Beresheet bumped up

June 19, 2008 - 7:15 PM by Harry · 1 Comment
Filed under: Music, Pop Culture, Travel

Boombamella Israelis love festivals. The Israel Festival is a five-week affair this year, currently in progress. Hardly a week goes by without some kind of event being dubbed as the next big festival, from the Cinema South Film Festival in Sderot, which wrapped up two weeks ago, to this past week’s kosher food extravaganza in Petach Tikva.

The most lively mainstream events on the annual festival calendar in recent years have been the big three hippie festivals, Boombamela, Shantipi and Beresheet, each taking place during a major Jewish holiday, times when the nation more or less goes on vacation. Intoxicating blends of new-age spirituality, corporate sponsorships, Eastern ethnic jams, family camping, teenybopper-friendly pop, nudism, all-night trance parties, beach living and even Carlebach-style Jewish outreach, the big three have drawn crowds in the tens of thousands since before the millennium.

But stretch marks have begun to show. Shantipi, the first one in the game, tried to reposition itself as less tween-oriented and more family-friendly in 2004, and when efforts were met with lower attendance, planners attempted and failed to backtrack on the move. Shantipi didn’t even take place this past Shavuot, earlier this month.

Even the most robust draw in recent years, Passover’s Boombamela, has seen a drop in attendance. “I reckon we’ll have twenty-five thousand or even thirty thousand people this year,” the festival’s artistic director Mathaus Waldorf told The Jerusalem Post’s Barry Davis a few months ago. It didn’t pan out. While something like 15,000 tickets were sold, a solid turnout by any means, it was a mere half of the load that planners had invested in infrastructure to accommodate. Plus, many of the revelers didn’t stay for the entire four-day shindig – the schoolteachers’ strike of the autumn had made for a shortened vacation from classes, and Hamas missiles falling in nearby Ashkelon surely inspired many parents to ask their children to come home early – lending the proceedings a feeling of emptiness.

The Beresheet festival, which started out ten years ago as a Rosh Hashanah production, has also attempted to rebrand itself as something bigger and longer in recent years, opting instead to take place during the longer holiday of Sukkot since 2004. Brought to you by the same production crew that organizes Boombamela, this year’s Beresheet is set to take place over three days starting on July 14 on the sores of the Sea of Galilee, a far safer bet in terms of minimizing school schedule conflicts and a somewhat safer bet in terms of minimizing the chances of a missile attack. The move might just mark a return to the millennial days of booming attendance, but the pre-commercialized purity of the early days will probably remain elusive.

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