Dollars and sense in Israel
It’s nice to know that some people are doing well financially in Israel. According to a new study on worldwide wealth, while there was globally a 17% increase in the number of millionaires in 2009. the rate in Israel was nearly 43%.
I guess that worn out joke – ‘how do you make a million dollars in Israel? Bring $2 million’ – is no longer the blueprint here.
The World Wealth Report, released by Merrill Lynch and the Capgemini consulting firm, states that there were 8,419 millionaires in Israel in 2009, compared to 5,900 in 2008. According to the Ha’aretz report, that brisk growth rate was surpassed only by Hong Kong and India. The study defines a millionaire as a person with at least $1 million in investable assets, excluding primary residences, and with an offset for liabilities.
In 2008, the number of millionaires in Israel had declined by 28% compared to the year before, because of the global economic crisis.
The growth in the Israeli millionaires’ club last year is the result of a 40% increase in the value of capital market financial holdings and a 15% increase in non-financial assets such as real estate.
Millionaires aren’t the only growth industry in Israel. According to the report, the number of multi-millionaires (those worth over $30 million) rose from 73 to 83 last year.
While not begrudging anyone their big payday, the rest of us are still struggling month to month, with record numbers living under the poverty line. Another old adage, “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer”, while not a joke, is relevant today more than ever.
Will my children be Jewish?
MK David Rotem leading the fight?
New regulations from the Chief Rabbinate have non-Orthodox Israelis in a tizzy. According to the rules, anyone can have their Jewishness called into question at any time. But legislators in the Knesset aren’t taken the changes lying down with MK David Rotem vowing to fight.
The new rules appear to be part of an ever-tightening noose around the conversion status of Russian immigrants to Israel who the rabbinic establishment fears may not be Jewish according to a strict interpretation of Jewish Law. But they also apply to immigrants from any country – including the two hundred thousand or so Anglos in Israel.
The issue was brought to the forefront a few years back when a rabbinic judge retroactively annulled an immigrant’s conversion status because she told the court, while seeking a divorce, that she did not observe Shabbat or family purity laws.
The controversial ruling was then applied to thousands of other conversions that were considered to have been conducted improperly, in part because the converts were not living ultra-Orthodox lifestyles.
The new regulations announced in the last month require city rabbis and marriage registrars to send every convert and (this is new) every person whose parents were married abroad to the court for a determination of whether or not she or he’s a Jew.
While the main targets of the ruling are converts, the implications for Anglo immigrants are nevertheless astounding. Even though my wife Jody and I were both born Jewish, we were married in the U.S. And not by a rabbi who is on the official list of Diaspora rabbis recognized by the Chief Rabbinate. Accordingly, our children – if they decide to get married in Israel – will have to prove their own Jewishness in a court of law. And, astonishingly, they will have to pay for their own hearing.
Hollywood stories
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life, Movies, Pop Culture, Travel
John Cusack and Woody Harrelson at the Kinneret.
There’s the Leo Dicaprio/Bar Rafaeli way of trying to visit the Kotel a couple years ago without thinking the paparazzi would notice, and getting ambushed on the scene, resulting in a fracas and ill feelings all around.
There’s the Bette Midler way – who this months spent some time here touring with her husband. They apparently planned ahead and gave Yediot Aharonot the chance to exclusively shoot the Divine Miss M in Jerusalem’s Old City. They cleverly labeled the photo “Bette hamikdash.”
When Jim Carrey arrived here from Egypt a few years back undetected, he went to the lengths or remaining incognito by hiring a stand-in look alike to hang out at the King David Hotel pretending to be him, while the real Carrey went out under a baseball cap and toured to his heart’s content.
But now, film stars John Cusack and Woody Harrelson have put one over on us – they were apparently in the country last week, hanging out at the Kinneret and checking out Christian holy sites in Jerusalem. How do we know? Cusack posted about what he called a ‘friendship tour’ on his Tweeter account, including a self-taken photo of the duo on the shores of Tiberias.
No publicists, no photo shoots and no decoys. Maybe we really are turning into a normal country.
Must-have knafe
I’ve never eaten it, but I’ve just got to have it. Kanafeh, that is. It’s an Arab pastry somewhat like baklava, but with the addition of soft goats cheese, an orange coating and sprinkled pistachio nuts.
I first learned about kanafeh from a friend who was guiding us through East Jerusalem. He pointed out a bakery near Damascus Gate called Eiffel that he says serves the best kanafeh in town. We were on a tight timetable and weren’t able to stop, but since then I’ve been hankering for a taste.
Our next opportunity came as we were heading up north from Jerusalem for a hike in the Carmel Mountains (see my previous post on that tiyul). Our route took us through the Druze village of Daliat el-Carmel and there, on the right side of the street, was a restaurant advertising fresh kanafeh, My taste buds fired up.
