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Nostalgia Sunday – Netanyahu’s fixer upper

The members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet went on a little trip today up to visit historic Tel Hai in the Galilee. Going on tiyul is quite common this season — dozens of people are hiking Shvil Yisrael, the Israel National Trail this month — but it’s unusual for members of Knesset to move en masse out of their comfort zone and into the periphery.

However, this was a special occasion. Today being the 90th anniversary of the battle at the Tel Hai compound — itself refurbished thanks to the efforts of The Society for Preservation of Israel Heritage Sites (SPIHS) — it was selected as an appropriate time and place for a cabinet meeting to approve a comprehensive plan, the largest ever, to “strengthen the national heritage infrastructures of the State of Israel”.

What is a national heritage infrastructure? As set out in Netanyahu’s plan (called TAMAR which in Hebrew is the acronym for “national heritage infrastructure”) it consists of about 150 “tangible/material cultural resources” (archaeological and historic sites) and “intangible/nonmaterial cultural resources” (archives and collections of literature, poetry, philosophy, arts, crafts, music and song, dance, theater, film, traditions, holidays, festivals, ceremonies, etc.) all in need of rehabilitation and/or enrichment. TAMAR will cost almost NIS 400 million, and will be funded by private donations to be matched by allocations from the budgets of 16 government ministries.

The list of sites — which is not yet finalized — includes 37 archaeological sites, 39 museums and collections, and 62 sites relating to Israel’s Jewish and Zionist heritage — many literally crumbling to bits, such as the magnificent painted ceiling in Jerusalem’s Meah Shearim Yeshiva. There are also 13 projects in the “intangible/nonmaterial” category that would restore cultural resources like the backlog of yet-uncatalogued movies still in cartons at the Israel Film Archive – as well as upgrade the archive building itself.

Two additional trails will be created in addition to Shvil Yisrael, promised Netanyahu, one a historic trail of archaeological sites from the biblical, Second Temple and other eras in the history of the Land of Israel, the other a trail tracing the places and events that gave rise to the modern-day State of Israel.

Netanyahu couldn’t have given a better example than this one: dowdy, dingy Independence Hall in Tel Aviv. “It is good that the city is open to the world and good that the city is alive and moving forward. But at 16 Rothschild Boulevard, there is a small auditorium in which the State of Israel was declared. There, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, declared the State of Israel.

“The hall is run-down. I am not saying that it is about to fall over but as far as the many young people and others, who flock to the street, to Rothschild Boulevard, are concerned, they do not know it. They do not visit it at all. And therefore, we will rehabilitate Independence Hall.”

The long-term payoff for TAMAR, say the plan’s authors, will be NIS 630 million in annual tourism revenue, job creation in the amount of 3,500 permanent positions plus 800 more during the 5-year period of the plan’s execution, and development of tourism to the Negev and Galilee regions. Later this week, the cabinet is due to approve the national transportation plan joining the Galilee and other regions to an accessible national transportation grid.

The cabinet also made a separate decision today on a new building for Israel’s National Library, funded by a donation from Yad Hanadiv (the Rothschild Foundation).

Foto Friday – Face, Body at Bezalel

Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Art & Design will be holding a conference this coming Tuesday entitled “Face, Body”.

Bezalel is Israel’s oldest and most prestigious academy of art and design whose students in the arts, design and architecture become leaders in their fields in Israel and the world.

Photo by David Adika

The conference, hosted by Bezalel’s photography department, will deal with the ways in which the face and body is presented in the plastic arts, in poetry, film and video, as well as in philosophy and science.

Photos by Eyal Ben Dov

The long explanations put forth by the organizers: “The face and the body are material and likeness. The face and the body are both real and the presentation of the real or the similar that enables the existence of the self and the other (everyone is both self and other) in various spheres as well as in discourse about the matter. The face and the body can also be addressed in the context of space and time, power interactions, as concepts and perceptions, as a covering and as what is contained within the cover.”

In a word: verisimilitude.

Image by Reuven Kuperman

Speakers include some of Israel’s leading art photographers and videographers, including department head Micha Kirshner, Reuven Kuperman, Simcha Shirman, Miki Kratsman, David Adika, Eyal Ben Dov, and videographer Alona Friedberg.

Click on the links to learn more about some of Israel’s premiere photographers. More information about the conference can be found on the Bezalel website.

