White Nights
Filed under: Art, Business, design, Food, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Life, Music, Pop Culture, Sports
Bialik House lit up on one White Night
Among the events on Thursday night, consider these: A Mondial soccer event on Rothschild Blvd; Gidi Gov performance, Rami Fortis performing in Yaffo, beach parties, midnight movies at the TA Cinemateque, flamenco fusion at Suzanne Dellal, a midnight concert of the Israel Opera, learning together in the Great Synagogue, Yehudit Ravitz at Zappa, dancing on the beach, and so on and so on. Newspaper Yediot Achronot also selected a few, and they offer some more information in English.
Among my personal emails are White Night notices for two designer sales, including one at Delicatessen (4 Barzilay Street), a great boutique in Gan Hachashmal, where the neighborhood will also be hosting free theater, events at the local bars and block parties. And Delicatessen is offering 10% off on all its inventory.
Studio Blush (also in Gan Hachashmal, 2 Levontin), is telling its customers that it will have all sorts of surprises, including shoes by Shoemaker, accessories from Shelly Dahari, okapi bags and a few other choice items.
So whether you want to shop, bop, listen or do a combination thereof, Thursday night’s ‘layla lavan’ is the destination for you.
Nostalgia Sunday – JNF-KKL stamp club
Filed under: Environment, General, History and Culture, Nostalgia Sunday, Travel
About a week and a half ago, an event took place at the Jewish National Fund House in Tel Aviv that might be termed historic: the revival of the JNF-KKL stamp collectors club.
Most people know that the Jewish National Fund – Keren Kayemet (JNF-KKL) raises funds using the trusty old Blue Box method of coin collection — in addition to Tree Planting Certificates and Soliciting Big Donations. But few today remember that the JNF-KKL also issued and sold stamps which, for a brief period in May 1948, were actually used as postage stamps in the newborn State of Israel.
Here’s what happened the other night, according to Dr. Arie Ben, founder and director of the JNF House museum and educational center. “The [stamp collector] group members, who came from all parts of the country, first visited our museum, which is celebrating 21 years of activity… Attending the gathering was a collector who is a pediatrician by trade, a retired academic from the Weizmann Institute who for years was a plant scientist, and a diplomat from Israel’s foreign service. Another of those present had set up a unique website offering information and collectors items for sale… we were also honored by the presence of a 92-year old collector who showed me a picture of the first meeting of the JNF-KKL collectors club… At the end of the evening, it was decided to revive the legendary ‘JNF-KKL stamp collectors club’, which was first founded in 1937 and held its first gathering in the JNF House meeting room, only days after being founded.”
The stamps hold a special place of honor in JNF-KKL history and the museum has an exhibition of stamps based on Ben’s research into 108 years of the organization’s activity. The JNF House itself, which includes the museum (also known as The Provisional People’s Council & Administration Museum), is a classic example of 20th century Tel Aviv Bauhaus architecture, and is located at 11 Zvi Shapira St., Tel Aviv, walking distance from the Dizengoff Center.
JNF-KKL’s online archive is also a treasure trove for the interested philatelist and include images of artist sketches for the stamps, as well as the stamps themselves. Another great source: the Sol Singer Collection of Philatelic Judaica.
Nostalgia Sunday – On the street where you lived…
Filed under: design, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Nostalgia Sunday, Travel
Today I visited all the houses where I’ve ever lived in Israel. Almost — I’ll get to that in a minute. Thanks to Zoomap.co.il, which has been photographing the city streets and each and every building in Israel, you too can take a look at your old digs and check up on how badly the place has continued to deteriorate since you yourself lived under its leaky roof.
For example, the apartment building near trendy Sheinkin Streeet in Tel Aviv where I don’t live anymore. Don’t be put off by the disgusting facade. Location is everything.
And then the place in glorious north Tel Aviv, off HaYarkon Park, where I moved to escape trendiness and find parking.
And the place after that — not a great apartment — but still right on the park.
I started to get hooked on finding a picture of every place I’d ever lived here. That’s when I found out that Zoomap also has its flaws: this is a picture of the building in front of the Jerusalem building where my family lived in 1973-4. You can see our building peeking out on the left-hand side. Apparently the Zoomap folk were too tuckered out to walk up the hill to take pictures of the cul-de-sac.
But I got back on track with this picture of my grandmother’s old apartment which was Party Central for several years in the early 80s.
I could not find an address for the Hadassah Youth Center on Mt. Scopus and so could not do a search for a picture — another failing of Zoomap is that, like GPS, it doesn’t recognize institutions, only addresses — but I’m pretty sure this is the immigrant absorption center in Dimona where Young Judaea parked us for a few months om 1979. Again, the dowdy appearance is deceiving; the Black Hebrews were also living there at the time, which made it kind of cool.
And this is where I live now! Back to Jerusalem, just up the street from grandma’s old apartment. Life is funny.
Google Earth doesn’t get down to building resolution for Israel so use Zoomap to take a trip down memory lane. Or purchase some real estate. It’s part of Bezeq’s 144 directory assistance site which is now translated into English. Happy trails!
Bauhaus travels
Filed under: Art, design, General, History and Culture
If you can’t make it to Tel Aviv this year to celebrate its centennial birthday, there’s a great traveling exhibit by a favorite photographer of mine, Yigal Gawze, showing his collection of Bauhaus photos, Fragments of a Style. The exhibit opened in Chicago, recently moved to San Francisco, and will then be moved to Europe, including the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, Germany, as part of the 90th Anniversary of the Bauhaus school.
What’s really lovely about Yigal’s photos in this exhibit is that he hones in on the details and sunlit curves that we all see in Tel Aviv, but in a much gentler light on the normally harshly sunlit buildings.
In his explanation of the photos, Yigal writes:
“It was during the winter season, when the normally harsh outdoor light was softer and more easily tamed, and the white facades stood out against the backdrop of the deep blue sky. I was a tourist in my hometown, and my eyes developed a new sensitivity to my surroundings.
I chose to work in color (in contrast to the historical documents and the modern photographic work done on the subject), in order to better convey the character and the atmosphere created by the local light. The shadow of the palm tree falling on the white facade represents the special encounter that takes place in Tel Aviv between a building style originating in Europe and the Mediterranean glare.From the start, I chose to focus on the fragments. I felt that I could capture the spirit of this architecture by focusing on an essential part of the structure, which carries within it the genetic code of the whole. It was also an attempt to convey something of the utopia of the years which saw the building of the ‘White City’. Only in the last part of the work, did I step back to deal with the whole building and its relationship to the street as part of the city.”
Nostalgia Sunday – Sali Ariel’s Tel Aviv Bauhaus
Filed under: Art, General, History and Culture, Nostalgia Sunday, Travel
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.
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