Foto Friday – Assaf Pinchuk images Israel
Filed under: A New Reality, Business, design, Entertainment, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Life, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Profiles, Travel
It’s the morning of Erev Pessach, Passover eve, and the country is in its final involuntary shopping, cooking and cleaning spasm. This evening, a blessed quiet will fall over Israel and for a few moments, all will be clean, orderly and in place.
That sense of balance, of everything being as it should be — dare I say it, of seder — is present in these images by commercial photographer Assaf Pinchuk, who specializes in architectural and industrial subjects. In his work, Pinchuk gives us a glimpse of the Israel we aspire to be. Even the unruly building blocks and winding streets of an old Tel Aviv neighborhood fall into place…
A office building lobby becomes a composition of light, shadow, contrasting colors and structural elements…
The city’s famously dynamic night life is omnipresent in the saturated green of a rest room…
A Tel Aviv rooftop apartment glows against a darkening sky…
In daylight, through the windowshades, the harsh Mediterranean sun paints white walls with shadow…
As always, the best days end with sunset on the Tel Aviv beach.
Assaf Pinchuk studied photography at Hadassah College, Jerusalem, after which he interned and worked with Cologne-based photographer Hans-Georg Esch. Together with wife and business partner Miri, Pinchuk opened his own studio in 1998, with the goal of producing unique, dynamic, smart and inspiring images for a client list that includes some of Israel’s leading companies and institutions.
The mad rush to the Seder
Filed under: A New Reality, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Life, Religion
The exodus to Seder night.
It’s not just a religious holiday here, it’s a national one, with surveys citing 90% of the Jewish population attending Seders, far higher than the rate of religious observance in the country.
The country has been in overdrive this whole week, with households driving themselves crazy cleaning and shopping for the holiday which begins Friday night. We thought we would beat the rush and arrived at our local Rami Levy supermarket at 8 am Wednesday morning. And while there weren’t lines out the door, it was clear that we weren’t as smart as we thought, as the parking lot and the shopping aisles were pretty full, but not in a manic mode.
Since we’re having our Seder with our daughter’s future in-laws, we didn’t have an overflowing shopping cart, and the whole ordeal was pretty civilized. In the checkout line which was getting longer by the minute, the cashier took a breath between customers and said with a shake of her head, “It’s going to be like this until midnight.”
I’m sure it was, and it only got worse the next day. But come Friday afternoon, an aura of serenity will descend on the country, and families will start getting dressed for the big night of the year. And around 6 pm, there will be a different kind of exodus as cars fill the nation’s highways bringing families and friends together for their Seder. It’s one of those times where living here feels just about right.
Turning lemons into lemonade in Pe’ekin
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Profiles, Travel
Margalit Zanati on the porch of her house in Pe'ekin.
She’s the caretaker of the ancient synagogue in Pe’ekin which dates back to the time of the Second Temple period (and which is featured on the back of the hundred shekel note). And according to Zanini, Pe’ekin is the only place in Israel where Jews have lived constantly throughout the period of the Diaspora.
That presence was threatened in 1936 when Arab riots forced the Jews of Pe’ekin to leave. One of the only families that returned was Zanati’s parents, and after they died, Zanini, who never married, took it upon herself to keep the Jewish presence alive in the village of 5,000.
Margalit showing a visitor some of the photos and artifacts at the visitor's center.
While the modern, villa-filled town of Peki’in Hahadasha was established in 1955 and boast modern villas and a comfortable suburban life, old Pe’ekin looks pretty much like it did a century ago.
Parking on the side of one of the village’s narrow streets, we started walking around, following not informative signs indicating points of tourist interest. Deciding to take a turn off the main road, we suddenly saw a big Jewish star on an old building, and a small sign explaining that it was the Zanati house. Opposite it was the synagogue.
An elderly woman emerged from the second floor of the ramshackle house, carrying a bucket and started walking down the stairs. I asked her if she knew whether the Jewish family in Pe’ekin was home, and she said gruffly, “I’m the Jewish family.”
A fraction of the lemon bounty.
