Paralysed and in pain, Spaniard hails euthanasia law as an option
SIMAT DE LA VALLDIGNA, Spain (Reuters) – Paralyzed from the neck down after suffering a car crash at 19, Rafael Botella, now 35 and in pain, is relieved that Spain’s parliament is set on Thursday to approve a law to allow euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Botella thought of ending his life when agonizing pain confined him to his bed six years ago. Though he has since changed his mind, he wants the option to do so legally. Despite opposition from the political Right and religious groups, once signed into law, Spain will become the European Union’s fourth country to legalize the practice after Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. A similar plan in neighboring Portugal suffered a setback this week.
“If for some reason someone is tired of living, no one has the power to tell him ‘no, you will live because my voters or my ideology tell the contrary’,” Botella told Reuters in his family home in Simat de la Valldigna, in the eastern Valencia region.
Before getting out of bed became too painful, he led an active lifestyle, skydiving, paragliding and going to hardcore techno music festivals abroad in his wheelchair.
When the pain became unbearable, he sought help from the Spanish Association for the Right to Die with Dignity, which convinced him to try different medical solutions and keep himself busy with projects.
In the care of his 75-year-old mother, he tries to keep the pain in check by doing brain exercises, is writing a book on his experience and making a short film about the problems faced by a paralyzed person against the backdrop of techno festivals.
Using his nose, he has learned to mix music on his computer and edit videos, and hosts live DJ sessions via Facebook.
Nevertheless, he wants to have all options available: “I want a bullet in the chamber so that if I ever need it, I can use it,” he said, in a figurative reference to medically-assisted suicide.
Almost 90% of Spaniards are in favor of decriminalizing the practice, according to a 2019 opinion poll. But for now, helping someone end their life carries a jail term of up to 10 years.
Euthanasia has long grabbed public attention in Spain, which has the world’s fourth-highest life expectancy, and more notably so since paralyzed man Ramon Sampedro recorded his assisted suicide in 1998 after being denied that right by courts.
His story was taken to the screen in 2004 Oscar-winning film
Bank Hapoalim is offering free entrance and guided tours to a number of sites, museums and national parks around the country over Passover.
Admission to all sites and museums, activities and attractions and guided tours will be subject to advanced registration only.
This year the project offers new attractions, including the Ramparts Walk in Jerusalem’s Old City, Planetanya Science and Space Center, Neot Kedumim Park, Eco Kinneret Floating Laboratory, the Museum of Tractors in Ein Vered and Minkov Citrus Orchard Museum.
This year’s Passover project will offer free admission to the public at a variety of sites and activities of small tourism businesses in the South from the Association for the Promotion of Tourism in the Shikma Besor area, such as: Jojoba Visitors Center in Hatzerim, El Hayaen Ostrich Farm, Beerot BaNegev Settlement Heritage Center, Hemdat Hasadot Ecological Farm and Petting Zoo, Ba’ofan Bicycle Trips and workshops for blowing glass, iron and ceramics and art workshops by Shosh Segev.
In addition, the Passover project sponsored by Bank Hapoalim will this year offer over 30 free guided day and evening tours around the country, by the Eshkolot tour association. Among the tours that will be offered: a day tour in Rosh Pina, the “Forgotten Moshava,” a day tour in the Gilboa area Springs Park, a day tour in the Sha’ar Hagai area “Carmila the Green Mountain,” a day tour in the Ben-Shemen Forest, the evening tour “Lanterns in the Golan Heights,” the evening tour “The Jewish Story of Acre” and the evening tour of the Independence Trail in Tel Aviv.
Reuven Krupik, chairman of Bank Hapoalim and chairman of the Poalim BaKehila Foundation, said: “This year, with the expected return to routine, the term ‘Holiday of Freedom’ is gaining special significance. Bank Hapoalim, which is currently celebrating its 100th anniversary, is happy to maintain its annual tradition and celebrate with all the people of Israel on tours of museums, national parks and nature trails, free of charge. This activity is part of our long-standing tradition of working for society and the community.”
The sites will open free of charge on all weekdays from: March 29 to April 2. Monday-Thursday (29/3-1/4) are full
activity days, and Friday, April 2, is a half day activity.
The package from Estonia arrived the other day. More precious items, from Malta and Tel Aviv, are still in transit. As he waits for them in his apartment in Montreal, Chris Silver is stalking certain sellers on eBay or plotting a return to his favorite Parisian flea markets and Casablanca emporiums.
Silver has amassed a collection of rare phonograph records from the era of Jewish musical stardom in North Africa, a period roughly corresponding with the first half of the 20th century.
