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Going to the zoo

I’ve been waiting for the right moment to introduce my baby boys to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, and given that their ears perk up every time they hear a dog bark, bird chirp or see a bird cross their path, I figured the time had come. Enough with reading about animals and faking a tiger’s snarl; we had to actually see some live animals.

The wait was well worth it — as is the annual membership which varies for singles, couples, couples with one child, two children, etc. — as they were equally enthusiastic about all the animals we saw, from ducks and flamingos to meerkats and yes, a couple of tigers. They both were slightly flipped out by the goats who swarmed their stroller in the ‘pinat chai’ (petting zoo), one trying to grab the remnant of Lev’s cookie out of his small fist. But once the goats butted out, it was on to bigger thrills, like stroking a sheep and watching turtles crawl around their enclosure.

The choices of animals to visit seems endless on that first trip to the zoo — elephants! zebras! monkeys! And what I also liked is the coexistence effect of the place; on a Thursday morning, the place was pleasantly full with ultra Orthodox boys on a school trip, Arab elementary school children in their red sweater uniforms, also on a school trip, as well as Arab high schoolers and similarly-aged Jewish high school kids. And just to prove the zoo’s coexistence effect, all signs next to the animals’ enclosures are written in Hebrew, Arabic, English and, often, Yiddish.

30seczoo01.MP3We’re [all] going to the zoo…

Tel Aviv battle of the bands

It was an opening line that did not forebode well.

“You picked an interesting night. Almost all the entries are metal,” said Bryan Steiner, greeting me at the bar of the Barby club in Tel Aviv Sunday night.

Steiner was referring to the 16 musical acts which were set to perform two songs a piece in the hopes of going on to the Israel finals of the Global Battle of the Bands Challenge. Steiner, the head of Blue Sun Records, along with promoter Carmi Wurtman and Barby owner Shaul Mizrahi, organized Israel’s participation in the event for the first time.

Over a dozen qualifying heats have taken place in October and November throughout the country with scores of Israeli bands vying to head to the finals taking place on Wednesday. The Israeli champion then goes on to the world finals in London on December 13, competing against the finalists from 36 other countries, with the winner receiving an artist development package worth $100,000.

Along with Sderot-based musician and producer Avi Vaknin, and Ziv Goland, a musical arranger for Dana International, I was asked to be one of the three judges for the event. However, unlike the high-profile American Idol model of in-your-face judging, we were allotted comfortable back-of-the-room tables and a scorecard to rate the entries from 1-20 and to provide written constructive criticism.

Battle of the bands have taken place for as long as there have been rock groups. Even in the mid-1960s, local high school bands would perform against each other at sock hops and on TV talent shows. One of the highlights of my college education in the late 1970s in Boston was attending the annual Rock & Roll Rumble held at the venerable punk club The Rat, where young hopefuls would wield “guitars like switchblades” in order to lay claim to the title of Beantown’s best band.

Turns out that not much has changed in 30 years. Despite the digital age of downloads and the gradual disappearance of CDs, the fading on the radio of guitar-based rock & roll in favor of studio wizardry hip hop, pop and dance music, and music in general receding as a number one priority among the social network-crazed youth culture, there’s still a lot of guitar slingers out there – of all ages.

The Barby was swarming with a mostly rambunctious teen audience – many of them bused in from Modi’in, where a good number of the competing acts hailed. The high school-aged entries, which made more than half of the 16 contestants stood in contrast to the half-dozen or so ‘older’ bands of adults, including one bass player who was even older than me, and a singer-songwriter, Yasmine Ariel who was in an advanced stage of pregnancy.

According to Steiner, amateur and professional musicians were eligible to sign up for the Challenge, with the only requirements being the ‘bands’ consist of two to eight members, all the music is live with no playbacks, and the songs are original compositions and not cover versions.

Regretting the fact I neglected to bring ear plugs, I took my seat, ready to face Steiner’s prognosis of a head banging evening. And indeed, there were a good number of acts – like Rockweiler (guess their genre) and Behind the Sun that looked and sounded like they learned everything about music in the back seat of Wayne and Garth’s car in Wayne’s World. Long hair flying in circular motions to the thunderous beats, they were parodies of a genre invented to be a parody.

Yet, there was something fresh and innocent about it nonetheless, as if despite the years of watching music videos and playing RockBand to get their moves just right, these kids were feeling music’s primal power and creating their own magic, no matter how derivative.

