Today, The Grandma has decided to read about Simon Wiesenthal, the Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer, who died on a day like today in 2005.
Simon Wiesenthal (31 December 1908–20 September 2005) was a Jewish AustrianHolocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer.He studied architecture and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II.
He survived the Janowskaconcentrationcamp (late 1941 to September 1944), the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp (September to October 1944), the Gross-Rosenconcentration camp, a death march to Chemnitz, Buchenwald, and the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp (February to 5 May 1945).
After the war, Wiesenthal dedicated his life to tracking down and gathering information on fugitive Nazi war criminals so that they could be brought to trial.
In 1947, he co-founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz, Austria, where he and others gathered information for future war crime trials and aided refugees in their search for lost relatives.
He opened the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime in Vienna in 1961 and continued to try to locate missing Nazi war criminals.
He played a small role in locating Adolf Eichmann, who was captured in Buenos Aires in 1960, and worked closely with the Austrian justice ministry to prepare a dossier on Franz Stangl, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1971.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Wiesenthal was involved in two high-profile events involving Austrian politicians. Shortly after Bruno Kreisky was inaugurated as Austrian chancellor in April 1970, Wiesenthal pointed out to the press that four of his new cabinet appointees had been members of the Nazi Party. Kreisky, angry, called Wiesenthal a Jewish fascist, likened his organization to the Mafia, and accused him of collaborating with the Nazis.
Wiesenthal successfully sued for libel, the suit ending in 1989. In 1986, Wiesenthal was involved in the case of Kurt Waldheim, whose service in the Wehrmacht and probable knowledge of the Holocaust were revealed in the lead-up to the 1986 Austrian presidential elections. Wiesenthal, embarrassed that he had previously cleared Waldheim of any wrongdoing, suffered much negative publicity as a result of this event.
With a reputation as a storyteller, Wiesenthal was the author of several memoirs containing tales that are only loosely based on actual events. In particular, he exaggerated his role in the capture of Eichmann in 1960.
Wiesenthal died in his sleep at age 96 in Vienna on 20 September 2005 and was buried in the city of Herzliya in Israel.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, headquartered in Los Angeles, is named in his honour.
Wiesenthal was born on 31December1908, in Buczacz (Buchach), Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, then part of Austria-Hungary, now Ternopil Oblast, in Ukraine. His father, Asher Wiesenthal, was a wholesaler who had emigrated from the Russian Empire in 1905 to escape the frequent pogroms against Jews.
In Europe, World War II began in September 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland. As a result of the partitioning of Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, the city of Lwów was annexed by the Soviets and became known as Lvov in Russian or Lviv in Ukrainian.
Wiesenthal's stepfather, still living in Dolyna, was arrested as a capitalist; he later died in a Soviet prison. Wiesenthal's mother moved to Lvov to live with Wiesenthal and Cyla.
Wiesenthal bribed an official to prevent his own deportation under Clause 11, a rule that prevented all Jewish professionals and intellectuals from living within 100 kilometres of the city, which was under Soviet occupation until the Germans invaded in June 1941.
In late 1941, Wiesenthal and his wife were transferred to Janowskaconcentration camp and forced to work at the Eastern Railway Repair Works.
Every few weeks, the Nazis staged a round-up in the Lvov ghetto of people unable to work. These round ups typically took place while the able-bodied were absent doing forced labour. In one such deportation, Wiesenthal's mother and other elderly Jewish women were transported by freight train to Belzec extermination camp and killed in August 1942.
Around the same time, a Ukrainian policeman shot Cyla's mother to death on the front porch of her home in Buczacz while she was being evicted. Cyla and SimonWiesenthal lost 89 relatives during the Holocaust.
Within three weeks of the liberation of Mauthausen, Wiesenthal had prepared a list of around a hundred names of suspected Nazi war criminals -mostly guards, camp commandants, and members of the Gestapo- and presented it to a War Crimes office of the American Counter-intelligence Corps at Mauthausen. He worked as an interpreter, accompanying officers who were carrying out arrests, though he was still very frail.
When Austria was partitioned in July 1945, Mauthausen fell into the Soviet-occupied zone, so the American War Crimes Office was moved to Linz. Wiesenthal went with them, and was housed in a displaced persons camp. He served as vice-chairman of the area's Jewish Central Committee, an organization that attempted to arrange basic care for Jewish refugees and tried to help people gather information about their missing family members.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles was founded in 1977 by Rabbi Marvin Hier, who paid Wiesenthal an honorarium for the right to use his name.
The centre helped with the campaign to remove the statute of limitations on Nazi crimes and continues the hunt for suspected Nazi war criminals,but today its primary activities include Holocaust remembrance, education, and fighting antisemitism.
