Foto Friday – Guy Raivitz’s Back Yard
Guy Raivitz is an Israeli freelance photojournalist who’s worked all around the local and foreign media. He also does pro bono work for social conscience organizations, including the UNICEF Angola mine awareness project, and Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation in Namibia. He’s trained his sharp lens on Israel as well – he was a staff photographer for “Haaretz”, among other publications – and produced a powerful portraiture series of people in soup kitchens.
Today’s Foto Friday presents four works from Guy’s latest project – a soon-to-be published book documenting Israeli reality called “Back Yard“. Each is a stand-alone work, but there is also a logic to the way he’s set them up on his website, in pairs.
Maybe its because I commuted on that freeway for six and a half years – and sat trapped in so many traffic jams while it was being built – but I found this combination strangely moving.
Guy has captured the craziness that engulfs the country on Yom Ha’atzmaut, when we tread a fine line between revelry and violence. The next day, the city lies quiet, covered by a layer of soot and shaving cream.
Israel Picks National Bird, The Hoopoe
With bated breath, Israelis waited for Shimon Peres’ announcement yesterday: Israel’s National Bird will be the … (drum roll) …
The hoopoe!
Known as “Duchifat” (doo-khi-faht) in Hebrew, we had our first exposure to the hoopoe through Salman Rushdie’s novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, where Haroun the protagonist gets a mechanical hoopoe bird to fly him to the Land of Gup. A good read.
If you’ve even been to Israel you can see these delightful-looking birds, with a majestic headpiece, flying through Israel which is a migratory bottleneck for millions of birds heading to Europe or back to Africa.
According to the Haaretz newspaper, the hoopoe garnered 35 percent of the popular vote, barely edging out the goldfinch and the warbler. However, it won the unanimous support of a public committee, and since the national bird committee’s vote was worth one-quarter of the total vote, that gave the hoopoe a decisive victory.
In the birdwatching community, reactions to the results were mixed. Alon said he had supported the goldfinch at the beginning of the process. “The finch’s numbers are declining and it is being hunted,” he explained.
Dr Uzi Paz, a veteran birder and former head of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, supported the warbler: “That is a bird I researched, so I was rooting for it.”
The Bible mentions the hoopoe as a non-kosher bird, and the Quran tells a tale of King Solomon who spoke to animals and told the hoopoe of his visit to the Queen of Sheba’s land.
James, a Green Prophet, has been following the vote for some time, writing a series of posts about the vote here, here, here and here; and also over on Jewcy where he talks about an unusual bird that sings in his garden. Worth a read.
Our boyfriend asked us, “Why the hoopoe? Israel should have picked the dove.” Cute. We hadn’t even thought of that possibility. What do you think? Was the hoopoe the right choice for Israel?
Israeli Women Shine at Annual Biomed Conference in Tel Aviv (Here’s Two of Them)
We’re always excited every time we meet women who are running companies, and it seems in Israel there are a lot of women focused in the biotech sector.
Meet NeuroQuest, a young diagnostics company, run by four ladies. We met two of them the other day at Israel’s world-famous Biomed conference in Tel Aviv (above).
Watch the video Israelity made, click here.
Israel brings relief to cyclone-struck Burma
Hat’s off to IsraAID!
A third Israeli relief team headed out from Israel yesterday to Burma (Myanmar) to try to help the people affected by Cyclone Nagris.
The first team flew out four days after the cyclone, when the true devastation was only just emerging. Two teams distributed over 10 tons of relief items in the crucially affected areas, and others provided training to over 500 local medical staff.
Now they’ve put together a short slideshow showing what they did there. Have a look – makes you want to book a plane out there and start helping.
Your Usual Unusual Event
I went to a typical Israeli wedding the other night. What does that mean in a country comprised of immigrants from over 100 countries? Is there such a thing as a typical Israeli wedding?
There are the denominators common to most weddings in the western world: a white gown for the bride, a gathering of family and friends, dinner and dancing afterwards. Then there are characteristics common to Jewish weddings: a rabbi, a chuppah, a ketubah, the breaking of a glass in memory of the Second Temple that was destroyed.
And then there are the things that typify your classic secular wedding in 21st century Israel: a fantasy countryside setting built on land where only recently chicken coops stood, nouvelle cuisine buffet ranging from Chinois to Juif, and an insane selection of music by the DJ to open the proceedings.
“Israelis are crazy. They are absolutely crazy,” stated my bemused significant other. At least that’s what I think he said, given the din that preceded the bride and groom’s march down the aisle – a sound bite from an old Muppets show.
We then tried to top one another with “whose been to the tackier event” stories – the bris I went to in Bat Yam where the dessert table was lowered down from the ceiling, the wedding we’d heard about where the bridesmaids and groomsmen were clad only in bathing suits, the fireworks displays that occur on a nightly basis over the wedding halls of Rishon Lezion, and of course, the famous bride and groom helicopter airlifts. Crazy.
And yet…
I was invited to this wedding, even though I’m barely related to the groom on my father’s side, because his family is small – most relatives had perished in the Holocaust. While standing and watching the ceremony, I ran into cousins from my mother’s side and it turned out they were related to the bride, as was the rabbi who performed the ceremony. Her family comes from Saloniki, a Greek community that was also decimated in WWII. His father was a general in the Israeli army. Her father ran a spice business. There were people there of all ages, first, second and third generation Israelis. In the midst of the dancing, a bouzouki player came out, line dancing began, and plates were smashed for good luck.
Typical? There is nothing typical about any wedding here.
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