Nostalgia Sunday – Riding the waves

December 11, 2011 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, education, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Profiles, Social Justice, Sports, Travel, War 

Israel’s Lee Korzits won the gold medal this past weekend at the Sailing World Championships in Perth, Australia. Her achievement, along with Gal Fridman’s Olympic gold medal and Shahar Zubari’s bronze, is remarkable on its own. Even more so, given how new pro surfing is to our young country. And, like most things Israeli, it started with a dream.

Before surfboards arrived on our shores, there was the hasakeh, a sort of platform on which lifeguards would stand and paddle. Used from at least the 1930s onwards, there are several theories as to how this banana-shaped wood vessel came into being: one that it was used by Arab fishermen, another that it was based on a 1926 design by legendary surfer Tom Blake.

Its use by the Israeli Navy was immortalized in song in 1972.

Hasakeh

Riding the waves on a hasakeh, however, was not surfing. According to an online essay about the History of Surfing in Israel, that began with Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, an American surfer and physician visited Israel in 1956. Wikipedia states that he volunteered for the Israeli army during the Suez Canal crisis but was rejected. Nonetheless, during his year-long stay, he found happiness on the beaches of Tel Aviv where he conceived of a dream: to found the first Olympic surfing team from the young state of Israel. Paskowitz imported six long-boards imprinted with the Israeli flag and began scouting the beach for potential talent and for someone to manage the project.

“…he arrived on Frishman Beach, [where] he found a lifeguard named Shamai Kancepolsky, also known as Topsea, and presented the idea to him. Says [Topsea's son] Nir Almog, ‘There was an immediate chemistry between them and my father decided to take on the project.’

‘At that time, lifeguards caught waves using hasakehs alone. Dorian gave them lessons and slowly, the lifeguard booth gang began surfing. In those days, [before breakers were built] Israel had high waves that broke on the shore itself… and going into the sea to surf was considered an act of bravery bordering on insanity…”

“A few years passed and the gang gained experience… but there was still no Israeli representation abroad. Dorian [Paskowitz] returned a second time, bringing a load of surfboards with him that were distributed among the new members.”

“Nir Almog adds, ‘In the Sixties, a huge storm damaged the storeroom where the surfboards were stored, and broke some of them to bits. After that, my dad decided to restore one of the big ones and shortened it to 1.80 meters. I was the only one in Israel with a shortboard.”

“In the early Seventies, a paratrooper commander by the name of Yair told Topsea that the army used a material — a aerated plastic called polyurethane foam — made by a company in Haifa. The material was similar to that used to make surfboards. Yair raised the possibility of manufacturing surfboards made of this material… Topsea and Nir began trying to design surfboards… and began a small surfboards producing industry. Most were rented out, and so a new generation entered into surfing…”

Topsea managed a small workshop on Hilton Beach and, along with renting out Hasakehs, designed surfboards. He, his wife Naomi — Israel’s first female surfer — and their children, all became lifelong surfers.In 1977, son Nir founded Almog Surfboards, Israel’s first pro surfboard company. Topsea co-founded the Israel Surfing Association in 1986.

The sport has continued to grow in popularity; according to the Encyclopedia of Surfing, “Israel is home to about 15 surf shops and 10,000 surfers”.

Paskowitz, by the way, gave up practicing medicine to become a professional surfer. He and his family founded and run Surf Camps and are known as The First Family of Surfing. In August 2007, he founded Surfing 4 Peace together with his son David (along with Israeli surfer Arthur Rashovan and eight-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater) to deliver surfboards to the surfing community in Gaza.

A wonderful online photo archive, can be found at the Topsea Israel Surfing Center website. Topsea’s youngest son Orian runs the center, carrying on the tradition and legacy of his father. The Center also hosts a YouTube channel where there are more videos about the legendary Shamai “Topsea” Kancepolsky and the history of surfing in Israel.

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Foto Friday – Ilan Garibi comes to light

December 9, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Art, coexistence, design, education, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Profiles, Religion, Travel 

Yotze la-Or is a new exhibition of modern-day origami paper lanterns at Holon’s Hankin Gallery (December 19 to January 28). The name is a play on words — “yotze la-or” means both “coming to light” and “published”* — and also fits nicely with the upcoming Hanukkah holiday which, like most winter celebrations, has light as an underlying theme.

Using a unique origami technique known as Tesselation, artist Ilan Garibi creates lighting fixtures made of Japanese paper and red mahogany. Tessellation refers to a collection of figures fill a plane with no gaps or overlaps. In origami tessellations, pleats are used to connect elements together in a repeating fashion.

Garibi, a retired Israeli Defense Forces officer, was first introduced to the Japanese art of paper-folding at age 12 by a family friend but it was in 1996, while on assignment in Asia, that he took on origami as his hobby. In an interview with All Things Paper, Garibi related that while in the IDF, he would motivate his soldiers to get up early with the promise of origami lessons.

“Those lessons were always full… soldiers liked the idea of having a break from the serious business, to have their commander taking down his uniform shirt and teach the crane or a Ninja star.”