Wiesenthal was not always happy with the way the centre was run. He thought the centre's Holocaust museum was not dignified enough and that he should have a larger say in the overall operations. He even wrote to the Board of Directors requesting Hier's removal, but in the end had to be content with being a figurehead.
Today, The Grandma has returned to the library. She has been reading about the Alhambra Decree, the Edict of Expulsion that ordered
the expulsion of practising Jews from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon.
Lots of things have been written about this terrible Decree, but a few of them talk about the main advantage of expulsing Jews, and it was not about religion but a strategy from the Catholic Monarchs about avoiding unpaid debts with some members of the Jewishcommunity, who were their moneylenders.
The Alhambra Decree, also known as theEdict of Expulsion, in Spanish Decreto de la Alhambra, Edicto de Granada, was an edict issued on 31 March 1492, by the joint Catholic Monarchs (Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon) ordering the expulsion of practicing Jews from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon and its territories and possessions by 31 July of that year.
The primary purpose was to eliminate the influence of practicing Jews on Spain's large formerly-Jewish converso New Christian population, to ensure the latter and their descendants did not revert to Judaism.
Over half of Spain's Jews had converted as a result of the religious persecution and pogroms which occurred in 1391. Due to continuing attacks, around 50,000 more had converted by 1415. A further number of those remaining chose to convert to avoid expulsion.
As a result of the Alhambra decree and persecution in the years leading up to the expulsion, of Spain’s estimated 300,000 Jewish origin population, a total of over 200,000 had converted to Catholicism to remain in Spain, and between 40,000 and 100,000 remained Jewish and suffered expulsion.
An unknown number of the expelled eventually succumbed to the pressures of life in exile away from formerly-Jewish relatives and networks back in Spain, and so converted to Catholicism to be allowed to return in the years following expulsion.
The edict was formally and symbolically revoked on 16 December 1968, following the Second Vatican Council.
This was a full century after Jews had been openly practicing their religion in Spain and synagogues were once more legal places of worship under Spain's Laws of Religious Freedom.
In 1924, the regime of Primo de Rivera granted Spanish citizenship to the entire Sephardic Jewish diaspora. In 2014, the government of Spain passed a law allowing dual citizenship to Jewish descendants who apply, to compensate for shameful events in the country's past. Thus, Sephardi Jews who can prove they are the descendants of those Jews expelled from Spain because of the Alhambra Decree can become Spaniards without leaving home or giving up their present nationality.
By the end of the 8th century, Muslim forces had conquered and settled most of the Iberian Peninsula. Under Islamic law, the Jews, who had lived in the region since at least Roman times, were considered People of the Book, which was a protected status.
Compared to the repressive policies of the Visigothic Kingdom, who, starting in the sixth-century had enacted a series of anti-Jewish statutes which culminated in their forced conversion and enslavement, the tolerance of the MuslimMoorish rulers of al-Andalus allowed Jewish communities to thrive.
Jewish merchants were able to trade freely across the Islamic world, which allowed them to flourish, and made Jewish enclaves in Muslim Iberian cities great centers of learning and commerce.
This led to a flowering of Jewish culture, as Jewish scholars were able to gain favor in Muslim courts as skilled physicians, diplomats, translators, and poets. Although Jews never enjoyed equal status to Muslims, in some Taifas, such as Granada, Jewish men were appointed to very high offices, including Grand Vizier.
The Reconquista, or the gradual reconquest of Muslim Iberia by the Christian
kingdoms in the North, was driven by a powerful religious motivation:
to reclaim Iberia for Christendom following the Umayyad conquest of
Hispania centuries before. By the 14th century, most of the Iberian
Peninsula had been reconquered by the Christian kingdoms of Castile,
Aragon, León, Galicia, Navarre, and Portugal.
During
the Christian re-conquest, the Muslim kingdoms in Spain became less
welcoming to the dhimmi. In the late twelfth century, the Muslims in
al-Andalus invited the fanatical Almohad dynasty from North Africa to
push the Christians back to the North. After they gained control of the
Iberian Peninsula, the Almohads offered the Sephardim a choice between
expulsion, conversion, and death.
Many
Jewish people fled to other parts of the Muslim world, and also to the
Christian kingdoms, which initially welcomed them. In Christian Spain,
Jews functioned as courtiers, government officials, merchants, and
moneylenders. Therefore, the Jewish community was both useful to the
ruling classes and to an extent protected by them.
As
the Reconquista drew to a close, overt hostility against Jews in
Christian Spain became more pronounced, finding expression in brutal
episodes ofviolence and oppression.
