Life in Israel is a beach

June 30, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Israeliness, Life, Travel 

Surf's up in Haifa.

In Israel, there’s a short time period between the winter and the summer – lasting about four or five days. One day it’s cold and windy and before you can say ‘spring,’ everybody’s headed to the beach.

Unfortunately, no sooner do we indulge in our vast expanse of beautiful coastline, then a few elements arrive making a dip in the water somewhat of a perilous endeavor.

First of all, the jellyfish (medusa) season begins, with bigger and spikier species seemingly arriving on the shores of the Mediterranean each year. Evading the giant blobs is only half the battle, as their poison permeates the water, giving sensitive bathers a stingy, swollen feeling even if you don’t come in direct contact with them.

Secondly, the strong summer winds often mean that the black flags come out in force, restricting the official bathing areas to the size of a Jacuzzi at some beaches.

Despite the obstacles, though, Israeli beaches are among the nicest and most inviting anywhere and offer a wide variety of from the pristine North with Achziv, heading down through Tel Aviv which epitomizes beach culture and on down to Ashkelon and Ashdod. When the Mediterranean has too many bathers or jellyfish, there’s also the Red Sea near Eilat and The Dead Sea for the mud and salt crowd.

ISRAEL21c provides a nice overview of the country’s top 10 beaches that provides a guide to watering holes around the country. We’re headed to a pre-Shabbat family barbecue tomorrow at our own favorite beach spot – just north of Cinema City on the Ramat Hasharon-Herzliya border. But don’t tell anybody.

Tags:

Answers.com no longer has all the answers

June 28, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Business, News, Technology 

Answers.com with former CEO Bob Rosenschein

Answers.com, one of Jerusalem’s largest employers of English-speaking immigrants and a long-time survivor of the first dot.com crash, has been effectively gutted by its new owners. TechCrunch reported that yesterday, 45 of the company’s 65 Israel-based employees were fired, along with some of the New York staff (the company had a total of about 90 people). The axed included Answers.com’s founder and CEO Bob Rosenschein and CTO Jeff Schneiderman.

The bloodshed was not entirely unexpected (new owners tend to look at their acquisitions with more scrutiny than, perhaps, the founders with all their history and attachment). But that doesn’t make it any less painful for the staff let go.

The purchase of Answers.com always seemed a bit strange to me. Publicly traded on NASDAQ, the company was profitable and seemingly happily humming along when AFCV Holdings, a portfolio company of growth equity investor Summit Partners, swooped in to acquire Answers.com for $127 million.

That may seem large but, when the deal was announced, shareholders were unhappy, claiming that it tremendously undervalued Answers.com. They even tried to block the sale (a U.S. court denied the motion in April 2011).

AFCV said the layoffs were necessary to focus the company on its main product –the Q&A site WikiAnswers – and that a number of product initiatives (including 1-Click Answers, AnswerTips and Widget Gallery), as well as a mobile version, would no longer be supported. AFCV also said that, since Answers.com was not public anymore, the company didn’t need certain support structure.

All that makes sense, and it was probably no surprise to Rosenschein and Schneiderman that AFCV would want to consolidate management at their own headquarters or with their own people (hastening the duo’s departure). And it may even make a certain amount of business logic – as Gil Reich, the head of Answers.com’s product management, pointed out in his own blog, Answers.com went through so many ups and downs in its 12-year tenure, that the new owners may have felt compelled to “ruthlessly cut everything it felt distracted from (the company’s) core mission of a great community creating great content.”

But it’s nevertheless frustrating to see a company that employed a lot of good people in Israel lose that staff to a new American parent that clearly doesn’t share the same sense of “career Zionism.” The Business Insider blog described it more nefariously: It looks like the new owners are “milking the company for the cash that comes from all that SEO traffic.”

One of my friends at Answers.com wrote on her Facebook status, it’s the “end of an era, beginning of a new one?” We’ll have to wait and see. There are still 20 people left in Israel at Answers.com. For the rest, that new beginning may not be exactly what they expected.

Tags: , , ,

Dog days of Israel

June 28, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life 

Golden labrador puppies for sale in Israel.

It seems like everyone is getting dogs lately. Two good friends, after years of good sense, decided independently a few weeks ago to bolster their already bustling lives of work and kids with puppies.

And it appears that they’re not alone. According to figures put out last week by the Agriculture Ministry’s National Dog Register, there are more than 385,000 dogs registered on their website. In 2010, 50,768 new dogs were registered – 14,657 of them born that year.

According to the Ynet story on the report, for the third time in a row, the Labrador Retriever is the most popular purebred dog in Israel, with 20,490 registered dogs. The Pinscher came in second with 17,881 registered dogs. They are followed by the German Shepherd with 13,848 dogs. The Pekingese is fourth with 15,544 dogs and the Golden Retriever seals the top five with 13,093 dogs.

However, the Pekingese dog breed leads the list for the second year in a row in terms of the number of purebred dogs who have joined the reservoir with 2,222 dogs compared to the Labrador with 2,074 dogs.

When I was a kid, we used to go the pound and pick out a mutt, and while many Israelis also prefer the friendly, down-to-earth stability of a mutt, most people have a clear preference for purebred dogs. Some 250,000 purebred dogs, and dogs with physical traits similar to purebred dogs, were registered with the National Dog Register in 2010 – an addition of 30,000 dogs, compared to 183,000 dogs of mixed breed which were joined by only 21,000 new members last year.

