Foto Friday – Purim Costumes, Israel style
Filed under: design, education, Entertainment, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Life, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Travel, tv
In our globalized wired world, its very hard to find a truly Israeli Purim costume. Gone are the times when little girls would dream of dressing up like Queen Esther and little boys live like wicked Haman for the day. Needless to say, the era of home-made dress-up has also passed — though many families do invest in having a seamstress whip up a bespoke fairy princess gown or two — and importers like Shoshi Zohar make their fortune each year at Purim time.
Nonetheless, a thorough perusal of the Shoshi Zohar online catalogue did yield some particularly Israeli fare, starting with this little Mossad agent…
I’m sure, despite the red Star of David on her cap, that this naughty nurse wasn’t trained by Magen David Adom…
This fellow seems as perplexed as I was at the idea of buying this get-up as a costume, when the real deal is easily available only a 15 minute drive away…
Shoshi Zohar actually has a whole section entitled “Costumes for Religious People” and here we do find some sentimental remnants of yesteryear’s costumes. Although the Megillah’s characters were curiously absent, I did find two out of the four Matriarchs. Here’s Rivka (Rebecca), her gown bedecked with camel appliques…
And Aharon (Aaron), the High Priest!
It was also nice to discover that local drugstore chain Super-Pharm had produced a series of instructional videos for the holiday about how to do face makeup and while Smurfette isn’t Israeli, the long-standing affection for the Dardasim, as they’re called here, is very much part of our local popular culture.
Foto Friday – Jerusalem Ice Festival
Filed under: Art, design, Entertainment, Foto Friday, General, News, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Travel
It’s zero degrees Celsius here in Jerusalem right now. Commonly known as the temperature at which water freezes, the weather is also a perfect backdrop to the Jerusalem Ice Festival which opens this coming Sunday.
A team of 20 Chinese ice sculptors came to Israel to create the exhibit which is divided into four sections, starting with Jerusalem of Ice where visitors walk through the ice version of Jaffa Gate…
Visit famous Jerusalem sites, like the Tower of David…
Sir Moses Montefiore’s windmill…
…and Montefiore’s carriage (that’s Mayor Nir Barkat inside)…
Or slide down the pride of Kiryat HaYovel, the “Golem” by Niki de Saint Phalle, now recast in crystallized H20!
After the Jerusalem section there are Animals and Childhood Stories, the Fantasy area, the Ice Bar, which features ice-works by local artists and an ice skating rink.
Here’s a quick look at how it all got done…
The Ice Festival takes place from March 6th- April 30th 2012 at the old Jerusalem Train compound. The festival will showcase dozens of ice sculptures, skating rinks and a variety of family-oriented activities. Admission fee is 65 NIS and yes, visitors will receive coats on entering the complex, which will operate at a temperature of -10 degrees Celsius. For more information: Jerusalem Ice Festival.
Nostalgia Sunday – Nostalgia Online
Filed under: Blogging, design, education, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, tv
Get ready to get nostalgic, big time. The wonderful Nostalgia Online site, (at Nostal.co.il)， a collection of documents, videos, audio tracks and images curated by collector/editor and contemporary history buff David Sela, sent out an email this past week announcing that all site content, text and images were now available for download, free-of-charge, for non-commercial use for private studies, homework, research and other educational needs including news report citations. Yay!
Sela, who only a few weeks ago, launched Radio Nostalgia, an online music channel playing Israeli hits from 25 years ago and beyond, has clearly tapped into a wellspring of human emotion: the good feeling elicited from seeing an old movie poster, classic naaley bayit slippers or even the relief felt from seeing a picture of a rusty old kerosene heater and being able to say, “Well, thank goodness we don’t have to use THAT anymore!”
The site is a comprehensive, non-profit enterprise with content written by Sela and a team of volunteer researchers, with materials contributed by thousands of visitors, private entities and institutions all interested in preserving the collective memory of the modern State of Israel. The site is divided into dozens of sub-sites (portals) and tens of thousands of entries, images, presentations, audio and video clips and various visual images.
In addition to Radio Nostalgia, there’s a video archive that gathers together over 1000 YouTube clips, an audio archive with sounds from famous historical events, a collection of downloadable PowerPoint presentations and print materials. There’s even a daily trivia factoid. For example, 34 years ago today in 1978, the film Eskimo Limon (Lemon Popsicle) — itself a nostalgic look back at wayward Tel Aviv youth in the late 1950s — premiered and became a national sensation.
Nostalgia Online also publishes an online magazine called Kova Tembel (in Hebrew) distributed free to 146,000 subscribers, runs an information center and also answers individual questions about the various historical aspects of Israeli culture and heritage.
The Nostalgia Online team assists organizations and institutions in creating displays for employees and/or the public and has also formed a non-government organization (NGO) for the purpose of establishing a museum of Israeli nostalgia.