In the early fourteenth century,
the Christian kings vied to prove their piety by allowing the clergy to
subject the Jewish population to forced sermons and disputations. More
deadly attacks came later in the century from mobs of angry Catholics,
led by popular preachers, who would storm into the Jewish quarter,
destroy synagogues, and break into houses, forcing the inhabitants tochoose between conversion and death.
Thousands
of Jews sought to escape these attacks by converting to Christianity.
These Jewish converts were commonly called conversos, New Christians, or
marranos; the latter two terms were used as insults. At first, these
conversions seemed an effective solution to the cultural conflict: many
converso families met with social and commercial success. But eventually
their success made these new Catholics unpopular with their neighbours,
including some of the clergy of the Church and Spanish aristocrats
competing with them for influence over the royal families.
By
the mid-fifteenth century, the demands of the Old Christians, that the
Catholic Church and the monarchy differentiate them from the conversos,
led to the first limpieza de sangre laws, which restricted opportunities
for converts.
These
suspicions on the part of Christians were only heightened by the fact
that some of the coerced conversions were undoubtedly insincere. Some,
but not all, conversos had understandably chosen to salvage their social
and commercial positions or their lives by the only option open to them
-baptism and embrace of Christianity- while privately adhering to their
Jewish practice and faith.
Recently
converted families who continued to intermarry were especially viewed
with suspicion. These secret practitioners are commonly referred to as
crypto-Jews or marranos.
The existence of crypto-Jews was a provocation for secular and ecclesiastical leaders who were already hostile toward Spain's Jewry.
For their part, the Jewishcommunity viewed conversos with compassion, because Jewishlaw held that conversion under threat of violence was not necessarily legitimate.
Although the Catholic Church was also officially opposed to forced conversion, under ecclesiastical law all baptisms were lawful, and once baptized, converts were not allowed to rejoin their former religion. The uncertainty over the sincerity of Jewish converts added fuel to the fire of antisemitism in 15th century Spain.
The Spanish expulsion was succeeded by at least five expulsions from other European countries, but the expulsion of the Jews from Spain was both thelargest of its kind and, officially, the longest lasting in western European history.
Hostility towards the Jews in Spain was brought to a climax during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. Their marriage in 1469, which formed a personal union of the crowns of Aragon and Castile, with coordinated policies between their distinct kingdoms, eventually led to the final unification of Spain.
Although their initial policies towards the Jews were protective, Ferdinand and Isabella were disturbed by reports claiming that most Jewish converts to Christianity were insincere in their conversion.
As mentioned above, some claims that conversos continued to practice Judaism in secret were true, but the Old Christians exaggerated the scale of the phenomenon. It was also claimed that Jews were trying to draw conversos back into the Jewish fold.
In 1478, Ferdinand and Isabella made a formal application to Rome to set up an Inquisition in Castile to investigate these and other suspicions.
In 1487, King Ferdinand promoted the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition Tribunals in Castile. In the Crown of Aragon, it had been first instituted in the 13th century to combat the Albigensian heresy. However, the focus of this new Inquisition was to find and punish conversos who were practicing Judaism in secret.
These issues came to a head during Ferdinand and Isabella's final conquest of Granada. The independent Islamic Emirate of Granada had been a tributary state to Castile since 1238.
Jews and conversos played an important role during this campaign because they had the ability to raise money and acquire weapons through their extensive trade networks.
This perceived increase in Jewish influence further infuriated the Old Christians and the hostile elements of the clergy.
Finally, in 1491 in preparation for an imminent transition to Castilian territory, the Treaty of Granada was signed by Emir Muhammad XII and the Queen of Castile, protecting the religious freedom of the Muslims there.
By 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella had won the Battle of Granada and completed the Catholic Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula from Islamic forces. However, the Jewish population emerged from the campaign more hated by the populace and less useful to the monarchs.
The king and queen issued the Alhambra Decree less than three months after the surrender of Granada. Although Isabella was the force behind the decision, her husband Fernando did not oppose it. That her confessor had just changed from the tolerant Hernando de Talavera to the very intolerant Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros suggests an increase in royal hostility towards the Jews.
The text of the decree accused the Jews of trying to subvert the holy Catholic faith by attempting to draw faithful Christians away from their beliefs.
After the decree was passed, Spain's entire Jewish population was given only four months to either convert to Christianity or leave the country. The edict promised the Jews royal protection and security for the effective three-month window before the deadline.
They were permitted to take their belongings with them, excluding gold or silver or minted money or other things prohibited by the laws of our kingdoms.
In practice, however, the Jews had to sell anything they could not carry: their land, their houses, and their libraries, and converting their wealth to a more portable form proved difficult.
