Renegade Jews in Israel

February 13, 2011 - 10:17 AM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, General, Israeliness, Life, Religion 

The community where I live is religiously mixed along the lines of most Israeli neighborhoods – mostly secular, some observant, some traditional. The religious establishment is very conservative, with a small C, and run under the stringent guidelines of the local chief rabbi. While synagogues dot the neighborhoods as frequently as mahkolot (convenience stores), there has never been an non-Orthodox congregation in the community, until my wife and I were involved in establishing an egalitarian minyan an number of years ago.

After meeting exclusively on Friday nights for years, one of our congregants took the initiative and launched every other week Shabbat morning services a few months ago, to resounding success. In a room donated by the local community center, upwards of 25-30 adults have been meeting and praying together under the auspices of the Masorti Movement (the Conservative Movement of Israel).

Things have been kept pretty word of mouth and grass roots, until in an effort to boost attendance, our sparkplug initiated a story about us in the local newspaper, including a photo of two people who help lead our services (male and female rabbinical students) holding a Torah.

Evidently, when the religious establishment saw the photo and story, they were none too pleased. And we heard through the grapevine that the chief rabbi was planning on paying a surprise visit to our Shabbat morning service. We weren’t sure whether he was going to try and disrupt it, or attempt to speak to us about the ills of men and women sitting and praying together. We were quite sure he wasn’t going to sit down among us and put his arm around the woman next to him and sing ‘Adon Olam.’

Ahead of the expected event, we made contingency plans as to how to react – do we let him in? Let him speak? Confront him if he attempts to cause disruptions? In the end, he didn’t show, so we didn’t have to implement any of our plans, but they’re ready for next time.

It’s just a little weird that in the Jewish state, we have to develop contingency plans against a rabbi who is hoping to prevent Jews from holding a Shabbat morning service in a format that is recognized and respected everywhere in the Western world.

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Refugee photography

January 29, 2009 - 2:18 PM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, coexistence, Immigrant Moments 

Active VisionSince late 2006, an estimated 10,000 African refugees and asylum seekers have arrived in Israel, crossing the border with Egypt on foot. After a long period of not knowing what to do with these people, several governmental bodies have since begun assisting them via a variety of humanitarian projects.

NGOs have been paying attention as well, with initiatives like Fugee Fridays organizing grassroots efforts to bring food from the Carmel Market to hungry refugees. A related organization, called ActiveVision, offering activities and workshops for refugees in the digital visual media arts. Since the late summer, one workshop project called “Asylum City” has taught a group of pupils how to operate still and video cameras as tools for conveying a message. Assignments mostly focused on documenting the community of asylum seeking families living in Tel Aviv, with the results yielding a print publication and a photo exhibition.

As Fugee Fridays co-founder Daniel Cherrin puts it in a recent piece for Haaretz,

The [Asylum City] course was extremely successful and instructors were able to teach the importance of filmmaking and storytelling both in theory and in practice. As a result, some very interesting and important films were produced. The group thus also actively takes part in spreading the awareness of their own situation.

Many of the older images from Asylum City can be seen here, while the latest batch, including profiles of some of the photographers, can be seen here. A slideshow of images from the workshops themselves can be seen here. Last week, a photo exhibition opened at the Shapira Quarter home of Y Circus.

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Out With the Old, in With the New

November 11, 2008 - 12:34 AM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: General 

Israel is full of villages – “k’farim,” in Hebrew. There’s Kfar Tabor, Kfar Vitkin, Kfar Shemaryahu, Kfar Habad – and my personal favorite, Kfar Saba. Most of these villages were established decades ago, usually as agricultural settlements.

And some of Israel’s many k’farim may still be largely involved in agriculture – probably the ones way up north or down south. But as the Tel Aviv-centered megalopolis expands ever outwards, and better highways and rail links bring the periphery closer to the center, many of the k’farim in the center of the country have found a new way to grow profits – with real estate, as developers buy up the old free-standing houses, many with large lots, and magically turn them into luxury apartment buildings, offices, malls, and all the other features of Israel’s increasingly urban/suburban landscape.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course; people gotta live, and as crowded as Israel is, there is still plenty of open space in the Galilee, and especially the Negev. While many farms and fields in the Sharon region, for example, have been turned into homes and stores, effective Israeli methods of land reclamation has turned large parts of the Negev into flourishing farmland, with everything from vegetables to fruit to grain growing nicely.

In Israel, as in much of Europe, the city centers are the most expensive places to live, and the further out you move, the cheaper the home. But when enough people move far enough out, that location gets an “upgrade,” and turns into a city, in and of itself. And that’s what’s been happening to almost all of the small towns, the k’farim, that once surrounded Tel Aviv. The villages are still there, in name – but now many of them are big cities.
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Living as I do in a town not too far from Kfar Saba, I’ve seen the process unfold there over the past few years. First came the mall in the middle of town; then came the new luxury buildings and homes, with real estate shooting up in value by hundreds of percent within a couple of years. Then, they built the new park, a sure sign that Kfar Saba was no longer a “k’far,” which would have its own natural open spaces. Now, the developers have moved on to the edge of town; the funky industrial zone, which really was dedicated to industry (not shopping, like in a lot of other towns), is getting a huge sandlar111109.jpgcombination office/mall space, which will take up about five big city blocks!

Thus the photos accompanying this piece: I may have come across some of the last “authentic” original agricultural-era homes in Kfar Saba. Someone still lives in the house with the sign in the top photo (there’s a satellite dish on the roof), but apparently they got an offer they couldn’t refuse, because it appears that a “luxury building” is going up on the site.

At least we’ll still have the shoemaker, (“sandlar”), whose little shack is seen in the bottom photo. This structure must have been built decades ago, but whoever owns it still has some principles, it seems – no “for sale” signs are up on this one, yet. Maybe the municipality should buy it out in order to preserve it – and let the next generation get a sample of “the way it was.”

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