News Brief

(IsraelNN.com) The eleventh annual Jewish-Israeli poetry festival opened Friday morning at Yad Ben-Tzvi in Jerusalem. The festival centers on Jewish poems of longing for Jerusalem over the generations, from the works of Yehuda HaLevi through Paul Celan to present-day Russian immigrant poets living in Israel.

The three-day festival will include an exhibition of art works that have Jerusalem as their subject, tours of Jerusalem and workshops, but its central event will be a musical protest event on Saturday evening, in which poets will demand that Jerusalem's Usishkin Street be renamed after Yehuda HaLevi.

The street was originally named after HaLevi, the poet and philosopher who lived in Spain 900 years ago and, according to a tradition which is in dispute, eventually immigrated to Israel. However, Menachem Usishkin, a central Zionist official, had the gall to rename it after himself in the 1930's.