The market in Spain was saturated with these goods, which meant the prices were artificially lowered for the months before the deadline.
As a result, much of the wealth of the Jewish community remained in Spain. Thepunishment for any Jew who did not convert or leave by the deadline was summary execution.
The Sephardic Jews migrated to four major areas: North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, and Italy. Some who emigrated to avoid conversion dispersed throughout the region of North Africa known as the Maghreb.
A majority of Jewish population had converted to Christianity during the waves of religious persecutions prior to the Decree -a total of 200,000 converts according to Joseph Pérez.
The main objective of the expulsion of practicing Jews was ensuring the sincerity of the conversions of such a large convert population. Of the 100,000 Jews that remained true to their faith by 1492, an additional number chose to convert and join the converso community rather than face expulsion.
Recent conversos were subject to additional suspicion by the Inquisition, which had been established to persecute religious heretics, but in Spain and Portugal was focused on finding crypto-Jews. Although Judaism was not considered a heresy, professing Christianity while engaging in Jewish practices was heretical.
Additionally, Limpieza de sangre statutes instituted legal discrimination against converso descendants, barring them from certain positions and forbidding them from emigrating to the Americas. For years, families with urban origins who had extensive trade connections, and people who were learned and multilingual were suspected of having Jewish ancestry.
According to the prejudice of the time, a person with Jewish blood was untrustworthy and inferior. Such measures slowly faded away as converso identity was forgotten and this community merged into Spain's dominant Catholic culture. This process lasted until the eighteenth century, with a few exceptions, most notably the Chuetas of the island of Majorca, where discrimination lasted into early 20th Century.
A Y chromosome DNA test conducted by the University of Leicester and the Pompeu Fabra University has indicated an average of nearly 20% for Spaniards having some direct patrilineal descent from populations from the Near East which colonized the region either in historical times, such as Jews and Phoenicians, or during earlier prehistoric Neolithic migrations.
Between the 90,000 Jews who converted under the Visigoth persecutions, and the 100,000+ Jews who converted in the years leading up to expulsion, it is likely that many of these people have Jewish ancestry. Genetic studies have explored local beliefs in the American South West that Spanish Americans are the descendants of conversos.
Anti-Semitism is the hatred that never dies. Violence that begins with the Jews never ends with them. All of this is true. What's also true is that anti-Semitism is the oldest hatred in the world because individual people have sustained
it in every generation. It cannot be defeated until we look these people
Today, The Grandma has continued her Logistic course in Sant Boi. They have been talking about modes of transports and handling equipment. Transport is essential in Logistics. If you want to send something to somewhere you need a good transport and a quick and cheap route.
Since the beginning of the humanity, people have created routes to exchange products, to create commerce, to enjoy tourism or to escape from wars, prosecutions or natural disasters. These last routes are also known as the routes of exile.
These historical routes are the same routes that nowadays are used for commercial reasons and where we used GPS today, ancient cultures used maps -The Game of the Goose- or travelled following the stars.
China is working in a new silk route that, probably, will change the future of transport, commerce and communications.
The Silk Road was a network of trade routes which connected the East and West, and was central to the economic, cultural, political, and religious interactions between these regions from the 2nd century BCE to the 18th century. The Silk Road primarily refers to the land routes connecting East Asia and Southeast Asia with South Asia, Persia, the Arabian Peninsula, East Africa and Southern Europe.
The Silk Road derives its name from the lucrative trade in silk carried out along its length, beginning in the Han dynasty in China (207 BCE–220 CE). The Han dynasty expanded the Central Asian section of the trade routes around 114 BCE through the missions and explorations of the Chinese imperial envoy Zhang Qian, as well as several military conquests. The Chinese took great interest in the security of their trade products, and extended the Great Wall of China to ensure the protection of the trade route.
The Silk Road trade played a significant role in the development of the civilizations of China, Korea, Japan, the Indian subcontinent, Iran, Europe, the Horn of Africa and Arabia, opening long-distance political and economic relations between the civilizations.
Though silk was the major trade item exported from China, many other goods and ideas were exchanged, including religions (especially Buddhism), syncretic philosophies, sciences, and technologies like paper and gunpowder. So in addition to economic trade, the Silk Road was a route for cultural trade among the civilizations along its network. Diseases, most notably plague, also spread along the Silk Road.
In June 2014, UNESCO designated the Chang'an-Tianshan corridor of the Silk Road as a World Heritage Site. The Indian portion is on the tentative site list.