A big revelation for me was how musically tight and well-rehearsed every band was – this was no ‘hey, let’s enter the competition and write a song’ operation. While the lineup was male-dominant, women were represented by two high school bands featuring female singers of the Pat Benatar variety, a third with an incredible 16-year-old female lead guitarist, and the aforementioned Yasmine.

Particularly eye-opening were the school-age musicians, who must have been playing since they were kids and waiting for this day. It was a little sad that they’ve had to latch on to the music that their parents grew up with and many of their moves and riffs are mechanical regurgitations, but it was uplifting to see that another generation has caught the rock and roll bug.

When each band played, some singing in English some in Hebrew, its fans stormed to the front of the stage holding signs, pogo dancing and moshing in a show of solidarity. The audience also received scorecards, and like on American Idol, it was their vote, not the judges which ultimately determined the winner.

My top pick was a young four-piece band called Hageveret Harishona who performed sparkling guitar power pop with precision three-part harmonies . But chosen by the majority and headed to the finals on Wednesday is Spitfire 07, one of the female-led Modi’in high school bands. They were a ‘great for a high school band’ entry, and I gave them high marks for their spunky, arena rock performance and stage presence, while citing their lack of originality.

But they were unsurprisingly the audience favorites, with singer Meit Botton, dressed in Joan Jett black and reaching all the vocal shredding high notes, darting around the stage in various ‘rock chick’ poses.

While it’s unlikely they’ll be headed to London for the international finals, you can be sure the members of Spitfire 07 will keep their victory on Sunday night close to them for the rest of their lives. Even though there’s nothing new under the sun, rock & roll is still alive in Tel Aviv.

The week that was

The pace of news events developing and exploding into headlines is always seemingly propelled by steroids here in Israel. There’s never a minute to rest, and the news addiction that most of the public suffers from isn’t helped any by half hour radio bulletins, that annoying beep beep beep of the hourly news reports and nightly hour-long TV newscasts that are holy in some households.

But even veteran observers are hard pressed to remember a week of news events – aside from wars and intifadas – that rolled in like a tsunami, pushing the previous one off the front page with an ease that is creepy and disconcerting.

First up at the beginning of the week was the disclosure that police had arrested an American immigrant – Yaakov Teitel – a resident of a West Bank outpost on suspicion of murdering two Palestinians in 1997 and carrying out a string of previously unsolved hate attacks against other targets, including planting a pipe bomb outside the home of prominent left-wing Israeli professor Zeev Sternhall which injured him, and sending a bomb package to a family of messianic Jews from Ariel, seriously wounding their 15-year-old son.

This was huge news and the media covered it from every angle, from settlements spawning extremism to questioning whether the Law of Return which enables all Jews to immigrate to Israel should be reconsidered, or at least more stringent.

But no sooner had we started to digest this horrific news, Israelis were presented with something even more uncomprehensible the next day. The police announced they had caught the suspect in the brutal murder of six members of a Russian immigrant family in Rishon Lezion last month. It was considered the worst murder case in Israel’s history, with many pundits speculating that it involved the Russian mafia and a hired killer.

However, police said that the suspect, Damian Karlik, 38, who was arrested with his wife, parents and two other female relatives, killed the Oshrenko family because he had been fired as a waiter a couple months earlier from the family’s restaurant.

Dmitry Oshrenko fired Karlik, who was headwaiter at the Oshrenkos’ high-end restaurant Premier, after accusing him of stealing a bottle of vodka. Karlik said he felt humiliated and began to nurture his hatred for his former boss. Expressing no remorse at the murders, which included two young children, Krilik allegedly bragged to the police that he was a “bad motherfu**er.”

Disoriented at the front pages of our newspapers being turned into True Crimes magazine, we felt things returning to ‘normal’ yesterday with the disclosure of a dramatic high seas capture by Israeli naval commandos off the coast of Cyprus of the “Francop”, an Antigua-flagged freighter packed with 3,000 Iranian rockets and shells headed for Hizbullah in Lebanon.
Related

If it had achieved reaching its destination, the shipment would have provided Hizbullah with almost the entire rocket arsenal they unleashed against Israel in the 2006 Second Lebanon War.