About five years ago, he began creating his own individual designs — mostly complex geometric patterns — that attracted attention and led to several exhibitions. Today, with 170 unique designs to his credit, he teaches “Origametria” a technique pioneered by Miri Golan and Paul Jackson of the Israel Origami Center, that uses origami to teach geometry in high schools. He also writes for the British Origami Society magazine, The Fold, (the online magazine of OrigamiUSA), and has authored a book on the subject.

See more pictures of Ilan Garibi’s work on his Flickr page. For more about Origametria, view this short film from 2006, which shows some of the IOC’s activities, including their peace program, Folding Together.

* Referring to the ancient practice of publishing on paper, kids.

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Nostalgia Sunday – The Yekke spectrum

November 20, 2011 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, design, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Movies, Nostalgia Sunday, Profiles, Travel, tv 

Yekke. The term, according to Urban Dictionary.com, “refers to Jews originating from Germany. Sometimes used in a derogatory or cynical manner, it refers mainly to their attention to detail…The origins of this title are unclear, ranging from referring to their short jackets… to a conjugation of the Hebrew dayek – to be precise.”

Between 1931 and 1939, 100,000 Jews came to pre-State Israel, most of them from Germany having fled the rise of Nazism. Unlike the previous four waves of aliya, the members of this Fifth Aliya were not necessarily kibbutz bound. Instead, they headed for towns like Tel Aviv, where they engaged in five o’clock tea dances and other bourgeoisie amusements and Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood, home to professors and intellectuals. German-Jewish immigrants founded Nahariya, home to some of Israel’s leading entrepreneurial families: Strauss, Soglowek and Wertheimer.

Once considered an embarrassment among young German emigres trying to fit in among the native-born sabras, their children and grandchildren are now exploring their Yekke roots, discovering that there was much more to the German-Jewish immigrant experience in Israel than simply being a nicely dressed, punctual minority among the Russian-Polish Socialist-Zionist majority, chronically late and clad in dusty, drab workman’s gear.

Two movies have come out recently that reflect aspects of the German-Jewish immigrant experience in pre-State Israel. Duki Dror’s Mendelsohn – Incessant Visions, explores the life of Erich Mendelsohn, the man who changed the face of modern architecture.

Dror’s fascination with Mendelsohn began in 2003, when UNESCO declared Tel Aviv a World Heritage Site. “I tried to understand the connection between this ugly city, where I was born and raised, and this declaration of cultural significance. I started looking at buildings… and I tried to figure out where this town came from… Who was the source of these modern ideas? Very quickly my investigation led to Mendelsohn It was clear that his presence infuses the plaster and concrete of Tel Aviv. And then I realized he had never built in Tel Aviv, but influenced all of the architects who built it.”

Dror tells the story of Mendelsohn’s life through the architect’s correspondence with wife Luise Mendelsohn. The letters, along with excerpts from Luise’s diary, provide personal insights into history: Mendelsohn’s technique of crafting tiny sketches with the power of a large rendering was the result of paper shortages during World War I. Luise, a cellist who played in a string quartet with neighbor Albert Einstein, wangled Mendelsohn’s first important commission: the Einstein Tower (Einsteinturm) in Potsdam, Germany– an astrophysical observatory built to prove (or disprove) the theory of relativity. At the height of his success, Mendelsohn’s architectural practice had commissions from all over Germany for buildings in his pioneering International Style. Luise tells of Erich’s obsession in creating their dream house — completed just in time for him, along with all other Jewish members, to be ejected from the German Architects’ Union. Realizing that their assets were about to be seized by the Nazis, the Mendelsohns left Germany for the England in 1933.

It was in London in 1934 that Mendelsohn met Chaim Weizmann. The future President of the State of Israel invited the architect to design the future State of Israel according to his modernist vision. Mendelsohn had already been to Palestine before, in 1923, on the invitation of Pinhas Rutenberg, head of the Palestine Electric Company who had the British Mandatory government concession to create an modern electrical infrastructure. Although his design for the first power station was rejected by the British for being avant garde, Mendelsohn was captivated by the idea of fusing ancient and modern in a Jewish homeland.
Read more

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Nostalgia Sunday – Tel Aviv’s new wing takes flight

November 6, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Art, design, General, History and Culture, News, Nostalgia Sunday, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Profiles, Travel 

The new wing of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art opened last week with the fanfare befitting to a world-class museum building for Israel’s cultural hub. Patrons were treated to a week of festivities, exclusive exhibition previews, cocktail parties, dinners, concerts, a symposium on Contemporary Architecture of Museums with the architect of the new building, and a glittering opening gala in the presence of Shimon Peres, President of the State of Israel, Ron Huldai, Mayor of Tel Aviv and a Who’s Who directory of local celebrities.

The Herta and Paul Amir Building is being touted as Israel’s answer to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Its proponents hope that Tel Aviv will be touched by the magical “Bilbao Effect” in which the building itself becomes a tourist destination. Interestingly, its architect, Preston Scott Cohen, calls the new wing, “An antidote to the Bilbao phenomenon, the new building of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art represents a new direction: an interiorized and socialized space of spectacle, as opposed to the ’90s model of an exterior sculptural object displayed to the city.”

