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Nostalgia Sunday – Little Israel

Maybe it’s because cable TV has been running “Pleasantville”, or maybe it’s because I was going through a bunch of old stuff. Suddenly, I was seized with a desire to visit the Israel we once pictured in our mind’s eye…

(For full-sized version click here).

After school maybe do some shopping…
(For full-sized version click here).

Or go to the movies…

(For full-sized version click here).

And maybe even take a drive!

(For full-sized version click here).

Go ahead, don’t be shy! Print, cut out and glue your own Little Israel.

Nostalgia Sunday

Sometimes it’s the dog days of summer, as you drift or, preferably, drive in a comfortably air-conditioned car, through the familiar streets of your neighborhood that you pay more attention to where you are and where you’re going.

At least that’s what seems to have happened to a friend and neighbor of mine, Kenny Borsykowsky, who recently spent time putting together a fabulous document of historical photos and descriptions of our Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot. Most famously home to the early Israeli writer S.Y. Agnon, the Talpiot of yesteryear was, in essence, a Jerusalem suburb, as well as an outpost of sorts, guarding the border with Jordan. And for the residents, life was full of challenges. The bus, tells Kenny through an Agnon quote from The Fire and The Trees, came four times a day.

“And for the bus to come and go as scheduled 4 times a day. And what would [the driver] do if he had to consult with the neighbors? Indeed there was no telephone. He would take the shofar, climb onto the roof of his house and blow it, the neighbors would hear and come…”

That was later in the settlement of the area. Beforehand, in the 1900s, the entire area was a cluster of army bases and today’s Beitar Street was once a landing strip. Other points of interest? The Orthodox synagogue, commonly known as S.Y. Agnon, and where I have been attending one of the many daily minyanim in order to say kaddish for my father — more on that later — was named for Agnon, one of the first residents of the area. He was born in Galicia, moved to Jaffa in 1908, then to Berlin and back to Palestine in 1924, when he settled in Talpiot. He loved the neighborhood, as he wrote in The Sign:

“I stood among the little trees, all surrounded by gardens…Since I love the small houses and the refreshing gardens, I will tell their story.”

In The Sign he tells of a young veterinarian who wants to build his home in Talpiot, overlooking the desert with the Dead Sea in the distance:

“Descending from his donkey, he began hiking and walking, making his way among thorns and boulders, pondering in thought: ‘Imagine if I could make this place my home, together with my wife and children! But living here was impossible, far from town with neither any sign of settlement nor a living soul around, except for birds and insects.”

Clearly, those times have long passed, as witnessed by the many residents, long lines of traffic in the morning hours and Egged buses passing through all day long. And Agnon got to witness his neighborhood’s changing facade as well, as witnessed by his decision to build the entrance of his own home away from the street, in order to reduce the noise entering his own home. It was from his home library that he worked, writing his books as well as the Prayer for the State of Israel, and he even convinced the city to make his street one-way (which it is to this day) to cut down on traffic and post a sign stating, “Please keep quiet: Writer at work!”

If only I could convince them to do the same for me…

Saving a stitch in time

I’ve never felt the need to own a watch – between cell phones, car clocks and sun dials, I’ve pretty much got it covered. But some people are more enamored with time – and time pieces. People like Sir David Lionel Salomons, a former mayor of London in the 1800s, who amassed one of the most valuable collection of ornate clocks and accessories in the world.

Sir David’s daughter, Vera Bryce Salomons, donated the collection to the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem in 1974, the same year, she endowed the museum with funds to enable it to open.

The clock collection, including over 55 clocks by influential 18th-century French clockmaker Abraham Louis Breguet, featured the ‘Marie Antoinette.’ Commissioned, according to legend, for the French queen by a lover, the clock was considered the crown jewel of Breguet’s career and the highlight of the Salamons exhibit.

The collection became so popular that the staid museum near the President’s residence in Talbieh became known as the ‘Clock Museum.’

All that changed on April 15, 1983, when the biggest robbery in Israel’s history at that time took place. Overnight, between the museum’s closing on Friday night and Shabbat morning, thieves pried open the bars on a small window, climbed into the building and drove away with over 100 items from the clock collection, including the Marie Antoinette; another priceless Breguet table clock from 1819 known as the ‘Sympathique,’ which ran on a system in which a watch placed in a recess of the clock was automatically set and reset; and an 11 cm.-long, gold “pistol clock” created at the beginning of the 19th century in France.

Ever since the burglary, not a word has been heard or sight seen of the missing priceless clocks. That’s what makes tonight reopening of the exhibit ‘The Mystery of Lost Time’ – with almost all of the clocks restored and returned to their home even more remarkable.

Read the whole story on your own time here.