Israeli sources say the shipment violates not only the UN Security Council resolutions from the 2006 war, but also those that forbid Iran from engaging in any arms exports. More importantly, it shows how Iran is attempting to incite the region, coming a day after Hamas in Gaza tested an Iranian-supplied rocket that has a range to reach Tel Aviv.

But hey, these are headlines that we’re familiar with -Iran, rockets, terror. However, by this morning, I found myself yearning for one of those days when the worst thing that could happen was The York Yankees winning the World Series, or narrow-minded citizens from my home state of Maine repealing same sex marriages. Both of those items are indeed reflections of a sorry state of affairs, but I’ll take them over the world gone crazy pace of news events we’ve had to put up with this week here in Israel.

Bayit banamal

I’m not the first to write about Tel Aviv’s namal, the refurbished port/boardwalk at the northern end of the city. And I must confess a ‘hubati’ (read below) love for strolling along its wooden planks, hillocked in some places to encourage kids on scooters, bikes and skateboards, and with just the right kind of cafes and restaurants along its length. (Although, as my mother pointed out recently, there are not enough benches for just sitting and looking at the sea.)

(’Hubatim’ or a ‘hubati’ — pronounced cho-BA-tim — is someone or those from Holon/Bat Yam. It’s a tongue-in-cheek/somewhat derogatory term for the Tel Aviv version of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, those who don’t actually live in Tel Aviv, but come in from the outskirts to enjoy ‘the big city.’ Another TLV friend of mine has a kindly term for those of us who don’t live in the Big Orange, ‘ambassadors and diplomats.’)

This isn’t an entry about hubatim, however, rather about a societal development that I noticed at the namal. Sure, it’s got the shopping, the restaurants, the event halls and bars. But during the day, besides the ‘ambassadors and diplomats’ strolling along the boardwalk, as well as the tourists and unexplained working-age people who are hanging out rather than working — btw, they must be freelancers — there are many, many moms with babies, pushing strollers and carrying babes in slings. Sure, it’s a nice place to stroll when you’ve got a kvetchy ankle-biter. And the Israeli commercial network is clearly starting to feed into that trend, with a Steimatzky’s for kids, a Shilav (of course), including a lovely playground outside the store, and Dyada, a kind of club for babies and their parents.

It’s all quite baby-friendly, which is a helpful thing when you’re trying to negotiate the real world from the vantage point of a double stroller loaded with two one-year-olds. Then again, all they really wanted to do was crawl after the seagulls.

Photo credit: Debbie Zimelman

Anka ticket angst

Israel is back on the rock concert map. We’ve seen some truly big names of late: Madonna, Leonard Cohen, Paul McCartney. But there have also been some visits by musicians slightly lower down on the food chain. A few months ago, it was Gilbert O’Sullivan, best known for the saccharine pop ditty Alone Again Naturally. And now it’s…Paul Anka.

I shouldn’t be so gloomy. A lot of people are big fans of the Canadian-born Anka. He has two shows scheduled during his tour of Israel. The 68-year-old contemporary of the Beatles (ouch, that’s a little hard to say in the same sentence) had a string of hits in the 1960s and by the end of that decade had sold more than 100 million records.

He’s been in the news again lately when it was revealed that he would receive half of the songwriting royalties for Michael Jackson’s new song, “This is It.”

I even thought it might be fun to attend his upcoming mid-November concert in Tel Aviv. But the prices, ranging from NIS 340 to NIS 1,000 ($92-$271), set me back in my chair: that’s an amount I usually tuck away for last minute emergencies like leaking roofs and car repair.

Madonna, McCartney and Cohen also had ticket prices in the same ballpark. One more lucid reminder that we’re not in the heartland of America where you can see a top performer for under $10. I have the ticket stubs to prove it. Pink Floyd: $8.75. Queen: $9.00.

Silly me. Like Anka, I was stuck in the 60s and 70s myself. Concert prices around the world today rival what we pay in Israel. Those ten-buck tickets have gone the way of the electric typewriter and the rotary phone. Even entrance to see oldies hit makers Three Dog Night now starts at $50!

Fortunately, ticket prices for Israeli bands are still relatively down to earth. You can see rockers Bet HaBubot or Erez Lev Ari for under NIS 100 ($26). Or catch them at a festival like Jerusalem’s annual Chutzot HaYotzer arts and crafts extravaganza where a full performance from a top star – Ivri Lieder, Yehudit Ravitz, Aviv Gefen have played in the last year – is included in the ticket price of NIS 40 (just over $10).

