Nostalgia Sunday – The Levant Fair

September 19, 2010 - 9:39 PM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Profiles, Travel 

Sukkot is festival and exhibition season in Israel which means everything will be celebrated, feted and displayed over the coming weeks. But, though they may not know it, they owe a debt to the granddaddy of all Israeli events, the Levant Fair.

Fairs in the Yishuv, the early Jewish settlement, first started in the 1920s as agricultural exhibitions but by the second half of the decade their nature had changed to commercial and industrial. According to Levant Fair collector and historian Dr. Arthur H. Groten, “The need to promote the Palestine of the Yishuv, as the Jews of Palestine were called, as a vital economic link between West and East reflected the cosmopolitan attitude of many of the new immigrants…”

The 1932 Palestine and Near East Fair was the first to be called a “Levant Fair” and “was the first to have official foreign governmental representation including Great Britain, U.S.S.R, Egypt, Cyprus, Romania, Turkey, Switzerland, Poland, Latvia and Bulgaria. 831 foreign firms exhibited and 285,000 people attended.”

It was that year that the fair adopted a new mascot: a flying camel. (Groten relates “an apocryphal tale” that when Tel Aviv’s Mayor Meir Dizengoff said to his colleague, the Mayor of Jaffa that he wished for his city to host a Levant Fair similar to those held throughout the Near East, “he was told that it would happen ‘when camels fly’”). True or not, the logo was much loved; it appeared on stamps, and is still used today by the Israel Trade Fairs & Convention Center.

But things really got going in 1934, “through the construction of an entirely new complex on the banks of the Yarkon River by a group of young architects, trained in Europe, many at the Bauhaus, under the direction of Arieh El-Hanani. The fairgrounds were an integrated assemblage of International Style buildings. In fact, it was the largest such integrated grouping ever constructed… Over 600,000 visitors paid to attend an event that included 36 foreign governments and 2200 firms (1500 being foreign).”

El-Hanani also designed the sculpture “Hapoel HaIvri” (The Jewish Worker), one of the Yishuv’s first works of urban public art.

On a personal note: my Israeli mother was born in Jerusalem in 1929; five years later, her family came to live in Tel Aviv. So I like to think that maybe, just maybe, she was one of the children who climbed on the statue, sat on her mother’s knee during the opening ceremony audience or rode the “Luna Park” carousel.

The last fair, held in 1936, was not well-attended due to the increasingly troubled situation in Europe, the rise of Nazism and the war against the Jews, as well as the Arab revolt.

Over the years, the fairgrounds fell into disrepair and the pavilions used mainly as ceramic and tile warehouses. The port closed to ships in 1965. The fairgrounds were moved to North Tel Aviv. Only in 2001 did reconstruction of the historic Tel Aviv port commence and with it, the rehabilitation of the Bauhaus structures — those few that remain. However, the statue of a flying camel still sits atop a flagpole at the main entrance and the modernist statue of the Hebrew Worker has also survived.

Today’s photos come mainly from the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, a rich source of historical images of the Middle East photographed from 1898 to 1946.

For more about the early days of Tel Aviv, see “City of Work and Prosperity”: The Levant Fair, part of the Eliasaf Robinson Tel Aviv Collection at Stanford University. And there are more great photographs of the Levant Fair on a site called Abraham Stern’s Tel Aviv.

Also, check out Dr. Arthur H. Groten’s wonderful collection of stamps, ephemera and additional photos of the fair in his online paper, Semiotics and the Levant Fairs of Palestine. It is an amazing and enjoyable read.

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Belly dancing on the Red Sea

January 30, 2009 - 2:35 PM by · 2 Comments
Filed under: coexistence, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Pop Culture 

An Israeli belly dancerIn a trend that runs parallel to the exploding popularity of pole dancing lessons among North American soccer moms, Israeli women – even Baby Boom-generation Ashkenaziot (Jews of Eastern European descent) – have been flocking to belly dancing activities and workshops in recent years.

The art form’s renaissance in Israeli culture, which always seems to be searching for ways to marry Middle Eastern folk arts with contemporary lifestyles, was on display in full force this past weekend in Eilat, where the fifth annual International Belly Dance Festival took place with much fanfare at the Golden Tulip hotel, according to The Jerusalem Post.

Workshops with over 20 instructors from around the world introduced participants to a variety of schools of thought on the subject of abdominal writhing. A wares fair offered goods like Turkish outfits, Indian jewelry and Egyptian recordings. A belly dance-off allowed participants from Russia, France, Germany Belgium and Israel to compete for a slot in an upcoming Berlin competition as part of that city’s Bazar Oriental festival.

And recital performances kept those in attendance entertained, thanks to shimmying from the likes of Egyptian-bred Magdy El-Leisy and Moroccan-raised Mayodi.

Image of an Israeli belly dancer courtesy YanivG from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

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