The mode of transportation is an important consideration when planning the shipment process. Besides the costs, the urgency of the shipment, the value of the goods being shipped as well as the size and weight of the goods need to be evaluated when determining the form of transportation. In this article, we want to help you determine, which mode is best to transport your cargo and freight!
OCEAN
Seaborne trade accounts for about 90% of the global trade, and as per UNCTAD, 1687 million tons (2015 estimate) were carried in around 177.6 million containers (2015 estimate) covering 998 billion ton-miles (2016 estimate).
Because of size or volume, there are several types of cargoes that cannot be or is economically unviable to move by other modes of transport than the sea.
Ocean freight
Ocean freight is a less expensive method of shipping goods, but the drawback is a longer transit time. Another benefit for ocean freight is while size and weight may be an issue for air; it is not for ocean freight.
Ocean freight is used quite extensively for the movement of bulk commodities such as agri-products (wheat, maize, soya, etc.), coal, iron ore or for wet bulk products such as crude oil and petroleum. Also, larger, odd-shaped items including engines and propellers may move via this mode as well, depending on how sensitive the delivery time is.
Ocean freight is also a preferred mode of transport for the movement of high volume and heavy cargo such as minerals, metals, ores, steel coils, etc. which would be impossible to move by air freight.
Additionally, businesses are placing more of an emphasis on the environmental impact on shipping. An air freight service emits a higher amount of polluting gases with less space capacity compared to sea freight services which are considered a much greener transportation mode with a higher carrying capacity.
Key benefits of ocean freight include:
-Suitable for wide range of products with long lead times
-Large volumes. A single, ultra-large container ship can carry +/-20,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU)
-Most environmental friendly among all modes of transport
-Economical. Liner shipping is the most efficient mode of transport for goods
Over the next 15 years, as the world GDP grows, there will be a demand for higher value goods. As per Boeing's 2016-2017 world air cargo forecast, there will be a proportionate growth in the value per ton of total traded goods around the world.
To meet the demand for growth, world air cargo traffic is forecasted to grow an average 4.2 percent per year.
Air freight
Air freight
is a critical mode of transport. It serves markets and supply chains
that demand speed.
One of greatest examples goes back to 1997 when Apple
began innovating on the nitty-gritty details of supply-chain
management. Almost immediately upon Steve Jobs’ return. At the time,
most computer manufacturers transported products by sea, a far cheaper
option than air freight. Steve Jobs took advantage of the benefit of air freight and used an innovative strategy. He paid $50 million to buy up all the available holiday air freight space to ensure that the company’s new, translucent blue iMacs would be widely available during Christmas season giving them a massive competitive advantage over their rivals. -It was an Oh s- moment, recalls former HP supply chain chief Mike Fawkes.
Other industries such as the automotive and retail industry also utilize air freight to achieve just-in-time (JIT) inventory replenishment. JIT option allows stores, production lines to place order fulfillment based on demand as, and when required. It provides greater flexibility and reduces inventory and storage costs.
Also, perishable goods such as foods, flowers, and some pharmaceuticals also take advantage of shorter transit time. Another positive for air freight is that there's less handling of cargo overall, so the likelihood of damage or theft is less likely when utilizing air.
But air freight also has its own disadvantages such as being one of the most expensive due to the requirement of speed and the fuel that is used.
It also has its size and weight limitations. Regulatory bodies limit what can and cannot be transported by air, and as such, oddly shaped or very large items may be more suitable for other modes of transport.
Another mode of transport which is also considered a green option is rail. Trains burn less fuel per ton-mile than road vehicles and a train, which can have as many than 100 wagons, only needs one driver. There are, however, some additional costs which are incurred in a rail journey: at each end of the rail transit, a road delivery will be needed, and there will be a lift cost to transfer the container between the train and the road vehicle.
On average, longer journeys tend to be less expensive by rail, and shorter journeys are less costly by road. Where the point of cost neutrality comes is governed by many factors which are route and commodity specific, but in general, the point of cost neutrality can be expected to lie in the range of 130 to 150 miles.
Rail freight
In 2015, the first freight train carrying ISO freight containers from China arrived in the Port of Rotterdam in 18 days as against the normal 44 odd days by the sea.
This movement of containerized cargo by rail from China to logistics hubs in Europe such as in the Netherlands, UK is seen as a significant step in the development of trade between the two continents. It has encouraged multinationals such as Hewlett-Packard and Ricoh to use the route from Europe to China for their cargoes.
The Manager of European Transport at Ricoh notes that if one can set up an effective planning, rail is a relatively quick mode of transport taking only 20 days to China. In addition, the move by rail also has some advantages such as all containers being transported to the location in one go, while being environmentally friendly as a train releases far less CO2 than a plane.