Margalit took us around the to the corner to the visitor’s center – a big open room with lots of artifacts and photos from the previous decades, including many of her parents with some of Israel’s founding fathers.
Margalit began to warm to us, and asked if we wanted to see the film about the family and the house in the show room next door. After helping her get the DVD and projector to work, we enjoyed the film, and learned that Margalit also gives musical performances to visitors and school kids who come to the home for arranged visits.
Afterwards we walked into a courtyard, which was home to an immense lemon tree, brimming with ripe lemons. “That’s why I have this bucket,” she said, and started picking the low-lying fruit. Realizing it would take her hours on end, we decided to pitch in, and before I knew it, I was on the top rung of a 25-foot ladder pitching huge lemons down into the buckets below.
An hour later, we climbed up to Margalit’s humble living quarters for some tea with nana. It was an afternoon that we received surely more than we bargained for, including a huge bag of lemons.
Nostalgia Sunday – Old fashioned cleaning
Filed under: General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture
We are in a cleaning frenzy! Not just me. The whole country is getting scrubbed fresh and ready for Passover.
In days gone by, the lady of the house — unsurprisingly, most house-cleaning in Israel was and is done by women — would “raise the house”, literally upending all furniture and more or less flooding the house so as to do a proper sponja.
Ah, sponja! How to explain the concept? To the outside observer, doing sponja may seem like taking a sopping wet rag, flinging it over a sponjador — a giant squeegee on a stick — and then flinging it madly back and forth across the endless surface of 20 cm by 20 cm balatot.
But no. Doing a proper sponja is what separates the men from the boys — surprisingly, many Israeli men take great pride in their sponja technique — knowing just how much to wring out the rag on the first pass, how to wrap it around the squeegee so that it doesn’t fall off, and of course, how to wipe the floor on the last pass so as to leave no streaks.
Sponja is so much a part of being Israeli that no one has ever thought seriously to change this system, generally considered the only way to get floors really clean, far superior to new-fangled methods like mops, Swiffers and Dyson vacuum cleaners (now advertising heavily in time for the holiday).
Of course, all of this would be meaningless without the holiest of holy waters, the apex of all that is clean, that which burns your nasal passages and lungs, and leaves you feeling that you’ve truly sacrificed yourself on the altar of hygiene: economica, known to the outside world as bleach.
Economica is a cult – either you’re in or you’re out. If you’re in, you can’t go to bed at night without a few splashes in the sink, the tub, the shower, the whatever — just to kill off the germs that must be lurking there. And if you’re out, you think your spouse is crazy. But I’m not. Really. Just a few more splashes. Please.
Before cream cleansers, bathroom cleanser was commonly known as cleaning sand — and with good reason, too. Not only did it leave scratch up ceramic finishes on bathtubs and sinks, it also left one’s hands red and raw, or truly clean, as pain and cleanliness must go hand in hand.
Before there was liquid dish soap, there was the old fashioned dish soap paste with the consistency — and bouquet — of axle grease. A few handfuls would be glopped into a dish and cut with water to make it usable. Later on, special dispenser were invented to accommodate this unwieldy activity. And bizarrely enough, some people still prefer the paste to the liquid, out of a feeling that it has more cleaning action.
A small consumer awareness note: Those people are apparently right! A quick look at a Ministry of Finance chart on cleaning products shows that the paste has 20% active ingredients while most liquids contain between 18-24% active ingredient. I bear a personal grudge against Palmolive, which used to contain 36% active ingredient and now contains a mere 18%.
Back to cleaning! Before Persil, before Tide, before even Sano, there was Soad (or Sod, as it was written then). For some reason, in Israel it is the laundry soaps that traditionally had the best mascots: the Textil Shampo boy, the Or boy and my personal favorite, the Ama lady. As I’ve written before, she owes a great deal to Betty Boop, and in fact, could be Betty Boop — if Betty Boop were born in Poland, came over to pre-State Israel in the 1930s, got married and lived in Givatayim.
And if she did live out that life, don’t you think she’d be in the midst of “raising the house” right now?! Enough dilly-dallying! Back to cleaning! Pessach is almost here!