Israel Museum expansion almost completed

Sometimes, we focus so much on the minutiae of Israel that we tend to lose sight of the primary treasures found within our midst – like the Israel Museum.

One of the leading art and archeology museums in the world, the 44-year-old museum is the country’s largest cultural institution, housing nearly 500,000 objects inside encyclopedic collections ranging from prehistory through contemporary art, and includes the most extensive holdings of Biblical and Holy Land archaeology in the world, among them the Dead Sea Scrolls.

However, over the last two years, visitors to the museum have been greeted by tractors, bulldozers, and a curtailed experience, as the museum began undertaking a massive remodeling and expansion. The good news? It’s almost completed. The museum announced this week that the renovations on its 20 acre campus will be open to the public on July 26th, 2010, and will include the creation of new facilities as well as a comprehensive reconfiguration of the Museum’s three collection wings, encompassing 80,000 square feet of new construction and 200,000 square feet of renovated and expanded gallery space.

Among the highlights will undoubtedly be the museum’s Jewish Art and Life Wing, housing the world’s preeminent collection of Judaica and Jewish ethnography. The wing will be named the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Wing for Jewish Art and Life in honor of a $12 million gift presented this week to the museum by the Mandel family from Cleveland, Ohio, and it will present objects from sacred and secular Jewish traditions together for the first time in a newly combined permanent display.

The Jewish Art and Life Wing, which traces the diaspora of sacred and secular Jewish cultures worldwide, from the Middle Ages to the present, will lead visitors through the daily and ritual markers of the Jewish life cycle and calendar, and will include a ’synagogue route,’ which includes four original synagogue interiors from European, Asian, and American cultures.

Always an eye-opening experience with endless discoveries, the newly refurbished Israel Museum will undoubtedly surpass all expectations as a premier attraction in our attraction-filled country.

Foto Friday – Edward Kaprov helps splice the ends

Splicing the Ends is the name of a new art exhibition that opens next week, November 28th, at the Amiad Center in Old Jaffa. Over the past two years, Amiad has emerged as a unique center for the arts in Jaffa’s newly revived Flea Market area, now a hot nightlife spot for Tel Aviv’s young bohemian set.

According to the organizers, the exhibit celebrates the winter season festivals for the three major monotheistic religions — Hannuka, Christmas and Eid ul Fitr — by “telling the story of mankind through the different religions… exploring the themes of immigration, living as an individual and as part of a community, and how one relates to oneself and to one’s environment.”

The show features works by over 30 painters, sculptors and photographers , including Edward Kaprov. A veteran immigrant to Israel from the former Soviet Union, Kaprov has worked with Israel’s biggest newspapers including business daily Globes, Haaretz and Yedioth Aharonot. His features have been published by National Geographic, GEO, and Russian Newsweek as well as other publications.

His work on display in “Splicing the Ends” deals with how religion informs day-to-day life in Israel, whether in the army…

…at a soup kitchen for hungry children…

…motivating political protest…

Kaprov’s work ranges from news and commercial photography to personal projects, including a series on Shamanism in Israel.

Splicing the Ends runs from November 28 through December 21 at the Amiad Center. A portion of the proceeds from the exhibit will go to ILAN, Israel’s Foundation for the Handicapped.

Nostalgia Sunday – Gil Gibli Investigates Past Crimes

Artist Gil Gibli is perhaps best known in Israel for the pen and ink cross-hatched portraits of Israel’s business elite that illustrate the pages of business daily Globes each evening. But Gibli is also a noted police forensic sketch artist — whose work has been cited in international professional literature — and when he looks back at the past, he often does so as an investigator into crimes whose trails have gone cold.

On his website, Gibli describes several cases where his forensic art brought the truth to light: reconstructing a portrait of Warsaw Ghetto uprising leader Pavel Frankel (pictured left) based solely on eye-witness accounts, bringing together two Yom Kippur War compatriots after 35 years, and the most chilling case: identifying a man, a nameless drifter, killed in a terror attack. The story – and Gibli’s uncanny ability to elicit details from eye-witnesses – was documented in the award-winning documentary No. 17 is Anonymous.

More of Gibli’s work may be found at his virtual gallery. He’s also a jazz aficionado and portraits include a series of jazz greats - more nostalgia, but of a cooler, gentler kind.