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Nostalgia Sunday – On the street where you lived…

Today I visited all the houses where I’ve ever lived in Israel. Almost — I’ll get to that in a minute. Thanks to Zoomap.co.il, which has been photographing the city streets and each and every building in Israel, you too can take a look at your old digs and check up on how badly the place has continued to deteriorate since you yourself lived under its leaky roof.

For example, the apartment building near trendy Sheinkin Streeet in Tel Aviv where I don’t live anymore. Don’t be put off by the disgusting facade. Location is everything.

And then the place in glorious north Tel Aviv, off HaYarkon Park, where I moved to escape trendiness and find parking.

And the place after that — not a great apartment — but still right on the park.

I started to get hooked on finding a picture of every place I’d ever lived here. That’s when I found out that Zoomap also has its flaws: this is a picture of the building in front of the Jerusalem building where my family lived in 1973-4. You can see our building peeking out on the left-hand side. Apparently the Zoomap folk were too tuckered out to walk up the hill to take pictures of the cul-de-sac.

But I got back on track with this picture of my grandmother’s old apartment which was Party Central for several years in the early 80s.

I could not find an address for the Hadassah Youth Center on Mt. Scopus and so could not do a search for a picture — another failing of Zoomap is that, like GPS, it doesn’t recognize institutions, only addresses — but I’m pretty sure this is the immigrant absorption center in Dimona where Young Judaea parked us for a few months om 1979. Again, the dowdy appearance is deceiving; the Black Hebrews were also living there at the time, which made it kind of cool.

And this is where I live now! Back to Jerusalem, just up the street from grandma’s old apartment. Life is funny.

Google Earth doesn’t get down to building resolution for Israel so use Zoomap to take a trip down memory lane. Or purchase some real estate. It’s part of Bezeq’s 144 directory assistance site which is now translated into English. Happy trails!

Nostalgia Sunday – Asimonim

Nostalgia is defined as “longing for something past” and the asimon, or Israeli telephone token, was a beautiful object for which I’m quite nostalgic. Not only did asimonim have a practical function — to make calls from public phones — they were attractively decorated with the image of a phone dial and had a hole in the middle, so you could string them on a leather thong to wear around your neck. Or, as I did, impaled on a large safety pin and hooked onto a belt loop. All very punk.

And here’s something I’m not at all nostalgic for: scrounging around desperately for an asimon, either because you miscalculated the length of your call, or — in most cases — because the public phone decided to eat your last precious token. This after having waited in line for 45 minutes to make the call.

I thought perhaps it was just me imagining conspiracy theories but it turns out that there actually was a national shortage of telephone tokens! This was between 1973 and the post-Yom Kippur War era, when asimon consumption shot way up, and 1981, when the Ministry of Communications found a way to manufacture asimonim locally instead of farming out the work to our friends at Vereinigte Deutsche Metallwerke AG (VDM). (Rumor had long had it that the arrangement with VDM was part of a reparations deal closed between the Israeli and German governments. Now, there’s a conspiracy theory to mull over).

In any case, by the time 1984 rolled around and the Ministry of Communications privatized Bezeq, there were asimonim aplenty and the black market in phone tokens (yes, there was one) had all but shut down. On the other hand, there was a wave of phone box break-ins. To stop the madness, Bezeq introduced the phone card in 1990, and again, war gave the new technology an unexpected boost in 1991 when the first Gulf War created new demand for international phone calls — mostly placed by those of us in sealed rooms trying to find out from relatives and friends abroad what CNN was reporting and which way the SCUDS were heading.

According to an excellent online article (in Hebrew) by Moshe Lipner, “Israel’s Telephone Tokens“, at their peak, there were 13,000 token telephone boxes around Israel. By 1999, these had been replaced by 22,000 Telecard phone boxes. These can still be found, as can phone cards, but their presence has declined considerably with the massive public switchover to cell phone technology — and who can blame the public for wresting itself out from under Bezeq’s monolithic thumb?

Meanwhile the modest little asimon has become a collector’s item on Ebay and an objet d’art. Given my penchant for wearing asimonim, I think I may need to get a pair of these:

Nostalgia Sunday – July 4th 1976

The Bicentennial Celebration of 1976 was a very big event and the entire USA was decked out in red, white and blue. We — my father sisters and I — instead got a plane on July 3rd and flew to Israel. It had been a rough year, with my mother’s death in early November, and somehow coming to Israel to be with family and friends was a comfort. Israel being Israel, we arrived to the latest national crisis: the hostage situation in Entebbe.

