The morning after
Filed under: General, Holidays, Immigrant Moments, Life
by Abby
I used to think it was weird that Israel’s Memorial Day and Independence Day are back-to-back. As the sun sets on Memorial Day, we go from eulogizing to dancing – in the same ceremony. The shift feels jarring.
But this year, I finally understood what Prime Minister Netanyahu referred to as “the unbreakable bond between Memorial Day and Independence Day.”
My husband and I visited Jerusalem’s Mt. Herzl, Israel’s national cemetery and its main military cemetery, on the morning of Yom Ha’atzmaut (Independence Day). The day before, it had been filled with somber families and politicians. The morning after, it was quiet. Bouquets and wreaths, memorial candles and black-beribboned Israeli flags adorned every one of the too-many graves.
The flowers were just starting to wilt. The plastic bags in which they’d come — imprinted with the words “Yehi Zachram Baruch,” “May their memory be a blessing”– overflowed the trash bins. Exactly how many stems, I wondered, did the government purchase and distribute at its 44 military cemeteries to lay at the graves of22,993 men and women killed in the line of defense? How much wax, how much blue-and-white cloth and black ribbon were needed to supply all the candles and flags?
Walking among the rows of tombstones, through the underground memorial to the 69 Dakar submarine sailors lost in 1968, and around the blue pool dedicated to the 140 sailors killed on the SS Erinpura in 1943, we saw that many were under 25 years old at the time they fell, and many were immigrants, like us.
We left Mt. Herzl and got on the light rail, where the mood changed abruptly. Instead of handing out fines, the conductors handed out lollipops and wished everyone a happy holiday. We then met up with our son, daughter-in-law and two little grandchildren for a traditional cookout amid throngs of Israeli families fanning the flames of their grills.
That’s when we understood the connection on a personal level. If not for all the brave men and women who sacrificed their future, we wouldn’t have a present to celebrate. They are the reason we were free to scamper around a Jerusalem park with our grandson and granddaughter on Independence Day, wiping their sticky faces from the residue of s’mores and listening with delight to their “Hebrish” toddler talk.
If Independence Day were separate from Memorial Day as it is in the US, the message might not be as obvious. I really get that now.
City non-planning
Filed under: design, education, Environment, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Politics
The Hursha event flyer
And then, a major scoop on why it is that the Hursha recycling area never happened. During a ‘heppening’ — Hebrew for a gathering, an event — that was taking place yesterday at the Hursha playground, sponsored by a local Jerusalem political and social action party, a municipality official taking part in the event told a friend that the reason the bins were never put in place is because the space wasn’t planned well, and there was no way the recycling trucks would ever be able to access the bins.
The Hursha, you see, is situated between two streets, Efrata and Korei Hadorot, accessed by what we call a simta, a kind of open alley or path that connects the two streets. The recycling space is at the front of the park, about midway up the simta, formally known as Barzilay Street, and therefore inaccessible to cars or trucks. It’s quite true, there is no way to access large recycling bins and clearly someone in the municipality made a big mistake when they poured the cement for this particular corner.
So that’s it. No cardboard or metal recycling corner for Talpiot, or not yet. And it seems doubtful that the city would post an apology sign, letting us know that they screwed up. Instead, the orange-painted area has become a default hangout space for parents and their toddling kids, until someone comes up with another, better idea.
The Voice of Israel has a French-Canadian accent
Filed under: A New Reality, Entertainment, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Music, Pop Culture
Kathleen Reiter, the winner of The Voice.
The 23-year-old Reiter is the daughter of Israelis who moved to Quebec before she was born. Deciding to make aliya last summer, the amateur singer auditioned for the maiden voyage of the show, which was popularized in the US last year.
The Israeli version turned out to be hugely popular and helped elevate the mentors – Shlomi Shabat, Aviv Gefen, Sarit Hadad and Rami Kleinstein – to even more of household names than they were before, and it exposed some seriously talented young singing sensations out there among the Israeli public.
“I don’t know what the future holds, but I know that this is an amazing opportunity for me and a great start to what will hopefully be a great life here in Israel,” Reiter said a week after her televised debut in January.
What happened afterwards may turn out to be one of the great aliya stories in Israeli history.
Here’s a clip of Reiter’s first single, which she sang last night at the finals – “Shout to You”.
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.
An Israeli short story
Filed under: General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life
Read this wonderful, Tel Aviv-based story by U.S. author Joan Leegant. Titled Displaced Persons, it traces the timelines of many different people in Israel, Ashkenaz, European types, Holocaust survivors, young Israelis looking to be anywhere but Israel, refugees from African countries, Americans finding themselves in Israel, and then touches on a myriad of issues sensitive to Israeli society. There’s the enduring pain of Holocaust survivors, the painful histories of African refugees and their seemingly resilient natures, the window on life in Israel, and more specifically, Tel Aviv. There’s the typical Israeli apartment home, cups of tea, motorcycles, walks on the beach, family dinners and a litany of familiar details that make this story all the more intimate.
It’s a window that’s been opening gradually for author Leegant, who has been dividing her time since 2007 between Boston and Tel Aviv, where she is the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University.
Sigalit takes out a tissue and wipes her eyes. She is constantly weepy. Her 88-year-old mother is hanging on in an old age home ten minutes from our building, which Sigalit visits for two hours every day when she’s not bringing her mother to her apartment for meals. “It’s not rebellion.” She stuffs the tissue into her pocket. “He really likes German culture. And how can I argue with him? Look at what they produced. Bach. Beethoven. Thomas Mann. Not everyone was Goering and Himmler.” She waves toward my window. “You want to hear the irony? Out there, Ben Yehuda Street? My mother says they used to call it Ben Yehudastrasse after the war. Little German-run shops, tea houses where people sat all day discussing Max Weber. It was schizophrenic. On the one hand, Germany was totally taboo—the first Israeli passports were marked as valid for any country in the world but there—but then they replicated the society as closely as they could.” She pulls herself out of her chair. “I should relax, right? The Germans have been paying for their history for decades; reparations practically built this country.” She goes to the door, puts her hand on the knob. “And all those earnest young volunteers who come on atonement missions: the most apologetic people on the planet.”
For more of Leegant’s work, go to her website, www.joanleegant.com.
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