents had been trying to have children for over 45 years. Shachar and her husband, Shmuel, had unsuccessfully tried to have children since they were married at the ages of 19 and 21, respectively. The couple had sought fertility treatments as well as blessings from religious figures. The proud parents, who are affiliated with the Nadvorna Chasidic dynasty, attributed the “miracle” to a blessing from their rebbe, who died three years ago.
National Lamaze Co-Founder Dies at 100 Elisabeth Bing was an expert in her field; she revolutionized childbirth in the U.S. Last Friday, the pioneer Lamaze instructor passed away at the age of 100 in her New York home. Bing was born Elisabeth Dorothea Koenigsberger in a Berlin suburb in 1914 to Jewish parents. Her family immigrated to England in the 1930s. In London, she studied physiotherapy, and among her patients were women in maternity wards who were confined to bed for as long as 10 days after childbirth. Bing was disturbed that women were being sedated during childbirth and having little or no control over the birthing process. During WWII, Bing pursued the study of natural childbirth while working as an ambulance driver. The turning point of her career came in 1949, when she visited her sister living in the U.S. During her visit she came up with the idea of helping obstetricians who were not knowledgeable about childbirth at the time. Bing wound up remaining in the U.S. and developing her practice in New York after meeting and marrying Fred Max
Where Have all the Good Bees Gone? According to a federal survey, more than two out of five American honeybee colonies died in the past year. Perhaps most surprisingly was that the worst dieoff was in the summer. Since April 2014, beekeepers lost 42.1 percent of their colonies, the second highest loss rate in nine years, according to an annual survey conducted by a bee partnership that includes the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“What we’re seeing with this bee problem is just a loud signal that there’s some bad things happening with our agro-ecosystems,” said study co-author Keith Delaplane at the University of Georgia. “We just happen to notice it with the honeybee because they are so easy to count.” That doesn’t mean bees are about to become endangered. After a colony dies, beekeepers split their surviving colonies, start new ones, and the numbers go back up again, said Delaplane and study co-author Dennis van Engelsdorp of the University of Maryland. What truly had entomologists stumped was the season of all the dying hives; it is much more common for bees to die in the winter than in the summer. Seeing massive colony losses in summer is like seeing “a higher rate of flu deaths in the summer than winter,” van Engelsdorp said. “You just don’t expect colonies to die at this rate in the summer.” The places with the most prevalent bee deaths are Oklahoma, Illinois, Iowa, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Maine and Wisconsin; all those states had more than 60 percent of their hives die since April 2014, according to the report. Scientists say that a mixture of mites, poor nutrition and pesticides are to blame for the bee deaths.
That’s Odd How White is White? It’s a matter of color. There are many issues that can split up a town. This one, though, is making waves—waves of color. Minneha Township is building a wall along East Central, east of K-96, in front of the Southern Village subdivision. The township board plans to paint the wall bright white, the same color it painted the
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Police detectives in Kibbutz Shoval were shocked to discover 13 rifles, including automatic weapons, in the home of an elderly woman. The officers were conducting a weapons search after receiving a tipoff that unauthorized guns were being held in the area of the northern Negev. When they arrived at the woman’s home, they asked her if she was storing any weapons in her house, and she assured them she wasn’t. But Police decided to carry out a search anyway and found an arsenal in her attic— including AK-47s, an air rifle, a Czech-made rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, a Mauser handgun, Berettas, flares, as well as ammunition for all of the weapons. The entire stash was confiscated and sent to the Netivot police station. The woman, in her 80s, told police the guns had belonged to her late husband but she was adamant that she didn’t know he had kept them in the house. Superintendent Menny Ohayon of the Netivot police explained that police had heard that an “illegal weapon” was being used somewhere in the vicinity of the kibbutz. “After some legwork, we located the house and officers went in to look for the gun. To their surprise, they found a whole stash in the attic, with many weapons above and beyond the specific gun they were looking for. “In the stash, there was even one weapon from British Mandate days,” Ohayon said. “The rest of the weapons were usable and manufactured in recent decades. Among others, we found four AK-47 assault rifles, a sawed-off shotgun, a Czech rifle, five Beretta handguns, a Mauser hand gun, a Tommy gun and a flare gun. We also found a silencer, cartridges, telescope sights and enough ammo that a whole Is-
Miracle Baby Born to 65-Year-Old
Bing. She began by coaching local expectant parents in the studio she ran on the main floor of her Upper West Side apartment building. Eventually she evolved into one of the best-known faces of the natural childbirth movement in the United States, promoting and teaching what she preferred to call “educated childbirth.” Soon after that in 1951 about, Mount Sinai Hospital approached her about teaching at its newly opened maternity ward. She became the clinical assistant professor at New York Medical College in the 1960’s. Eventually, she and Marjorie Karmel established the American Society for Psychoprophylaxis in Obstetrics, now known as Lamaze International, to inform the public of the natural childbirth approach developed by the French obstetrician Dr. Fernand Lamaze. Although Bing encouraged women to depend on relaxation techniques to cope with labor pains, she did not discount the option of using anesthesia when necessary. “You certainly must not feel any guilt or sense or failure if you require some medication, or if you experience discomfort,” she wrote in her 1967 book “Six Practical Lessons for an Easier Childbirth.” Ironically, she herself received an epidural when she gave birth at age 40 to her only son Peter.
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Widow’s Weapons Cache
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Education Forum slated to take place in South Korea next week, which will deal with raising global education standards. Titled “Universal Basic Skills: What Countries Stand to Gain,” it argues that universal education in basic skills in math and science will lead to a dramatic economic boon for the countries tested. The Arab world trailed far behind on the list, with one headline in the report noting diplomatically that “high-quality schooling and oil don’t mix easily.” “The high-income non-OECD countries, as a group, would see an added economic value equivalent to almost five times the value of their current GDP – if they equipped all students with at least basic skills. So there is an important message for countries rich in natural resources: the wealth that lies hidden in the undeveloped skills of their populations is far greater than what they now reap by extracting wealth from natural resources,” the report pointed out.