The next morning, we were awakened to the news that the hostages had been rescued. Israel’s reaction was euphoric — not since 1967 had there been so stunning a win! — although everyone knew that the victory was bittersweet. Four hostages and IDF Commander Yonatan Netanyahu were killed. Nonetheless, the raid was a tour de force of Israeli think-on-your-feet strategy and bravado in the face of the cartoonishly evil dictator Idi Amin Dada.

That same morning, I went down to Jerusalem’s Ben-Yehuda Street with my dad and he bought this T-shirt for me.

The text balloon says, “Kol ha-kavod le-Zahal” or “All respect due to the IDF” — probably the last thing Amin was thinking of saying at that moment. The shirt was doubly humorous for having made new use of the most hackneyed of Israeli cliches about the military. As far as we were concerned, it was “Kol ha-Kavod to Lord Kitsch” which had somehow managed to speedily produce the T-shirts in a matter of hours.

And then, the next day, Miss Israel, Rina (Messinger) Mor, was crowned Miss Universe!

It was a double-coup for the Jewish State and its people were ecstatic. We were riding a wave of popularity on the international scene, it was felt. This was only reinforced by Israel’s Eurovision wins in 1977 and 1978. Surely we were becoming a nation like all others, with beauty queens and pop stars, a nation able to vanquish its enemies to the approval of the international community and, like anybody else, glorify those victories in made-for-TV movies. It seemed possible. But those were more innocent times.

Rioting in Jerusalem? All is normal

Summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the streets. Apologies to Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, but the streets of Jerusalem on these last few weekends have not seen much joyous dancing.

The fight between the haredim of Jerusalem and its secular residents (and secular mayor Nir Barkat) is over whether a parking lot near the Old City can be opened on Shabbat to accomodate the throngs of visiting tourists, both local and international.

A compromise involving using a private parking lot instead of a municipal lot was offered, and supposedly accepted, but someone forgot to tell the haredim. There have been clashes the last few Saturdays between haredi protestors and the police, with the protestors demanding that the private parking lot be closed on Shabbat, stating it’s a violation of the status quo in the city – the delicate fine line in the power struggle between the secular and observant Jews of Jerusalem.

However, according to Matt Rees, one of my favorite authors and a good friend, the action on the street is actually a good thing.
Writing in the Global Post, Rees states that if the big item on Israelis’ agenda is an open parking lot on Shabbat, then maybe things aren’t so bad here.

Ultra-orthodox Jews have been rioting the last few weeks against a parking lot the municipality wants to leave open during the Jewish Sabbath, leading to dozens of arrests and quite a few moderate to serious injuries. Secular activists have held protests in favor of free garaging for those who defy God by driving on Saturday.

All of which is a sign of good times in Israel.

Here’s why: It shows that Israelis think there’s nothing worse to worry about.
When I first came to Jerusalem in 1996, the ultra-Orthodox, or “Haredim” as they’re known here (it means “those who quake,” as in quaking before the wrathful God of the Jewish Bible) used to riot over a major thoroughfare that ran through one of their neighborhoods. They wanted Bar-Ilan Street closed between sundown Friday and the onset of Saturday night.

And then, Rees continued, the Intifada started. Since then it’s been one Intifada after the other, with terror, suicide bombings and security fences to be built. Who had time to protest?

But in comparison to the intifada, these are easy times for Israel. Long may the Sabbath be a time for rioting.

One of the proverbs I learned when first coming to Israel was one that said – it’s a good thing there’s an Israeli-Arab conflict. Otherwise, we Jews would be at each other’s throat. These days, it seems like we have the worst of both worlds.

Our first NBA pick

You may have read about it already, but I need to express my excitement about Omri Casspi becoming the first Israeli player to be selected in the first round of the NBA draft. Yes, it’s not the final, final stage in this nail-biting process, but hey, it’s the NBA and he’s Israeli and it’s looking pretty good.

In case you didn’t know, Casspi is 6′9″, 20, and a forward for Maccabi Tel Aviv. He was selected 23rd overall by the Sacramento Kings, and as Ha’aretz noted, “is the focus of a national obsession with the idea of an Israeli making it into the NBA, in which some 20 percent of the players are foreigners.”

The country’s obsession should have been requited ten years ago when Oded Katash had a two-year contract with the New York Knicks — the New York Knicks! — but lost his marbles during the 1999 player lockout. I know, insane.

There have been others since; Doron Shefer, Lior Eliyahu and Yotam Halperin, all drafted, all in the second round. But they didn’t make it. Casspi, on the other hand, is in. Will he get a contract? Will he get off the bench? Hard to say. But hey. Very hopeful.

According to the New York Jewish Week, Casspi’s selection also smacks of a coexistence bid, natch, as the King’s co-owners, Joe and Gavin Maloof, are popular Sacramento businessmen and philanthropists who come from a Lebanese Arab family. That appears to be a first.

