Nostalgia Sunday – The Templer German Colonies
The Israel Academy for Film and Television competition for the 2012 Ophir Awards will open on May 13, 2012, and will take place during the months of May, June and July at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque. Winners will be announced at the Ophir Awards Ceremony, which will take place in September 2012.
Among the 38 documentaries entered into the competition this year is Shadows In Palestine, a new look at the millennial movement of German Templers (not to be confused with the Crusader Knights Templar), a community of religious Protestants who lived in the Holy Land for three generations, from 1868 to 1941, in settlements known today as the “German Colonies” of Haifa, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Sarona (in central Tel Aviv), Wilhelma (adjacent to today’s Ben Gurion Airport), Waldheim (now Moshav Alonei Abba) and Bethlehem of the Galilee.
The Templer sect (Tempelgesellschaft) was a German Protestant sect with roots in the Pietist movement of the Lutheran Church. They believed that living in the Holy Land would hasten the second coming of Christ and were expelled from the church in 1858 because of their millennial beliefs. In 1868, at the urging of their leader, Christoff Hoffman, the emigrated to the Holy Land and built their first colony in Haifa.
According to Wikipedia, “The colonists built an attractive main street that was much admired by the locals. It was 30 meters wide and planted with trees on both sides. The houses, designed by architect Jacob Schumacher, were built of stone, with red-shingled roofs, instead of the flat or domed roofs common in the region.
“The Templer settlement of Sarona was one of the first modern agricultural settlements in Palestine… In August 1871, the Templers purchased 60 hectares of land from a Greek monastery north of Jaffa.
“The colony’s oranges were the first to carry a ‘Jaffa orange’ brand, one of the better known agricultural brands in Europe, used to market Israeli oranges to this day. The Templers established a regular coach service between Haifa and the other cities, promoting the country’s tourist industry, and made an important contribution to road construction.
“In 1873, after establishing colonies in Haifa and Jaffa, members of the Templer sect from Württemberg, Germany, settled on a large tract of land in the Refaim Valley, southwest of the Old City of Jerusalem. The land was purchased by one of the colonists, Matthaus Frank, from the Arabs of Beit Safafa.”
The Templers brought modern farming methods to the region, importing agricultural machinery, introducing soil fertilization, better methods of crop rotation and new crops with a focus on crops and products they could readily sell. ‘The researcher and author Sven Hedin wrote of his visit to Sarona in 1916 ‘…many plants were in blossom. They mainly grow grapes, oranges and vegetables, [but] like in old times they also produce milk and honey.’”
But the idyll began to fracture when in 1917, during World War I, General Edmund Allenby conquered Palestine from the Ottomans. “The German colonists were regarded as enemy aliens. Many of the colonists were recruited for the units of the German Imperial Army, which fought together with the army of the Ottoman ally against the British conquest.”
The German colonists — now into their third generation — chafed under British rule and became increasingly influenced by German nationalism. “In 1937, 34% of the Templers were Nazi party members. At the start of World War II colonists with German citizenship were rounded up by the British and sent, together with Italian and Hungarian enemy aliens, to internment camps in Waldheim and Bethlehem of Galilee. 661 Templers were deported to Australia via Egypt on July 31, 1941, leaving 345 in Palestine.”
“Sarona, together with the three other agricultural settlements – Wilhelma, Bethlehem of Galilee and Waldheim – became ‘perimeter’ compounds into which all Germans living in Palestine were interned. Sarona held close to 1,000 persons behind a guarded, 4 m high barbed-wire fence. In July 1941, 198 people from Sarona, together with almost 400 from the other internment camps were deported to Australia on the Queen Elizabeth. They were interned in Tatura in Central Victoria Australia until 1947. By November 1944, most of the remaining Sarona residents had been moved to the camp in Wilhelma. The last group was sent there in September 1945.”
However, according to the new documentary, “during the thirties, the Templers were pressured to embrace and form a Nazi party” and fell victim to a secret exchange between Germany and Britain. “The Nazi party set free a number of Jews from concentration camps and in exchange Britain, who controlled Palestine at the time, sent the Templers back to Germany. Despite the fact that only a third of Templers joined the Nazi Party, all of them were forced to leave their new homeland.”
It will be interesting to see this new account of the Templer’s history. (Right now there is only a movie trailer on YouTube). The movie includes first-hand interviews with Templers who speak about the past and their exit from Mandatory Palestine. For Israelis who don’t necessarily know the background to these German Colony neighborhoods, it’s a chance to learn about the Templer movement, its accomplishments and contributions to the development of the modern State of Israel.