Key benefits of rail freight include:
-Reliable transit times and schedules
-Railroads are the most efficient form of land transportation. One train can haul the equivalent of over 400 trucks
-Fast and cost-effective deliveries over long distances. Typically over 500 miles
-Traditionally, rail has a strong safety record
-Helps in alleviating road congestion, thus lowering emissions
Road freight is one of the most common of all modes of transportation. It is widely used in continents such as Europe, Africa, and North America. The single customs document process provides a seamless movement of goods even across various states and countries.
Road freight provides several advantages over other modes of transportation such as:
-Cost-effectiveness
-Quick and scheduled delivery
-Local, over border, long or short haul deliveries even in rural areas
-Flexible service
-Saving in Packing Cost compared to other modes
-Track and trace of cargo and truck
-Complete door-to-door service and it is one of the more economical means of transport.
However, truck transport is limited somewhat as to what it can carry by the size of the vehicles used and by size and weight restrictions. Another limitation is that it is affected by weather, road conditions and traffic.
Another option to keep in mind is multimodal solutions -the utilization of more than one mode of transport.
Multimodal is a combination of different modes of transportation such as rail, road, and sea which allows the customer to cost-effectively manage shipments from start-to-end, ensuring optimum care and efficiency every step of the way.
Multimodal
One such example is the cross region rail network combined with truck.
Providers including DHL, Geodis, UPS and DB Schenker are offering such a solution along China’s Silk Road network.
According to UPS, the service can offer savings of up to 65% versus air freight costs while providing transit times up to 40% faster than standard ocean movements.
Sea-Air is another example of multimodal transport. The service is considered less expensive than air and quicker than ocean service.
An alternate solution to pure air or ocean, Sea-Air provides the global transportation industry time and cost savings along with eco-friendliness.
Sometimes using this mode of transport helps to avoid demurrage fees.
Key benefits of multimodal transport include:
-Cargo can be moved to any part of the world using multiple modes of transport
-Reduces the distance for the goods between the manufacturer and consumer
-Customers can deal with one entity to handle all modes of transport under one document
Conclusion. What mode of transportation should you use?
There are numerous options for transporting goods, and there may not be one solution for your transportation needs. Each mode of transport has its advantages and disadvantages. Prioritizing your needs, understanding your shipment and comparing costs is important when planning your shipment and choosing the best mode of transport.
When you have chosen your best transport, it is time to talk about which type of goods you want to send and which containertype you are going to use. An intermodal container is a large standardized shipping container, designed and built for intermodal freight transport, meaning these containers can be used across different modes of transport -from ship to rail to truck- without unloading and reloading their cargo. Intermodal containers are primarily used to store and transport materials and products efficiently and securely in the global containerized intermodal freight transport system, but smaller numbers are in regional use as well.
These containers are known under a number of names, such as simply container, cargo or freight container, ISO container, shipping, sea or ocean container, sea van or (Conex) box, sea can or c can. Intermodal containers exist in many types and a number of standardized sizes, but ninety percent of the global container fleet are so-called dry freight or general purpose containers, durable closed steel boxes, mostly of either 6.1 or 12.2 m standard length. The common heights are 2.6 m and 2.9 m -the latter are known as High Cube or Hi-Cube containers.
Just like cardboard boxes and pallets, these containers are a means to bundle cargo and goods into larger, unitized loads, that can be easily handled, moved, and stacked, and that will pack tightly in a ship or yard.
Intermodal containers share a number of key construction features to withstand the stresses of intermodal shipping, to facilitate their handling and to allow stacking, as well as being identifiable through their individual, unique ISO 6346 reporting mark. In 2012, there were about 20.5 million intermodal containers in the world of varying types to suit different cargoes. Containers have largely supplanted the traditional break bulk cargo -in 2010 containers accounted for 60% of the world's seaborne trade. The predominant alternative methods of transport carry bulk cargo -whether gaseous, liquid or solid- e.g. by bulk carrier or tank ship, tank car or truck. For air freight, the lighter weight IATA-defined unit load device is used.
Finally, The Grandma has explained how to make comparisons and how to avaluate which is the best transport or container using comparative and superlative adjectives.
Today, The Grandma has visited the Ancient Synagogue of Barcelona. This place, in Catalan SinagogaMajorde Barcelona, is believed to be an ancient synagogue located in the centre of Barcelona. It has been described as one of the oldest synagogues in Europe. After many centuries of use for other purposes, the building re-opened as a synagogue and museum in 2002. No congregation prays regularly at the SinagogaMajor, but it is used for festive occasions.