Gibl’s YouTube channel has several videos (in Hebrew) about his work.

Foto Friday – The Israel Photography Exhibition

POV, a retrospective of new works by Israel’s leading photographers/curators took place this past week at Tel Aviv’s newest landmark, the refurbished old train station structure in Neve Tzedek (pictured left). For those who missed the show (and that includes your humble scribe), POV has provided video portfolios for the group, as well as individual photographers. A portion of these works are presented in this Foto Friday column, with more to follow. Enjoy! And for those who can’t wait, visit the POV website and YouTube channel.

Show Portfolio

Moshe Shay

Yuval Tebol

David Perlov

Nostalgia Sunday – Michal Negrin World

There’s something about Michal Negrin. Whether you love her retro n’ roses style or hate it — there seems to be no in-between — there’s no disputing that Negrin has tapped into a reservoir of emotion among women longing for a certain time that seems, at least on the face of it, to have been lovelier, more civilized, more sedate and possibly more fun.

Negrin has come a long way from her stand at the Nahlat Binyamin crafts fair and the little shop on Sheinkin Street, where Russian ladies used to painstakingly crochet, wrap, stitch and glue each encrusted earring, necklace and pin by hand. Today, she has die-hard fans and store locations around the world. And when those fans come from Paris or Palm Beach to Israel their mission is clear: get new Negrin pieces from the source.

The answer lies off the beaten track south of Tel Aviv in Bat Yam, at the accessories designer’s new central office, workshop and showroom. This is where the company’s 160 artisans carry out the delicate process of mounting and hand painting jewelry and decorative items, creating fashion, printing fabric, molding ceramics and more. It’s also a showcase for items created by Michal Negrin herself.

And now, there is the new visitor’s center, Michal Negrin World. This really is a world as Negrin would like to see it: a fantastic display of romantic roses and baby’s breath, lace, crystals and a just a hint of old-fashioned naughtiness.

The exhibit includes dollhouses, puppets and multilevel dioramas designed by Negrin and her husband Meir. There’s a cafe, and guided tours of the workshops and showroom. Negrin herself says, “I wanted to create a place that would be surprising… flooded with optimism and happiness, inviting visitors a peek into the worlds of my content and creativity.”

Some fun facts: Negrin wove a magical spell on the costume designers of “Harry Potter and the order of Phoenix”, when a ring and brooch were commissioned for actress Imelda Staunton, who played cat-obsessed senior undersecretary to the Minister of Magic Dolores Umbridge. Her celebrity fans, according to ISRAEL21c, include Demi Moore, Nicole Kidman, Britney Spears, Alicia Keys and Jane Seymour. And Negrin nostalgia has even extended to the sports arena; in 2008, she was commissioned by the Israel Olympic Committee to design the formal lapel pin for the Israeli team (pictured here).

Michal Negrin World is open to the public Sun-Thu, 9:00am-3:00pm. Tours must be booked in advance. Tel: 972-3-555-3326. Address: 7 Kaf Tet B’November St., Bat Yam.

Nostalgia Sunday – Sali Ariel’s Tel Aviv Bauhaus

As Tel Aviv’s centennial gets underway and the weather warms up, more and more festive events will be held to celebrate the occasion. One of these happened last night, when the Rozin Center Gallery opened the season with an exhibition of works by painter Sali Ariel.

Originally from the States, Sali was a long-time Jerusalemite who made the move to Tel Aviv over a decade ago. As she got to know her new home, she noticed it was changing before her eyes. “I started seeing the Ramat Gan business district going up and all the big tall buildings on Rothschild Boulevard and while I don’t think that’s bad, I was afraid we would forget how Tel Aviv looked. I also felt inevitably, Tel Aviv had to change but I didn’t know if it was for better or for worse. I wanted to document it for people in the future so they would know how Tel Aviv was in our time.”

Ariel feels she looked at Tel Aviv as an outsider, “because I had just moved from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv seemed to have a bright happy fun look about it. And maybe for that reason I didn’t see the trash and crumbliness, because I was comparing it to the serious and the grayness of Jerusalem, which I also love and think is beautiful, but very different.”

Ariel started out wandering Yarkon Park and trying to sketch the natural surroundings. “But whenever I started to paint trees there were buildings peeking out form behind. And when i started to paint buildings, shockingly, a lot of what i saw was green leafy stuff — they was sort of inseparable, the two.”