Try seeing Donny Osmond for a price like that!

Have any lessons been learned from Rabin’s assassination?

Thursday marks the 14th anniversary of the death of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin – certainly one of the cataclysmic events of Israel’s short history.

The divisions among the country’s citizens which led to Rabin’s assassination are still very apparent, with venom from both the Right and Left toward each other spouting freely without any attempt to mask the hatred. The Right blames Rabin and his followers on the Left for the failed Oslo process and the Left blames the Right for the environment that enabled an Israeli to take the life of a prime minister.

While most of the country mourns Rabin’s death and marks each anniversary with sadness, there’s a not so small minority who don’t take part in the collective grief and go about their business like any other day. It’s not a holiday that brings the country together.

Still, there are attempts at unity. President Shimon Peres opened the 24 hours of commemoration saying that the former prime minister’s vision of peace will not be abandoned. The state ceremony, held at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, was attended by Rabin family members, ministers, members of Knesset, and students from schools throughout Israel.

“Israel’s young generation has kept in their hearts the knowledge that such a despicable murder mustn’t ever happen again,” said Peres. “When the criminal took Yitzhak’s life, he intended to extinguish all hope for peace as well, but his plot will not succeed.”

Peres added that while peace has many enemies outside of Israel, there are also many skeptics within Israel’s own borders. He added that “Rabin’s assassination delayed the entire process and hampered the diplomatic course, but the understanding between us and our neighbors has grown, and its urgency has not changed.”

Memorial ceremonies will continue Thursday throughout the country, and the state ceremony is scheduled to take place in Mount Herzl cemetery at noon.

I remember leaving my newspaper that night after putting out the Rabin assassination edition thinking that Israel was in mortal danger from within, and wondering if we would survive. 14 years, we have perservered, but still have many lessons left to learn and internalize about what kind of country we want to build here.

Missing in Israel – Jack in the Box

Residents of Haifa have a new unlikely neighbor who is hardly anonymous – Jeremy Tyler, is an 18-year-old basketball-playing phenomenon from San Diego who signed with Maccabi Haifa this past summer and has been acclimating himself to his new enivrons.

The 6′-11″ 260-pound Tyler decided to skip his senior year in high school in order to gain experience in professional basketball playing in the European League with Mac. Haifa as a prelude to reaching the NBA in the 2011 draft.

Last year, he averaged 28.7 points during his junior year at San Diego High to lead the club to the CIF-San Diego Section Division I quarterfinals.

After a few weeks here, Tyler is convinced he made the right move, telling The Jerusalem Post’s Aryeh Dean Cohen that playing basketball in Israel will be “a good story to tell my kids about, and their kids’ kids.”

But he also admitted that he’s still getting used to some of the basic elements of life in Israel. As far as the food goes, he likes “absolutely nothing” that’s prepared locally, and has a constant craving for his his favorite meals at Jack in the Box.

He also misses his family and his Jewish girlfriend Erin, with whom he hopes to visit Jewish sites here when she arrives for a visit this year. So far, Tyler’s ‘I’m not in Kansas anymore’ moment came on Yom Kippur, which he called “that holiday where we had to stay in the house – Yom Kippur… I’ve never seen a city, a whole country like this shut down. It was like ‘Wow’ to me.”

That’s alright Jeremy, I’ve been here 25 years and am still in awe when that happens.
Welcome to Israel, and good luck with Maccabi Haifa.

Body shop makes a dent in insurance premiums

In a country where there’s nary a car that’s not pocked with dents, scrapes, and nicks, I’ve been extremely fortunate to have escaped being involved with any road accidents that required involving insurance companies. Until last week.

An older lady turned right at a stop sign, without really looking left, and sideswiped my car as I drove by. When we pulled over, I really wanted to wail on her, over how she typified the aggressive, sloppy Israeli driving style. But she was so apologetic and shaken up that I ended up telling her it wasn’t so bad and that she shouldn’t worry.

And it wasn’t that bad, just some paint scraped away, one door guard ripped off and a slight dent. I told her I would bring it to the body shop next door to my usual mechanic and see how much it cost. It the estimate was less than her NIS 1,000 deductible, which I was sure it would be, then we could avoid going through our insurance companies and the accompanying hassles.