Picture of sponja is from Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Ama and Or images courtesy of the wonderful and highly recommended Nostal.co.il
Nostalgia Sunday – Friedel Stern exhibition
Filed under: Art, design, education, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, News, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Profiles, Travel
Some images, if you grow up with them, are imprinted in your brain. So it was with me and cartoonist Friedel Stern’s In Short, Israel. I loved to turn the pages of the small square orange-bound book, look at the pictures and try to understand Stern’s humorous take on 1950s / early 60s Israel. As I grew older and got to know Israel and Israelis better, I understood that many of her illustrations were a loving rebuke, made by a yekke gentlewoman, of the rough and tumble society in which she lived, worked and thrived.
I loved her depictions of Israelis: the hairy sabra, the men in undershirts and sandals, kibbutz women in headscarves and shirtsleeves, prim and proper German-Jewish immigrants wearing jackets in the height of summer heat. And I loved the book, which was English on one side, Hebrew on the other, and which I donated some years ago to the Israeli Cartoon Museum in Holon. It was nice to see a copy (not mine) of “In Short, Israel” under glass at the Museum’s opening of a Friedel retrospective but I felt a bit wistful at not being able to reach out, re-read it and re-live the old memories. But that is how it goes with historical artifacts, even those of contemporary history.
At the exhibit, which runs through June 23rd, I did learn more about Friedel Stern herself. She was born in Liepzig, Germany in 1917 and immigrated to Palestine in 1936. During World War II she was one of many who volunteered to serve in the British army, serving alongside a group of young women who later on went on to prominence in the new State of Israel: actress Hannah Meron, former diplomats and politicians Esther Herlitz and Tamar Eshel, political wives Sonia Peres and Leah Rabin, Cafe Tamar proprietor Sarah Stern and many others. According an article in The Jerusalem Post, her caricatures were often used to camouflage dispatches.
Stern studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts, and began her career as a caricaturist in the ‘50s, working at leading newspapers and magazines such as Davar and Dvar Hashavua, LaIsha and Bamahane signed with her trademark signature and a small star (Stern means star in German), focusing on social issues and humorous portrayals of daily life.
“In her heyday as a journalist, Friedel Stern would dress up as different characters – a cleaning lady, a bus conductor, and once even as a man – to provide her readers with amusing reports about her experiences,” writes Yirmi Pinkus in the museum catalogue. “[Her] articles recounted her experiences as a fictitious American tourist and were, of course, accompanied by original caricatures. Friedel strolled through the ‘Persian [Bahai] Gardens’ in Haifa, she was impressed by the dining room in Kibbutz Gesher Haziv, she inspected souvenirs in the Old City in Jerusalem, and was eventually dropped a heavy hint to tip the tour guide.”
She also illustrated books, posters, brochures and was a lecturer at the Department of Graphic Design at Bezalel. From 1944 onwards, she exhibited and participated in exhibitions of both painting and caricature. Her works were presented in galleries and museums in Israel and abroad. She received many awards, including, in 1999, a lifetime achievement award in the field of caricature and painting by the Council of Women’s Organizations in Israel.
Friedel Stern died in October 2006, only weeks before her 90th birthday. According to an article about the new exhibit in Haaretz, “In her will, Stern, the only woman among the group of cartoonists active in Israel during the state’s first decades, bequeathed all her works to the Cartoon Museum. A few months ago, after prolonged legal proceedings, the approximately 10,000 drawings she left finally arrived at the museum’s archive in Holon.
“Before her death, Stern, who had no children, also saw to the establishment of a foundation in her name, which organizes a biannual competition for humorous cartoons, with a prize of NIS 10,000 for amateurs and NIS 25,000 for professionals. A ‘control freak,’ according to people who knew her, Stern stipulated that works of hers be displayed alongside the works in the competition. And indeed this week at the Cartoon Museum they acceded to her wishes, and hung works by Friedel along with dozens of entries in the latest competition.”
Haaretz noted with disappointment that the small size of the Friedel show — and I must agree. It was nice to see some unfamiliar works but I would have welcomed the chance to see a few more pages from In Short, Israel.
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