What Israelis name their dogs is a different story – Forget Hebrew names, for female dogs, the most popular name is Lady (3,098 dogs) and males are getting stuck with Lucky (2,734), slightly ahead of the gender-confused Bonnie. More unique names found in the register include Red Bull, Kinor (Hebrew for violin), Nautika, Abu Ali and Escape.

You’ll find the most dogs in Tel Aviv – with 26,546 registered canines, followed by Jerusalem with 21,608 and Haifa with 14,321. But while Israelis have evidently taken to raising dogs, they haven’t necessarily taken to cleaning up after their dogs – so when you’re in those cities, be careful where you walk.

Tags:

Sandal making

June 28, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Art, Business, design, education, General 

Here’s a cool opportunity. Learn how to make a pair of sandals by hand, according to the traditional methods, with an emphasis on personal expression. The teacher is Nina Rozin, one of the founders of The Guild, Tel Aviv’s school for shoemaking and accessory design. The syllabus? It includes familiarizing students with the world of sandals and their structure, moving into creating individual molds, planning and carrying out design, fitting the sandal and cutting the leather or fabric. Students will also prepare the soles and insoles by hand, learning how to attach them to one another and finish the product.

The course is on 8 Tuesdays in the summer — so that you’ll be able to wear your sandals in September — and costs NIS 1200. What I really like about the idea is who’s sponsoring it and where it’s being held. Nina Rozin, as mentioned above, is one of the founders of The Guild, the shoemaking school that is one of the sponsors. The other is the Library at Bayit Banamal, which is where the course is being held, and which is part of the combination structure owned by design firm Comme il faut at the namal, Tel Aviv’s northern port boardwalk. Bayit Banamal was originally a warehouse, rebuilt as a combo cafe/day spa/gallery/store space and now includes the library/cultural center.

There will be other courses there throughout the year — including one on marriage and another on journalism; the sandal one just caught my eye. Just think: Design your own sandals and then get to wear ‘em.

Tags: , , ,

The latest Holyland monstrosity in Jerusalem?

June 27, 2011 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: Environment 

Planned 24-story tower in southern Jerusalem

When the city of Jerusalem canceled the “Safdie Plan” in 2006, urban planners said there would be no choice but to build inside the city itself. The Safdie Plan, a project conceived by world-famous architect Moshe Safdie, would have put upwards of 20,000 housing units in the hills to the west of Jerusalem. Environmentalists fought it tooth and nail, as did conscientious bikers and hikers.

There’s no denying that Jerusalem’s burgeoning population needs more homes and apartments to live in – it’s either that or intensifying the ongoing exodus of young families to surrounding communities and, ultimately, the abandonment of the city to the super rich and famously vacant.

But building more inside the city necessarily means greater density: open plots get developed, height limits are raised, and entirely new complexes are planned.

Nowhere is that more blatant than the recently revealed master plan for the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Baka, where we live. The plan, which was presented recently to stunned local residents at an emergency meeting at the Baka community center, is full of zoning changes that allow 6, 8 and 12 story buildings to be erected on the neighborhood’s periphery.

The most audacious part – and the one that’s raised the most controversy – is a plan to erect a massive 24-story building at the “Oranim” junction, where Yehuda, Pierre Koenig, Yohanan Ben Zakai, Emek Refaim and Elezar HaModa’i Streets meet, on the current site of a gas station and car wash.

This building would so tower over everything else, it would be impossible to miss from, well, the entire city. It would cast a shadow over many existing homes, and its central location would make it even more of an eyesore than the controversial Holyland project. Indeed, the untenable height leads to all kinds of speculation on Holyland-style corruption and bribes.

Not only would the building be entirely out of sorts with its surroundings, where 4 story buildings are the exception, but it’s hard to imagine how the area would cope with the significantly increased traffic. Is the city planning to build double decker highways? Because the narrow two lane streets that currently comprise our transportation arteries are already woefully clogged during the rush hours.

But is it really so bad? My friend Yuval, a successful local architect, says that large construction often means the developers have to give a lot back to the city. New parks, improved roads, community infrastructure.

And, indeed, the pictures of the building show an impressive traffic circle which would presumably ease the flow of cars and buses, as well as the continuation of the new “train track” bikeway and park right through the center of the building complex on their way to the Malcha shopping mall. Transportation consultant Marc Render (a friend and very honest broker) has his name on the plan, so presumably there are traffic accommodations that would mitigate the initial fear.

The complex would ironically also serve to visually integrate the neighborhoods of Baka, the German Colony, Katamon, Makor Haim and the Katamonim around the traffic circle, with each community jutting out like a spoke in a wheel (although detractors say you’d only see the design from above).

Perhaps the size of the new building is a red herring. With all the other new buildings and zoning changes in the master plan, those involved in negotiations know that dropping in a particularly controversial project means they can take it out (or scale it down, to perhaps, 12 stories) and get everything else they want.

It will undoubtedly be a long fight from here and my personal jury is out on what the optimal result will be. In the end, it may not affect me as much as my grandchildren – the plan is not scheduled to be completed for another 20 years. By that time, there may even be a light rail line into our neighborhood (wishful thinking, to be sure).

Or maybe, I’ll embrace the monster and buy a penthouse flat of my own. I bet things will look very different from the top.

Tags:

Page 1 of 912345...Last »

 

© 2012 ISRAELITY | Site by illuminea | Sitemap