You can show your support by joining their Facebook page. And if you’ve got any Israeli knick-knacks, bric-a-brac or any other cool old stuff lying around, take a picture and share — it will surely be appreciated!
For old time’s sake, here’s the trailer for Lemon Popsicle.
Haredim gone wild
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, design, General, Israeliness, Life, Pop Culture, Religion, Social Justice
This is unlikely to help bridge the secular-haredi divide that has engulfed Israel, with all the recent women-in-the-back-of-the-bus and army singing segregation stories.
An Israeli fashion magazine called BelleMode is publicizing a new photo spread that speaks directly to those headlines. The spread features models portraying haredi men and women on a bus. But not only is there no separate seating, there’s some very provocative cohabitation going on.
As the Gawker website put it, the outfits “ resemble the clothing favored by haredim, except with some minor differences. Like, some of the shirts are see-through. And some of the models have forgotten to wear their pants.”
According to an accompanying behind the scenes video for the shoot, the director is heard explaining what he was trying to do. “My feeling is, that in the fashion industry, women have a lot of power, they are at the center. We took that power and decided to centralize/funnel it into a fashion production – that’s both inspired and against a woman’s appearance, to bring all the stuff that’s most irritating to us — the bus banishments, silencing of singing – to bring it and make a production that walks a fine line between being very closed and modest to ripped wide open and sexy. As long as it’s being done in good taste and doesn’t harm the woman, I don’t see any problem.”
You can judge for yourself after viewing some of the photos from the shoot here.
Nostalgia Sunday – Cinema Savion saved!
Filed under: Business, design, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Movies, News, Nostalgia Sunday, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Social Justice, Travel
The best sort of mayor, it is said, is one who can keep real estate developers under control. Look at some of the architectural monstrosities surrounding us and one has to conclude that modern Israel has had very bad luck with city management. Some lovely buildings have been torn down with the occasional commemorative plaque or, worse yet, commemorative structure erected as an afterthought.
Some of the silliest examples: Talitakumi in front of Jerusalem’s HaMashbir LeZarchan, a strangely out of place wall-and-clock structure intended to replicate the front of a girl’s school that was razed to make room for the department store. The gate leading to Gymnasia Herzliya in Tel Aviv was thrown up by sentimental, well-meaning people in recognition of the original structure, demolished to make way for the Kolbo Shalom. And does anybody know that the Gan HaIr mall and residential complex was named for the municipal zoological garden that once stood there?
The most unsung of all are the movie houses, most of them shuttered for decades, fall deeper and deeper into disrepair until they are destroyed to make room for malls, tall buildings and parking lots. No one remembers Tel Aviv’s majestic Mugrabi Cinema or Jerusalem’s historic Edison.
Nonetheless, a small victory was achieved a little over a week ago when high-rise developers were forced to change a plan to tear down Bay Yam’s historic Savion Cinema. The victory belongs to a local activist group of Bat Yam residents, artists and the Society for Preservation of Israel Heritage Sites who objected to the demolition and proposed a synthesis of old and new structures.
In its heyday, Bat Yam boasted six movie houses. The Savion Cinema was built in 1957 and — in line with the global trend – closed in the 1980s. “However it remained an architectural icon because of its facade which was characterized by a weave of concrete block units,” states The Marker.
Icon or not, the building was in bad shape. Its most recent tenant: a dollar store in what was once the movie-house’s lobby.
According to The Marker, the design for a 25-story tower by architect Ilan Pivko, will be modified in accordance with preservation plan for the building. The building — a luxury residence and prestigious office space — is a flagship project for the Bat Yam municipality which wants to develop the run-down neighborhoods adjacent to Jaffa. The preservation plan calls for the street-facing facade to remain intact.
One look at Pivko’s work and its clear that adapting his design to the new guidelines goes against his post-modernist grain. He does not favor keeping the facade as is and suggests a modular solution instead. “One can reconstruct, dismantle or in some other way create an interior element within the structure.” How Pivko handles this challenge remains to be seen… he has done this sort of thing before… but if he wanted to do it with the Savion, he would have worked it into the original design…
Hmmm… one gets the feeling that this issue isn’t over just yet.
Whether or not the Savion Cinema facade remains on the street level or whether, in the end, Pivko’s lobby will simply feature a bold construction of recycled concrete filigree, the real significance of the decision is a precedent set in curbing real estate developers’ ability to destroy old structures without recognizing their historic value. Hopefully, that means recognition not just in the form of an incidental plaque, statue or clock, but as part of the planning, putting real thought into paying homage to what came before.
The Savion Cinema photos were taken by architect Sharon Raz who is a one-man documentary powerhouse with a particular interest in Israel’s old cinemas. See his Disappearing Architecture and Disappearing Cinemas sites as well as his Natush blog for more photos and information.
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