June 23rd, 2021 Haifa Workshop

This was the second day of presentations from the cancelled “Poetry By The Sea” residential workshop. Faced with no open hotels, we divided the presentations into two separate days, held the first and last week of June, in Netanya and Haifa respectively. 

Like the workshop held in Netanya, this one was fully subscribed with 20 participants; but several last-minute cancellations due to illness resulted in a final participation of sixteen poets who gathered together in the lovely home of our gracious hostess, Edit Gavriely of the Haifa group. 

As usual in our one-day workshops, there were three presentations,  each followed by a writing exercise and time for participants to read the poems written during the exercise period:

  • Elana Dorfman of the Haifa Voices group, who had given a much-lauded “mini-workshop” on “Poetry of the Senses” focusing on the sense of smell, via Zoom back in March, returned with a parallel session on “The Poetry of Sound”.

  • Iris Dan, also of the Haifa group, introduced us to an ancient genre with her presentation on “Aubades – the Daily Shock of the Dawn”.

  • Dina Yehuda from the Lower Galilee gave a talk on  “Bible Stories as the Inspiration for Poetry,” focusing on the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall via its depiction in Medieval and Renaissance paintings, resulting in an outpouring of ephrastic poems from participants in the exercise period.

A couple of slides from Dina Yehuda’s presentation:

The participants were invited to submit poems written during the workshop, or edited versions of them, for publication in the workshop chapbook. Copies are still available for sale (20 NIS + 5 NIS for postage). Both Voices Israel members and the general public may order it directly from this website, using our PayPal Me account, by clicking on the following button:


If you don’t see the button, use this link: PayPal.me/VoicesIsrael

You will be asked to log in to your PayPal account and then fill in the amount to send Voices Israel and a note saying what the payment is for. Please also send an email to whoever is distributing them  (currently, our President Judy Koren: president.voices@gmail.com) giving your current postal address.

We sorely missed our “resident photographer,” Judith Fineberg; in her absence we made do with a couple of general pictures of participants taken via cellphone: