JERUSALEM — It was not only Israeli tech savvy that 26 South Carolina business and academic leaders were eager to explore during a recent mission to Israel, but also how that know-how translates into making the world a better place.

“Where else but Israel do technology and goodwill work so closely together?” asked businessman Jonathan Zucker, director of the newly formed South Carolina-Israel Collaboration (SCIC).

The delegates flew home from Israel with 50 fresh business and research partnerships — including a dozen in the hot-topic area of “aging in place.”

In some ways, the 44-year-old violinist Joshua Bell seems to be a reincarnation of 19th century pianist Franz Liszt. Not just a superb musician, but colorful and glamorous to boot. A showman.

What Bell does not seem to be is another Jascha Heifetz — austere, cold, and remote. Heifetz tried to be perfectly immobile while he played; Bell has been criticized for moving around too much. And can anyone imagine the haughty Heifetz donning a baseball cap and playing for passersby in a subway station in Washington, D.C., just for the fun of it?

Hanna Arie-Gaifman has deeply personal reasons to be gratified at the 92nd Street Y’s presentation of a multi-disciplinary series on the Nazi transition camp in Terezin, Czechoslovakia. “My mother’s family went through Theresienstadt [the German name for the camp], and they all perished in Auschwitz,” says the director of the Y’s Tisch Center of the Arts. The camp, which was billed by the Nazis as an ideal community for the Jews, absorbed her interest from childhood. Born in Czechoslovakia after the war, Arie-Gaifman immigrated to Israel with her family when she was 14; by the time she was 18, she was cataloguing artifacts from Theresienstadt at The Hebrew University.

So there they were, on the last day of Chanukah, almost 900 teenagers and staff members, most of them in their 20s, joined by a few older people, staffers and guests, sitting at round tables, 10 per table, happy but surprisingly tense, waiting to go.

Each table was entirely bare except for 10 variously colored cheap plastic dreidels.

The only people standing were members of the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown’s staff, led by its general manager. They were impartial; they were the judges.

After a short video, exhorting the contestants to break the record, a countdown led to 10 seconds of effort, as hundreds of people willed their little plastic tops to keep spinning, even as many of them spluttered onto the table, sometimes banging into each other as they went down.

OFER, west bank – Israel recently released 550 Palestinian prisoners in the second phase of the Gilad Shalit exchange deal, but thousands of Palestinians remain in Israeli jails.

According to the Israeli Prison Service, there are 6,640 Palestinian prisoners in Israel: 4,816 security prisoners and 1,824 being held for criminal offenses.

Unlike the conditions in which Shalit was held for more than five years — largely incommunicado, with no visits, little direct sunlight, and no knowledge of when, or if, he would be freed — Israel says it carefully regulates its treatment of Palestinian prisoners.

WASHINGTON – Rick Santorum’s near-win in Iowa and his fourth place finish in New Hampshire ahead of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have made him the GOP’s latest “not Romney” candidate to beat. His status as the GOP right’s champion will be put to the test Jan. 21 in South Carolina’s Republican presidential primary. He may have his work cut out for him, however, in attracting Jewish support in the general election if he eventually manages to wrest the nomination from bruised frontrunner Gov. Mitt Romney.

Pro-Israel insiders say the Santorum campaign is now aggressively reaching out to Jewish givers who helped him when he was a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania.

WASHINGTON – @JewishWhiteHouse is back.

In a surprise move Monday, President Barack Obama announced that Jack Lew, his director of the Office of Budget and Management — a Cabinet-level position — would replace William Daley as White House chief of staff.

Lew, 56, was chosen for his long years in government and his reputation as a skilled multitasker — he was top budget-cruncher for President Bill Clinton before reprising the job for Obama — but Jewish officials were offering a sigh of relief for a subsidiary reason: Their who-we-gonna-call pleas were answered.

The image of Israel and its place in the international community is always a hot topic, perhaps even more as 2012 looms as a historic year.

Against that backdrop, Jersey City-born businessman J. Harvey Karp is ratcheting up what he calls his “ongoing mitzvah project,” the webzine Israel Up Close (www.israelupclose.org).

You will not find Karp’s name mentioned anywhere on the site. He prefers to keep the spotlight squarely on the Jewish homeland through professionally produced video segments illustrating the myriad ways in which Israel and Israelis contribute to the world and work toward peace.