Welcome to Eye In Zion - ברוכים הבאים לעין בציון

Shalom and Welcome to everyone! This blog is dedicated to pictures. After 5 years in Israel as a student-tourist, I finally made aliyah on י"ג אלול, תשס"ו - September 6, 2006 - last week (read about it in my journal), and after about 100,000 digital pictures in that time, it's about time I started a photo-blog. Aside from thanking Hashem and my parents and everything I've photographed for this, I have to thank Yishai Fleisher of Israel National Radio for the original idea and the Jerusalem Post's Jewish and Israel blog contest for making me realize how big this blogging community is and how much I would love to be a part of it.

Here's the meaning behind the name of the blog: As a photo blog, I liked the word eye, as in photographer's eye and as a photographer, my eye is always open looking for photo ops. So Eye in Zion describes me and this blog - a photographer in Zion providing photographs in and of Zion. It also fit perfectly because when read together, "eye in" sounds like the Hebrew word, "ayin - עין", which means eye. But why use Zion and not Israel? 2 reasons - (1) because it rhymes and (2) because if you read "eye in" like "ayin" it is like 2 words in Hatikvah, a great song that is Israel's National Anthem. The 2 words in the song are "עין לציון", meaning "eye toward Zion". Now, as we are seeing the ingathering of the exiles and the sprouting of our redemption, it is a beautiful opportunity to adapt the words and make it "עין בציון", meaning "eye in Zion".

As I mentioned, I intend for this to be a photo-blog. I hope IY"H to continue to update my LiveJournal (http://msstein24.livejournal.com) as a journal of everything I do, so go there to read details. This will be parallel to the journal to some extent, and when there's no new pictures to post, I may do a picture of the day or picture from this day in my history in Israel. We'll see what happens. For the time being, it will take me a while to get this organized and set up the way I want it, so bear with me.