Israel hosts musical melting pot
The international musicians of The Bridge Project.
But it was no joke for Ittai Shaked, Andy Bussuttil and Umit Ceyhan who make up The Bridge Project - based in cyberspace but coming down for landing this week in Israel.
All three musicians have a day gig at the successful Israeli startup Waves, which was profiled in ISRAEL21c a few years ago. Violinist Shaked is a quality assurance manager for the Grammy Award-winning company that develops audio mixing software for the digital age for sound engineers and producers. And Bussutil, a multi-talented musician who runs his own recording studio in Australia, and Ceyhan, the Turkish Muslim who currently lives in France and teaches sonic and cinematic arts at the University of Toulouse, are part of Shaked’s team testing the company’s new products.
When, over a year ago, Shaked posted a message to his more than 100 testers around the world asking if anyone wanted to get together virtually and create some music, Bussutil and Ceyhan responded. Thus began ongoing file sharing and music creation between the three, with each adding his own instruments and ideas onto the previous take of their world music combining everything from Middle Eastern sounds to klezmer and Balkan beats.
The chemistry between us was amazing – we found out we shared and loved the same kind of music, more or less, with different spices,” Shaked told me. “And all three of us play instruments that combine together very nicely. At some point, I realized that what we’re doing here is making an album.”
The result is Three Waves Under the Bridge, the fruits of their online efforts, and the arrival in Israel of Bussutil and Ceyhan this week to meet Shaked and each other face to face and perform a series of live shows around the country.
Three Waves Under the Bridge, mixed by Shaked and mastered by Bussuttil, is a reflective world music mosaic brimming with musical ideas, and featuring a genre-hopping range of instruments – North African percussion like bongos and darbukas, strings ranging from violin, viola and cello to clarinet and sax, and traditional Turkish instruments like the duduk, kopuz and saz.
The music is only part of their accomplishments. As Bussuttil said, “Our efforts were an attempt to unify people rather than divide them. And we hoped to demonstrate that people from different backgrounds can create more than conflict, we can create things of beauty as well.”
If you’re in the country, you can catch the Bridge Project on May 14 at the Tmuna Theater in Tel Aviv. Other shows on the mini-tour, supported by the Foreign Ministry and the Australian Embassy in Israel, include The Jame Club in Acre on May 17, The Jazz Club in Mitzpe Ramon on May 18, and Hemdat Yamin in the Galilee on May 19.
But anyone can enjoy their music here.
Haaretz tries to make itself irrelevant
Multi-media, multi-platform, multi-expensive
You know it’s bad news when a newspaper refers to a new web initiative it’s launching as “the start of a new era.” But that’s exactly what Haaretz did this week in announcing a program that “will enable us to provide you with accurate and comprehensive news coverage, analyses and commentary on Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world.”
In other words, they’re going to start charging for access.
Haaretz hasn’t shared specifics of its new digital subscriptions program yet, but the parameters are clear – they’re identical to what The New York Times launched earlier this year: a limited number of free articles per month with the rest nestled behind a pay wall. Print subscribers will get access to the whole kit and kaboodle. A subscription will cover all digital platforms: web and mobile, including smart phones and tablets.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I know well the dire circumstances newspapers are in (I report on the subject for the AIM Group). But sequestering your content for paying subscribers works only if you’re the undisputed leader in your space: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Economist have all succeeded. Other attempts to cut free access have failed, many miserably, before being unceremoniously retracted.
Is Haaretz the clear king of the Israeli news space? Their Hebrew edition certainly has elements of The New York Times, particularly in terms of its writing, columnists, features and investigative reporting. I’ve been a regular reader for years. But the online competition – in English, certainly – is fierce in Israel. The Jerusalem Post’s website has far more readers than Haaretz; indeed, it’s the web’s number one English language site on Israel and Jewish subjects in terms of traffic.
More recently, The Times of Israel has come on the scene. The writing is uniformly excellent, superior even than to Haaretz (which consists of direct translations from Hebrew). It quickly made it to the top of the sites I visit first in the morning.
True, Haaretz has faster news coverage, and it’s been my go-to site after a terrorist attack or midnight coalition re-alignment, but if you flit from The Times of Israel to The Jerusalem Post to Ynet to some of the more right wing papers, you can get your fix without ever needing to pay an agora to Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken.