But this was a Friday and, unbeknownst to us, that’s prime shopping time and the traffic at noon in Daliat el-Carmel was bumper to bumper. There was no way to pull over, let alone anywhere to park. As we nudged forward, my kanafeh receded sadly into the background.
My search for kanafeh reminded me of another dessert obsessively sought. Back at the height of the mid-2000s donut craze in the U.S., I was traveling on the East Coast with the family. My goal: to find a Krispy Kreme store with the red “hot now” light on, indicating that original glazed donuts were rolling fresh out of the oven.
On highways from Toronto to Cleveland and Chicago, past rest stops and strip malls, the Krispy Kreme proved elusive until the last day of our road trip. Unlike with the kanafeh, my love for Mr. Krispy was ultimately requited. And it was worth it.
On the way out of the Carmel, we skipped the Daliat traffic, but also our opportunity to pick up some kanafeh for the ride home. Still, it’s only a matter of time before I find the time to head back to the Old City. I just hope that after all the anticipation, I actually like it!
Nostalgia Sunday – Welcome to Eggs-rael
Filed under: Food, General, health, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Travel
Pinch me, I must be dreaming. For the first time in all my years here, I’ve found a place with egg white omelet on the menu. Not that you aren’t able to order an omelet made of egg whites in Israel. But this generally this involves making long explanations to young wait-persons who generally respond with everything from a blank stare of utter confusion to a just-as-confused-but-trying-to-be-helpful, “Are you sure you only want the whites? I’m going to have to charge you for a regular omelet anyway, you know.” So, having it on the menu is a big deal.
It got me thinking about eggs, which are a very important part of the daily diet for most Israelis – and not just during Passover when it’s all eggs, all the time. According to a 2007 report by International Egg and Poultry Review, hen egg consumption in Israel was 30.98, putting Israel 36th in world per capita consumption. In 2004, Globes reported that the average Israeli consumed 239 eggs per year.
One of the reasons consumption is so high is because eggs aren’t just for breakfast in Israel. I still remember this revelation at the age of 7 or 8 when I was invited to dinner at the home of a little girl in my Grandmother’s Jerusalem neighborhood. Her mother served us fried eggs, sunny side up. Wow! Breakfast food for dinner! This must be a pretty good country to live in if you can have that.
Of course, actually coming here to live meant dealing with some of the peculiarities of egg procurement. For example, during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, eggs were taken away from consumers and delivered straight to our soldiers. The only eggs available were tiny little substandard ones — and then only through the black market.
Meanwhile, Israel’s soldiers were being stuffed silly with four, five and six eggs a day. Eventually, this artificially created shortage ended, eggs came back to the grocery shelves and those soldiers — now in their 50s and 60s — treat their high cholesterol levels with statin drugs. (Israel’s Hadassah Hospital, you should know, was a pioneer in the use of statins for controlling high blood pressure).
Another weird thing was that there were no egg cartons, just trays of eggs. If you just wanted to buy a few eggs, say 6 or 8, the grocery store proprietor would place them very carefully in a little brown paper bag and hand it to you to carry gingerly back home. And if you were lucky, most of them would arrive whole. This led to the development of the portable plastic egg carrying case.
Even before the State was founded, most of Israel’s eggs were marketed by evil monolith (I am not kidding) Tnuva which at one point in the 1980s marketed 66% of all of the country’s eggs. To its credit, Tnuva did standardize levels of production and was the first Israeli company to qualify for ISO 9002 international standardization. Nonetheless, times have changed and today Tnuva has to make do with controlling a mere 35% of the egg market in Israel.
I’m too young to have experienced the austerity regime of Israel’s early statehood but the excellent Nostal site (in Hebrew but with lots of pictures) has a nice entry about powdered eggs, which seem to have characterized the era for many.
But I am old enough to have seen one of the last egg stores in Tel Aviv, which was located on Shenkin Street right next to Cafe Tamar. It was not a boutique. It was a dumpy little store that sold one thing and one thing alone: that perfect oval symbol of rebirth.
Today, we have egg cartons by the dozen, restaurants like Tel Aviv’s Benedict that serve eggs all day and all night, and shakshouka, a North African dish consisting of eggs poached in tomato sauce, is a staple on every menu. (The Israel Poultry Council has a nice recipe here).
As for the aforementioned egg white omelet, it was served to me at the Si Espresso cafe. Located at the Latrun junction, the cafe is a popular hangout for mountain bikers from all over Israel (hence the healthy Lite Breakfast)*. Definitely recommended, even if you aren’t wearing biking shorts.
*This past Friday morning was no exception; the bikers hadn’t yet received the news that one of their own, triathlete Shneor Cheshin, had been killed while riding by a hit-and-run driver. You can read more about it in Yossi Melman’s impassioned editorial, Drivers to Blame, in Haaretz.
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