Nostalgia Sunday – Commercials Go Way Retro

March 7, 2010 - 10:17 PM by · 2 Comments
Filed under: General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Music, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, tv 

We are awash in a flood of nostalgia that shows absolutely no sign on abating. As part of that trend, our commercials and TV shows are populated by the stars of yesteryear, trying today to earn some of the cash-o-la they couldn’t back in those modest days.

Take, for example, singer-songwriter Mati Caspi, seen lately endorsing Bituach Yashir direct insurance. Other unlikely singing insurance pitchmen include David Broza and Boaz Sharabi.

And here, just to remind you of why we loved them — Riki Gal and Mati Caspi in concert televised by Channel 2, then in its infancy. (Check out Riki’s single lace glove!).

Gal, by the way, is still a force to be reckoned with (she judged the first two seasons of Kohav Nolad, the Israeli version of Pop Idol), and will be performing in Jerusalem on Monday night this week at a benefit for Tsad Kadima, the Israeli organization dedicated to the rehabilitation of children, adolescents and young adults with cerebral palsy and other motor dysfunctions. (Tickets are still available. Contact anat@tsadkadima.org.il or call 02-6540062).

But back to nostalgia: even stars who no longer walk this earth are getting into the game. Israel Discount Bank revived a commercial from the 80s that starred the late great actor Shaike Ophir.

The ad’s revival highlights the fact Discount Bank was Israel’s first to offer telebanking-a revolutionary concept back then, especially in light of the poor quality of our phone service (“poor” being a polite substitute for the other four letter word I was considering using). Ophir actually offers the cop an asimon phone token so he can make the call. The commercial has proven so popular, there’s a follow-up where today’s comedians pay homage to Ophir:

Even Maccabi Health Services has climbed on the retro bandwagon, launching a radio campaign that employs the use of this catchy jingle for powdered orangeade Zip. The connection between HMO and beverage is tenuous — something about “We’re not in the Eighties anymore, so why should your health organization be?” — but it’s fun to revisit the era and that peculiar but sweet Israeli institution of the family whistle. Enjoy the original.

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Nostalgia Sunday – Yemenite Embroidery

February 15, 2009 - 10:14 PM by · 5 Comments
Filed under: Art, design, General, History and Culture, Nostalgia Sunday, Profiles 

Back in the early Sixties, most kids’ mothers wore frilly cocktail aprons to entertain. Not my Israeli mother. Hers looked like this.

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And her miniskirts and pantsuits looked like this.

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My mother, a singer of international folksongs, had a great collection of gowns. Many were created at Esther Zeitz, a Jerusalem house of fashion that employed a team of Yemenite seamstresses that sat, day in and day out, stitching threads of silver and gold onto splendid garments. Who needed jewels when you had something like this bedecking your neck?

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Wearing Yemenite embroidery was very cool among Israeli women who came of age during the 1940s and 50s. This dress was made for my mother when she was a teenager during the 1948 War of Independence.

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In the Sixties, after the 1967 war and the reunification of Jerusalem, she combed the Old City looking for a velvet jacket with Bedouin embroidery to wear over a black velvet gown. She found one, too.

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In the early Seventies, she scored some Bedouin-style embroidered garments from the Arab Women’s Union of Bethlehem, an embroidery cooperative.

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But my favorites will always be the Esther Zeitz outfits. As I recall it, Zeitz – whom I remember as a large woman with swollen arms – closed down in the Eighties when she became too ill to manage. It would be nice to find out more about what happened to the workshop, which was located at the junction of Ben Yehuda and Bezalel streets – I think it is a hairdressers’ today.

My sisters and I wore many of these garments during the Go-Go Eighties. Today, however, they are fragile – the polyester fabric is forever but not the cotton threads that hold down the metallic threads. We are not sure what will happen to this collection, and so decided to document the clothes that, for us, are part of a happy memory.

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