Ice Cream Parlor in Arab and Jewish Town in Galilee

                                                                                         
Nadene Goldfoot
In 1963, the Arab town of Tarshiha and the Jewish town of Ma'alot merged together into a larger Ma'alot-Tarshiha in the Galilee.  This is the home today of a swanky ice cream parlor with their own home-made ice cream. The owners are two nice looking young men that look like brothers, but one is Jewish and the other is Arab.   It's 20 km (12 miles) east of Nahariya and has about 20,600 population.  Nahariya is a northern coastal city with a lovely beach of 51,200.  Nahariya is only 9.6 km (5 miles) from the Lebanon border.

"Ma'alot was established as a development town  for Jewish immigrants from Romania, Iran, Lebanon and Morocco, in 1957."   "On 15 May 1974, an elementary school in Ma'alot was attacked by terrorists of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorists  in what became known as the Ma'alot massacre. 115 people were taken hostage and 25 were killed in this attack.    Twenty-two teenagers of the 11th grade (Juniors) and three teachers from Safed "Tsfat"  on a class trip were murdered in the attack. They had been sleeping on the floor inside the building.  In addition, three Israeli women, one of them seven months pregnant, one four-year-old child, and two men were killed by the same terrorists in the events before the murder of the school children."

The merger of these two cities "is a rare model of interdependence and cooperation between Jews and Arabs. Today, the population is approximately 17,500; 13,000 in Ma'alot, 4,500 in Tarshiha.

Reference: http://israel21c.org/social-action-2/an-arab-jewish-ice-cream-shops-sweet-story/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma'alot-Tarshiha
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma'alot_massacre
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vie/Nahariya.html