Archaeological investigations show that the original structure of the building was built in the third or fourth century; whether this structure was the synagogue cannot be said with certainty. The building was significantly expanded during the 13th century. Medieval Barcelona is known to have had several synagogues, and the main synagogue was certainly in the immediate area.
King Jaume I visited the synagogue in 1263 at the conclusion of the Barcelona Disputation. Shlomo ben Aderet served as the rabbi of the Sinagoga Major for 50 years.
The Jews of Barcelona were massacred in 1391. The building was used for many purposes and its original use was forgotten. Over the centuries, additional stories were added to the building.
In 1987, Jaume Riera i Sans began researching the location of the SinagogaMajor. His research was based on a reconstruction of the route followed by a thirteenth-century tax collector that ended at the Sinagoga Major.
Riera's work led Miguel Iaffa to examine the exterior of the building. Iaffa noted that the structure had been built in compliance with religious requirements that the building should face Jerusalem and that it should have two windows. In fact, the eastward orientation of the building, toward Jerusalem, broke with the northwest/southeast alignment of the streets in its neighborhood.
Iaffa purchased the building in 1995 when its owner put it up for sale. The Call Association of Barcelona, in Catalan Associació Call de Barcelona, led by Iaffa, undertook the recovery and restoration of the synagogue. The Sinagoga Major was opened to the public in 2002, and it drew 20,000 visitors during 2005.
The Grandma loves Jewish culture and history, perhaps because her ancestors were xuetes, the descendants of Majorcan Jews and she is very interested in knowing more things about her past.
Barcelona is celebrating its patron festivity and during five days all museums are open and free. She has decided to visit El Call, the Jewish quartier of Barcelona, and its historical places -the Synagogue and the Jewish Museum. During her visit to the museum, she has remembered another important event for the Jewish culture when on a day like today in 1997; the Dead Sea Scrolls were made available to the public for the first time.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, also Qumran Caves Scrolls, are ancient Jewish religious manuscripts found in the Qumran Caves in the Judaean Desert,near Ein Feshkha on the northern shore of the Dead Sea. Scholarly consensus dates these scrolls from the last three centuries BC and the first century AD.
The Dead Sea Scrolls
The texts have great historical, religious, and linguistic significance because they include the second-oldest known surviving manuscripts of works later included in the Hebrew Bible canon, along with deuterocanonical and extra-biblical manuscripts which preserve evidence of the diversity of religious thought in late Second Temple Judaism.
Almost all of the Dead Sea Scrolls collection is currently under the ownership of the Government of the State of Israel, and housed in the Shrine of the Book on the grounds of the Israel Museum. Many thousands of written fragments have been discovered in the Dead Sea area. They represent the remnants of larger manuscripts damaged by natural causes or through human interference, with the vast majority holding only small scraps of text. However, a small number of well-preserved, almost intact manuscripts have survived – fewer than a dozen among those from the Qumran Caves.
Researchers have assembled a collection of 981 different manuscripts -discovered in 1946/47 and in 1956- from 11 caves.
The 11 Qumran Caves lie in the immediate vicinity of the Hellenistic-period Jewish settlement at Khirbet Qumran in the eastern Judaean Desert, in the West Bank.
The caves are located about 1.6 kilometres west of the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, whence they derive their name. Scholarly consensus dates the Qumran Caves Scrolls from the last three centuries BCE and the first century CE. Bronze coins found at the same sites form a series beginning with John Hyrcanus, in office 135–104 BCE, and continuing until the period of the First Jewish–Roman War (66–73 CE), supporting the radiocarbon and paleographic dating of the scrolls.
In the larger sense, the Dead Sea Scrolls include manuscripts from additional Judaean Desert sites, dated as early as the 8th century BCE and as late as the 11th century CE.
Biblical texts older than the Dead Sea Scrolls have been discovered only in two silver scroll-shaped amulets containing portions of the Priestly Blessing from the Book of Numbers, excavated in Jerusalem at Ketef Hinnom and dated c. 600 BCE. The third-oldest surviving known piece of the Torah, the En-Gedi Scroll, consists of a portion of Leviticus found in the Ein Gedi synagogue, burnt in the 6th century CE and analyzed in 2015. Research has dated it palaeographically to the 1st or 2nd century CE, and using the C14 method to sometime between the 2nd and 4th centuries CE.
The Qumran Caves, the Dead Sea
Most of the texts use Hebrew, with some written in Aramaic, for example the Son of God text; in different regional dialects, including Nabataean, and a few in Greek. Discoveries from the Judaean Desert add Latin -from Masada- and Arabic -from Khirbet al-Mird- texts.
Most of the texts are written on parchment, some on papyrus, and one on copper.