So what’ve we got? An Israeli basketball player signed to the NBA, and a coexistence play in progress. All good signs.

Cafe Birnbaum

Tel Aviv is a city with many a cafe, and not all of them have appeared in the Aroma/Cafe Hillel stream of the last ten years. One of the best-loved, and with mighty tasty grub, is Cafe Birnbaum, owned the Birnbaum sisters, Penina and Sima. They took over from their father who ran the space as a bakery for many years, and turned it into a vegetarian cafe, although that term doesn’t really do it justice.

The retro front window tells newcomers that Cafe Birnbaum has been in existence since 1962, but the interior of Birnbaum’s is white, light and airy, and bustling with the activity of Penina and Sima, both with short gray hair and sharp, Tel Aviv-y black pants, shirts and red aprons. Penina runs around with a cigarette in hand, although there is a clear No Smoking sign, and the food is vegetarian and pointedly meat-less, although not crunchy granola, and neither is the crowd. There’s no menu; it’s grab a plate and fill up with as many of the fresh vegetable and grain salads as you can fit on your thick white diner dish. For the second course, you can choose from a selection of vegetable pies and bean and grain dishes, which Penina will warm for you in the oven (although I ate my mine room temp; it was a hot day). And that’s all for NIS 45. Drinks are extra, as are the delectable-looking desserts, which included a plummy fruitcake and sweet noodle kugel last Thursday.

Once you’ve settled in with your very tasty choices, it’s time to sit back and look around, while enjoying eating. Birnbaum’s is always busy, and it’s apparent, even on a first visit or if you haven’t been there for a while, that it’s a well-loved restaurant. The walls — and ceiling — are covered with art and some poetry, much of it by well-known Israeli artists such as Menashe Kadishman and Motty Golan who created pieces of and for the sisters.

Cafe Birnbaum, 31 Nachalat Binyamin

Nostalgia Sunday – Pop Star

Do Israelis know from the Jackson-5? Puh-leez! This is the country whose government banned the Beatles from performing in the early Sixties on the grounds that they were a degenerate influence on the nation’s youth. But they did know Michael Jackson. In the mid-Seventies, with the advent of third radio broadcaster Reshet Gimmel, which played pop music, and pirate radio station The Voice of Peace, Israelis did become exposed to the international pop music. “Maariv LaNoar”, a weekly magazine for young people, reinvented itself as the local version of “Tiger Beat” with covers like this one:

Israelis tended (and still tend) to be exposed to Euro-pop, rather than good old American rock and soul but Michael Jackson was a massive musical crossover artist, with huge cultural influence all over the Middle East. Once “Thriller” hit, every country had their own ringleted version of Michael Jackson. Israel too*.

His Pied Piper persona already in full-swing, Michael Jackson held particular appeal for the younger set (by this I mean people who are now in their late Thirties) and in the mid Eighties you couldn’t go to any wedding or bar mitzva without the kids breaking out into song: “Triller! Tee lai lai… la lee la la la la la la la la la la la la… Triller! Tee lai lai…” and so on, ad infinitum.

But by the late Eighties, Israel’s media had fallen into lock-step with its international counterparts and stories about Jackson — whom “Spy” magazine once described as “the American version of Prince Ludwig of Bavaria” — focused on the weirdness.

And then, in 1992, speculation began that he was coming to perform in Israel. And he did in 1993.

During the past decade, new albums like “History”, regularly made the mainstream Israeli press, like this cover of Yediot Aharonot’s weekend supplement from 2002 of Jackson pulling his famous crotch-grab move. Famous but not original; the move was copped from Prince-produced Minneapolis band The Time, who doubtless stole the move from some other uncredited act.

Now Michael Jackson is dead and, as a good friend posted the other day on Facebook, in-between all the big hits, “the airwaves are filled with a whole ouevre of repetitive music that we fortunately never had to listen to.” Because our memories are not of Euro-perception post-”Bad” crap. We over-forties remember the J-5 hits, the Jacksons and, of course “Off The Wall” — little of which are being played here. Sadly, Israeli radio — whose knowledge of soul music is limited to the Blues Brothers movies parts 1 & 2 — is as usual, regurgitating only what it knows, not doing any research and depriving listeners of that truly joyous, wonderful music. Personally, I blame it on the boogie.

*Izhar Cohen, he of the Eurovision Europop mega-hit A-ba-ni-bi.

 

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  Israel is often seen as a place of conflict and strife. In reality there is much more: there's business and research; art and culture; community and family. At ISRAELITY, Israelis blog their daily thoughts, experiences and insights. It's the real Israel, not the media's Israel. It's people living ordinary lives in an extraordinary place.

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