Silver, who is also a professor at McGill University, now possesses about 500 albums recorded by Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian Jewish vocalists and instrumentalists. It’s the first archive of its kind.
But Silver estimates that the genre encompasses thousands of more titles — which are all in peril. That’s because the standard medium for the period was not vinyl, but shellac, a brittle material. Drop a shellac disc on the floor and it will break into pieces.
“Whenever I find one, no matter its condition, I always think it is a miracle because just by the nature of the material, it wasn’t supposed to survive,” Silver said.
The records in his collection represent a bygone musical world, but they are vestiges of the great Jewish communities that were once ubiquitous across the Maghreb, the Arab name for Northwest Africa. The hundreds of thousands of Jews who lived in the region emigrated in the aftermath of Israel’s founding and as France dismantled its colonial regimes.
The exodus happened in waves over the course of about 20 years, and the reasons for departure varied with social status and local conditions. The rise of Zionism and Arab nationalism combined to make these countries generally less hospitable to Jews.
While there was a Jewish presence in various anti-colonial movements, many Jews had thrived under the French system, belonging to an elite class whose status came into doubt in the new era. Amid the chronic instability, many Jews sought opportunity in France, Canada, Israel and elsewhere, largely bringing an end to a 2,000-yearold diaspora.
Silver, who is Jewish but grew up in Los Angeles without a strong sense of Jewish identity, went to college at the University of California, Berkeley. There he learned about the history of Jewish North Africa. After graduating and before he became a collector of records, Silver was traveling in Morocco and contemplating
a career in academia.
At first, he was most interested in what happened to the musical stars of North Africa after they had left and moved to countries where Arabic was not the dominant language. In one famous example, singer Zohra El Fassiya, a cultural icon in Morocco, moved to Israel and was quickly relegated to a remote, dusty corner of the country, with few opportunities to perform, as memorialized in a 1976 poem by Erez Bitton.
With time, Silver grew more curious to learn about the earlier
period, the heyday of these artists. And he wondered if there was a richer history to be discovered beyond archival documents of conventional historical research.
The musical record provided what he was looking for. Each album usually indicated not only the name of the performer but sometimes also the composer and lyricist. The name of the record label and the place of pressing were important details. The lyrics and melodies encoded on the shellac told him many stories.
“Here we have a history of North African Jews in their own words in Arabic through the music, which is traditional and popular and everything in between,” Silver said.
HE LEARNED to listen for things like shoutouts naming members of the orchestra, or sudden interludes with a musician offering their personal story. He encountered the cultural seepage of American influences, as evident, for example, in Arabic renditions of the classic “Yes, Sir! That’s my Baby.”
Or, take the music that Tunisian Jewish star Habiba Msika recorded in the late 1920s in Berlin. Faraway from French protectorate authorities, she incorporated subversive messages about her homeland.
“On those records, if you listen to them until the end, she’ll shout out something like ‘Long live Egypt’ or ‘Long live the Independent Levant.’ And then the orchestra erupts into applause,” Silver said.
Msika’s daring artistic production and lifestyle earned widespread attention, including from Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel, and tragically, from a murderous former romantic partner, who set fire to her apartment, killing her at age 27.
Famous and universally adored, the particular Jewishness of these musicians was not a secret. They openly identified themselves as Jews, and even if not, their dialects and accents gave them away. The first training ground for many Jewish artists was the Shabbat table and the synagogue, which generated a musical style that many non-Jews wanted to emulate, according to Silver.
“There are many stories of Muslim musicians who would position themselves outside of the synagogue on Saturday mornings to learn a new or different melody,” he said.
Silver has cultivated a global community around this musical repertoire. He shares tracks and commentary on social media and through a dedicated website called Gharamophone, a portmanteau of gharam, which means “love” or “passion” in Arabic, and gramophone. Over the past few years, he has racked up some 200,000 plays through SoundCloud alone.
One of the most important audiences he is serving is a younger generation of musicians in Israel and North Africa. They may have previously found a few low-quality YouTube videos, but now they have access to dozens of artists and hundreds of songs.
“You can see people interacting with music in incredible ways, sometimes reprising certain songs as well,” Silver said.
One of the best examples is offered by the musicians Neta Elkayam and Amit Hai Cohen. They are a married couple who live in Jerusalem and have performed to large audiences in their country, as well as in Morocco and all over Europe. They have performed “Abiadi,” an interpretation of and tribute to the Moroccan icon Zohra El Fassiya.
“I never wanted to just collect or to possess,” he said. “I wanted to collect in order to bring the music back into conversation with people. Everything I’m endeavoring to do boils down to that. And I’ve had much success with it.” (JTA)