Spectacle or sculptural, the 195,000 square foot new wing is an exciting break with the past. Built to house the museums’s ever-expanding collection contemporary art, the structure centers around a monumental sculpture, the Lightfall, that reaches toward a skylight which sends natural light into the building’s interior. Ramps and stairs spiraling down around the Lightfall provide access to the galleries, art library, center for Architecture and Design, 400-seat auditorium and ancillary spaces.

Although Cohen takes inspiration from the White City’s Bauhaus Modernism, it’s a far cry from the old building, designed in the Brutalist style by architects Dan Eytan and the late Yitzhak Yashar, which was completed in 1971, and for which Eytan and Yashar won the Rechter Prize of Architecture.

And it’s an every farther cry from the first Tel Aviv Museum on Rothschild Boulevard, the historic Modernist building that was home to Meir Dizengoff, the first mayor of Tel Aviv, and the site where the State of Israel was declared.

Throughout its various incarnations, however, the spirit of the museum belongs to artist Marc Chagall.

According to a lovely essay on the American Friends of the Tel Aviv Museum website, “Mayor Dizengoff had a vision of Tel Aviv becoming a great commercial and cultural center. After building houses, a movie theater, hospital, synagogue and slaughterhouse, bath houses and other structures the Mayor began to feel the need to foster beauty—which meant art and an art museum.

“Dizengoff visited Paris in 1930, met Chagall and asked his help in establishing a museum. The… artist readily accepted. In a letter to Dizengoff after meeting him in Paris and prior to his first visit to Israel, Chagall stated: “‘. . . we are prepared to help you. I am happy that finally a Jew has emerged who wants to establish a Jewish museum, and who understands how indispensable it is (not only as a useful element of tourism) . . . in the major centers of Europe and America, societies of friends of the Jewish museum should be established . . . to collect money and artistic material fit for a museum.’

“Chagall visited Tel Aviv a year later. Tel Aviv had a population of 50,000 people and three repertory theaters. Mayor Dizengoff had donated his home as the future Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The Mayor met Chagall, his wife and daughter at the head of the city’s fire brigade. Horse races on the seashore were organized in Chagall’s honor.

“At a reception in Tel Aviv Chagall said “I am amazed how a handful of people, surrounded by hatred, rather than love, builds and creates a new land. I am jealous of your idealism, and I wish you from the bottom of my heart to continue what you started. And for me I wish to come and wallow among you, and maybe I shall be able as an artist to do something for your future Jewish museum as well . . .”

“Chagall advised Mayor Dizengoff as to what works should be included in the Museum’s collection. Chagall’s work ‘Jew with Torah’ was the very first work to enter the Museum.

“The Museum has thirteen masterworks by Marc Chagall. Three works were a gift of the artist, the remaining ten works and many others were donated by friends from around the world. Marc Chagall visited Israel eight times. He died at the age of 97 [in 1985] in Saint-Paul de Vence, France.”

To honor the new wing, the Museum opened a special exhibition entitled Five Moments: Trajectories in the Architecture of the Tel Aviv Museum which presents “five key moments in the Museum’s history through five architectural prisms, providing two different and complementary viewpoints that turn these moments into a complete cultural continuum.”

Hopefully, Chagall’s contribution is mentioned as a force driving those trajectories. It’s nice to think of his spirit infusing the new wing, with lovers, doves, cows, sheep and fiddlers, all in constant ascension along the Lightfall towards the open sky.

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Foto Friday – Michael Silverman’s Beautiful Weeds

October 28, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Art, Environment, Foto Friday, General, Life, Picture of the Week, Profiles, Travel 

Feng Shui is an ancient Chinese practice of situating built environments — buildings, rooms and even furniture — in spots with auspicious chi, meaning good life-force or energy. Photographer Michael Silverman, who is also a Feng Shui master, lives in such a place: the village of Clil, an ecologically-minded community in the foothills of the Western Galilee overlooking the Mediterranean.

Founded in 1979, Clil’s unique character has been determined by not only by its residents — many of whom are professional artists, artisans, musicians and writers — but by the surrounding landscape, fields and orchards planted over the years.

Silverman trained as a commercial photographer in the US and began studying Feng Shui in 1972. After moving to Israel in 1974 he worked in advertising, multimedia and later on, as high-tech in Israel gathered steam, in software, multimedia and Internet design.

Today, he teaches design and photography, and acts as a consultant to businesses interested in using Feng Shui principles in the workplace.

According to Chinese scripture, “Chi rides the wind and scatters but is retained when encountering water” (the term Feng Shui actually translates to “wind-water”). The art of creating a framework for the untamed describes perfectly the latest photographic series from Silverman, Weeds 2011.

Within his viewfinder, a simple blade of grass suddenly gains form and stature…

The world reflected in a drop of water…

A half-dead dandelion takes on new life…

More photos can be found on Michael Silverman’s Picasa page, Facebook page, and YouTube channel, where he’s also shared some lovely slideshows. Here’s one to start with. Enjoy.

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