Ariel was not a Bauhaus aficionado when she started working on this theme. “I was just doing buildings that looked nice to me. And then i was offered an exhibit at the Bauhaus Center and have had several exhibits since then. It also turns out that many of the building that I like are Bauhaus — but not all. Some of them are the older buildings in what’s called oriental or eclectic style.”

More works can be viewed at Sali Ariel’s website and the current exhibit will be on display at the Rozin Center Gallery in Ramat Aviv until April 22.

Nostalgia Sunday – Joseph Bau’s studio

Tel Aviv, like many cities that are cultural centers, houses many small gems, collections of artwork which are part of modern Israel’s history and should be preserved. Intending to do a write-up on the work of painter, graphic artist, animator, author, poet and publisher Joseph Bau (1920-2002), I logged into the Joseph Bau webiste only to discover that the studio where Bau worked for 40 years may close due to financial difficulties.

The modest studio-cum-museum includes paintings by Bau, commercial advertisements, and corporate logos, including those of “Eskimo Lemon” popsicles, Shekem (the IDF equivalent of the PX), and Israeli movies including: “Kazablan”, “Salah Shabati” and others.

Bau’s remarkable story – some of which was dramatized in the film Schindler’s List – began in Poland. He was a student at the University for Plastic Arts in Krakow when World War II broke out and Jews were sent to Nazi concentration camps. During his internment at the Plashow Concentration camp, Bau fell in love with another inmate, Rebecca. They secretly married when Bau smuggled himself into the women’s camp – their love story inspired a scene in the film.

Bau never lost hope or a sense of humor and it was art that saved his life. At Plashow, and then Gross-Rosen, he worked as a draftsman, lettered signs in Gothic type while secretly forging documents and identity papers. According to his online biography, he saved 400 lives in the process. Bau was later transferred to to Oscar Schindler’s camp where he stayed till the end of the war. Bau then returned to Krakow to complete his university studies and work as a newspaper graphic artists and illustrator.

In 1950 Bau immigrated to Israel with his wife and oldest daughter. According to his biography, “He was recruited to a secret unit of the intelligence corps that dealt with technical covert operations that utilized his talent for art and graphics. Later he was transferred, together with other Intelligence corps personnel to a similar unit that was formed and worked as part of the intelligence community belonging to the Prime Minister’s office. Joseph never spoke of these activities.” One may assume however, that his talent as a forger was also not overlooked.

In 1956 Bau opened his studio in Tel Aviv, where he painted, worked in commercial art (including designing the famous Amisragas logo) and animation, as well as authoring and illustrating a number of humorous books – even one about his experiences during the Holocaust.

Bau’s daughters, Hadasa and Clila, want to continue keeping this special little museum alive to commemorate their father’s life, artistic achievements, and his contribution to the State of Israel. They have started a petition requesting the city of Tel Aviv provide support.

Foto Friday – Sharon Bareket’s redheads squint in the hot noonday sun

Mention red hair and most people will think of Ireland or Scotland. And indeed, those two countries have the highest per capita number of redheaded people. But Israel, too, has its share of fair-skinned Gingers — and that’s not counting the extraordinary number of Israeli women who favor fluorescent orange over blonde from the bottle.

Photographer Sharon Bareket’s new exhibit, entitled Melano-Mental Photography – Touches of Light/Skin, at the Tavi Dresdner Gallery in Tel Aviv’s funky Neve Tzedek neighborhood, is a series of large-format images of red-heads – from strawberry blonde to vibrant titian – squinting and sweltering in the hot Mediterranean sun. Which begs the question, what are these people doing here?

“The light skin, the translucent eyelashes, the sun-blinded gaze, eyes all but closed, demarcates a closed circle, loaded with painful meaning in the political, cultural, linguistic and erotic contexts,” writes Doron Rabina in the gallery notes.

The photos are about Israeli identity: the people in the pictures are native-born sabras yet they appear as aliens in their surroundings.

But pity not the poor redhead! The photos do not take into account the fiery temperament that characterizes them; throughout the ages, from King David to Boudica, Queen Elizabeth I to Thomas Jefferson, there have been red-haired heroes.

Maybe what Israel needs right now is a redhead to lead us, though there doesn’t seem to be one coming up in time for the February elections.

 

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