Haaretz has one thing going for it that the other English-language online Israeli news sites don’t, though: a top-notch mobile app. Haaretz’s iPhone app makes it so easy to consume news, I don’t even bother with the west. The Times of Israel’s David Horowitz told me that a smart phone app is on the newspaper’s development horizon but in the meantime a browser version optimized for mobile will be out soon. I hope it’s as functional and friendly as Haaretz’s, or – gulp – I may wind up paying in the end after all.
When I posted about Haaretz’s going pay on Facebook, I was met with a barrage of Haaretz hate: the paper’s politics are loathed by many Anglos in Israel. While I may not always agree with the editorials at the paper either, my post was about business models not Gaza.
What will save the newspaper industry? We’re still trying to figure that out. Sexier interactive advertising (see what Yoni Bloch’s Interlude is doing), better behavioral tracking (despite our shuddering the thought), even setting up as a non-profit are all being discussed and tried.
In the meantime, we can cool our heels with this ambiguous pronouncement from Haaretz:
As we approach our first centennial, we hope you will join us as we embark on a new chapter in our history, one in which will pledge our allegiance to maintaining the standards of journalistic excellence and integrity that are the bedrock of Haaretz as we explore the new frontiers of the modern digital age.
Amos Schocken will be holding an online Q&A session Tuesday May 15 at 4:00 PM Israel time. Ready your outrage.
Foto Friday – Yigal Pardo’s Dog (and Cat) Days
Photographer Yigal Pardo loves animals and has successfully parlayed that affection into a career.
Pardo studied photography at Hadassah College, Jerusalem, then worked in New York for a year, returning to Israel to open his pet photography business.
Pardo works with Israel’s pet food manufacturers, ad agencies, breeders, animal-related publications, professional and non-profit organizations as well as pet-lovers, shooting commercial studio work and portraits, and photographing animals in the great outdoors.
One organization that has benefited from his talents is Shaar HaGai Kennels, breeders of Israel’s national dog, the Canaan.
Pardo has documented kennel owner Myrna Shiboleth on her treks to seeks out new desert and Bedouin bloodlines so as to retain the natural characteristics of this “semi-feral” breed.
A previous post reported on Shaar HaGai’s current woes: the kennel — and with it its Canaan breeding program — is under threat of closure by the Israel Lands Administration (ILA). Shiboleth, a world champion dog breeder, dog show judge and the world authority on Canaan Dogs, is lobbying for public support via on an online petition. (50,000 signatures are needed and she’s up to 39,855, so if you support this cause, please sign and share the link).
Far from the wild, Pardo also photographs dog shows for the Israeli Kennel Club.
And cat shows, too!
A cat-owner himself, Pardo has stated that although his specialty is dogs, it is from cats that he’s learned the most about photographing animals.
“It is the dog’s nature to please his owner. When the owner brings them to a photographer, from the dog’s perspective, the photographer is an ally… The cat is not interested at all to please humans… but fortunately, he is also very curious and we can take advantage of this curiosity when we take the pictures.”
Great photos of animals of all kinds can be found on Yigal Pardo’s page at PetNet.co.il.
B&B owner, antiquities authority battle over ancient tomb
Mitch Pilcer in front of the grave he discovered. (Arieh O'Sullivan)
That doesn’t likely happen too often in most parts of the world, but it did in Israel, to Mitch Pilcer, who owns picturesque bed-and-breakfast country establishment in the Galilee village of Tzippori, the home of early rabbinic sages.
Pilcer’s 2009 discovery of Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi’s grave, whose commentaries appear in the Talmud and legend has it was a close friend of Elijah the Prophet, has sparked an ongoing struggle with the Israel Antiquities Authority who have been demanding that Pilcer allow them to excavate the tomb.
According to a report by The Media Line, the IAA won a court order, and late 2009 it conducted a dig on the property and confiscated the headstone door, which had been inscribed in plainly legible Hebrew: “This is the burial place of Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi Hakapar.”
Later the IAA filed charges against Pilcer for carrying out an illegal excavation, damaging an ancient site and possession of antiquities. Pilcer’s trial began at the Nazareth Magistrate’s court last week where he pleaded not guilty. He has also made formal demands to have the stone returned to its original site.
Full disclosure here is that Pilcer is an old friend, and I’m on his side of this battle over the ownership of the stone and the site. Read the full story about his battle with the ‘Man’ here.
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