Archaeologists have long associated the scrolls with the ancient Jewish sect called the Essenes, although some recent interpretations have challenged this connection and argue that priests in Jerusalem, or Zadokites, or other unknown Jewish groups wrote the scrolls.
Owing to the poor condition of some of the scrolls, scholars have not identified all of their texts. The identified texts fall into three general groups:
-About 40% are copies of texts from the Hebrew Scriptures.
-Approximately another 30% are texts from the Second Temple Period which ultimately were not canonized in the Hebrew Bible, like the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, the Book of Tobit, the Wisdom of Sirach, Psalms 152–155...
-The remainder, roughly 30%, are sectarian manuscripts of previously unknown documents that shed light on the rules and beliefs of a particular group or groups within greater Judaism, like the Community Rule, the War Scroll, the Pesher on Habakkuk, and The Rule of the Blessing.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in a series of twelve caves around the site originally known as the Ein Feshkha Caves near the Dead Sea in the WestBank, then part of Jordan, between 1946 and 1956 by Bedouin shepherds and a team of archeologists. The practice of storing worn-out sacred manuscripts in earthenware vessels buried in the earth or within caves is related to the ancient Jewish custom of Genizah.
The initial discovery by Bedouin shepherd Muhammed edh-Dhib, his cousin Jum'a Muhammed, and Khalil Musa, took place between November 1946 and February 1947. The shepherds discovered seven scrolls housed in jars in a cave near what is now known as the Qumran site.
Early in September 1948, Metropolitan bishop Mar Samuel brought some additional scroll fragments that he had acquired to Professor Ovid R. Sellers, the new Director of ASOR. By the end of 1948, nearly two years after their discovery, scholars had yet to locate the original cave where the fragments had been found. With unrest in the country at that time, no large-scale search could be undertaken safely.
Sellers tried to get the
Syrians to assist in the search for the cave, but he was unable to pay
their price. In early 1949, the government of Jordan gave permission to
the Arab Legion to search the area where the original Qumran cave was
thought to be. Consequently, Cave 1 was rediscovered on 28 January 1949,
by Belgian United Nations observer Captain Phillipe Lippens and Arab
Legion Captain Akkash el-Zebn.
The 972 manuscripts
found at Qumran were found primarily in two separate formats: as scrolls
and as fragments of previous scrolls and texts.
The Dead Sea Scrolls
In the fourth cave the fragments were torn into up to 15,000 pieces. These small fragments created somewhat of a problem for scholars. G.L. Harding, director of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, began working on piecing the fragments together but did not finish this before his death in 1979.
Some fragments of scrolls have neither significant archaeological provenance nor records that reveal in which designated Qumran cave area they were found. They are believed to have come from Wadi Qumrancaves, but are just as likely to have come from other archaeological sites in the Judaean Desert area. These fragments have therefore been designated to the temporary X series.
The Dead Sea Scrolls that were found were originally preserved by the dry, arid, and low humidity conditions present within the Qumran area adjoining the Dead Sea. In addition, the lack of the use of tanning materials on the parchment of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the very low airflow in the Qumran caves also contributed significantly to their preservation.
Some of the scrolls were found stored in clay jars within the Qumran caves, further helping to preserve them from deterioration. The original handling of the scrolls by archaeologists and scholars was done inappropriately, and, along with their storage in an uncontrolled environment, they began a process of more rapid deterioration than they had experienced at Qumran. During the first few years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, adhesive tape used to join fragments and seal cracks caused significant damage to the documents.
The Government of Jordan had recognized the urgency of protecting the scrolls from deterioration and the presence of the deterioration among the scrolls.
However, the government did not have adequate funds to purchase all the scrolls for their protection and agreed to have foreign institutions purchase the scrolls and have them held at their museum in Jerusalem until they could be adequately studied.
In partnership with Google, the Museum of Jerusalem is working to photograph the Dead Sea Scrolls and make them available to the public digitally, although not placing the images in the public domain.
The lead photographer of the project, Ardon Bar-Hama, and his team are utilizing the Alpa 12 MAX camera accompanied with a Leaf Aptus-II back in order to produce ultra-high resolution digital images of the scrolls and fragments.
With photos taken at 1,200 megapixels, the results are digital images that can be used to distinguish details that are invisible to the naked eye. In order to minimize damage to the scrolls and fragments, photographers are using a 1/4000th of a second exposure time and UV-protected flash tubes. The digital photography project was estimated in 2011 to cost approximately 3.5 million U.S. dollars.
For a thousand years after the Dead Sea Scrolls were written,
the Jewish holy scriptures -the five parts of the Torah and 19 other holy books- were copied and passed down in the various Jewish communities from generation to generation.