The next day, I brought the car to the body shop and was given an estimate for NIS 1,600. So I tried a couple other places, but received similar estimates. Of course, at that point, the lady decided to go through her insurance company, which triggered a series of bureaucratic forms, faxes, phone calls and a visit to an accident assessor that over the next few days kept me busy for hours.

It’s an odd arrangement when the victim of an accident ends up having to do all the work to repair the damage caused by the other person. But that’s just a sideline to the main point here – yes, there is one.

I finally got the car repairs completed yesterday at the original body shop I went to and went to the office to settle up (I also didn’t know that I had to pay for all the repairs and accident assessor costs, and then file a claim with the lady’s insurance company to get reimbursed.)

When I asked the manager who to make the NIS 1,600 check out to, he said ‘no, that’s not how much it cost – it’s NIS 3,450.’

Now, I’m getting reimbursed anyway, but I couldn’t resist asking him, ‘You told me when I was going to do the repair privately that it would be NIS 1,600. You’re doubling the price because the insurance company is paying for it?’

He just shrugged and said the Hebrew equivalent of ‘That’s the way it is.’

Maybe I’m just naive, and this is the way of the world, not only in Israel but in most countries when it comes to insurance claims. But it just doesn’t seem right, does it. I’ve always wondered why our car insurance premiums are so outrageously high. And yesterday, I found out why.

Back to school daze

280,000 students started attending classes this week at universities and colleges throughout Israel. No strikes this year, which comes as a pleasant surprise.

An article in Yediot Aharonot over the weekend offered some interesting facts and stats about the the face of Israeli higher education which might be eye-opening for some, such as…

– There are 66 institutions of higher learning in the country, including 34 academic colleges (or junior colleges as they’re called Stateside) and 24 vocational schools.

– Tel Aviv University boast the biggest student body of the nation’s eight universities with 25,800 students, followed by Hebrew University with 23,000, Bar-Ilan University with 22,00, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev with 20,600, University of Haifa with 18,000, the Technion with 13,000, Ariel College with 11,000 and the IDC in Herzilya with 5,200 students. Evidently the Weizmann Institute – the home of recent Israeli Nobel prize winner Ada Yonath is considered a ‘research institute’ and not listed as one of the country’s universities.

– Out of the 221,000 students studying for a bachelor’s degree, 55% are women, and out of those studying for a master’s, 57% are women.

– Onto more important matters, the university cafeteria with the least expensive sandwiches for sale is Tel Aviv University, with a basic sandwich going for only 3 shekels (not sure what’s in that one, maybe just two slices of bread. While the most costly cafeteria sandwich is found at the Technion for 12 shekels (must be organic brain food).

– For a full meal, Bar-Ilan University tips the scales as the most expensive at 27 shekels ($7) with the University of Haifa trailing the field by offering some entrees at 15 shekels.

– Prices of dormitories also fluctuate with Hebrew University costing the most (between 900-1,300 shekels a month) and the Technion being the cheapest at 360-790 shekels.

With tuition becoming more costly each year, students and their parents are sure to be looking at these extra costs in deciding which institution to apply for. My daughter joined the ranks of the 280,000 students as she began classes this week at the instructional college Muzik, a Tel Aviv-based music school. I know that we’ll be urging her to eat meals in her apartment as much as possible.

Guru in our backyard

The Israeli meditation community was all a flutter this week with the arrival of meditation guru (both figuratively and literally) Sri Sri Ravi Shankar who spoke yesterday at Hebrew University to a crowd of about 600.

Shankar is best known in Israel as the founder of the Art of Living, a type of meditation that includes very strenuous breathing exercises (not the usual calm “notice your breath”). My wife Jody has been an active practitioner for several years now and swears by the process.

Like a traveling Gandhi, Shankar has jetted around the world, from his home base of India to Baghdad, Kashmir, Sri Lanka and beyond, spreading his message of peace and love. He is speaking this week at the 2nd Israeli Presidential Conference. He was last in Israel in 2003 during the height of the suicide bombings.

The Hebrew University event included a talk by Shankar, guided meditation, and music by an Israeli ensemble on sitar and percussion.

At the end of the evening, Shankar invited the audience to come and stay with him in India. While some certainly will, many Israelis were happy to have gotten a glimpse of their guru in their backyard.

 

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