New kosher wine, clothing and YouTube too

February 1, 2011 - 9:47 AM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Business, Technology 

It’s been busy week for the kosher market. Ynet reported on three new certifiably kosher products, including one online.

Tulip Winery goes kosher

The first is the most mundane. Tulip, a well-regarded boutique winery, will be kosher by the fall. The reason, says the winery’s CEO Roee Yitzhaki, is purely financial. “We did the math and realized that we lose 8,000 holiday gift baskets each year because our wine is not kosher,” Yitzhaki told Ynet.

The transition hasn’t been cheap ($421,000 has been invested so far) or quick (it’s taken four years).

YouTube gone kosher

Less time in development is the new Glatube, an all-kosher alternative to YouTube. Indeed, “it’s exactly like YouTube, with one exception: No promiscuity,” says Sharon Bokobza, the site’s creator and a student at an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva belong to the Breslov Hassidic movement.

Glatube (which is a play on the words “glatt kosher”) already has 1,000 clips uploaded, most of them religious music and classes by heavily bearded rabbis. Bokobza promises there will be no images women and absolutely no women singing (he’s employed a team of kashrut “supervisors” who vet each video). There is apparently a clip of a cat playing the piano. A klezmer tune I assume?

Make sure to get kosher clothes too

The final entry in our purity parade is another form of kosher supervision, this one for clothing stores in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim and Geula neighborhoods.

“The Committee for the Sanctity of the Camp” sends haredi women across town to inspect clothes and then gives those stores that are sufficiently modest their official certificate of approval.

How do all these fit together? Well, I’m planning on spending a nice evening watching Glatube, sipping a glass of kosher Tulip wine, while my wife is adorned in officially sanctioned modest clothing. Care to join me?

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Stage mom

November 13, 2009 - 10:01 AM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Art, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Movies 

Our director, Eran Riklis

Our director, Eran Riklis

I became a stage mother this week. Through a series of amusing connections and events (my babysitter’s younger sister has a starring role in an Israeli television show, Room Service, and the casting director asked her mother if she knew any babies in Jerusalem who could be cast in a new Eran Riklis film), my boys are two of the babies in Eran Riklis’s latest movie, Human Resources.

Set in Jerusalem, and based on the 2004 A.B. Yehoshua book, The Mission of the Human Resources Manager, it’s about a human resources manager in a big Jerusalem bakery during the dark days of the second intifada. A Russian worker dies in a suicide bombing attack and when no one claims her body, he has to take her back to Russia.

Filming is taking place in Jerusalem and Romania, and we were part of the Jerusalem filming, which was set in the ghost-town like atmosphere of the Schneller Army base, in the Geula neighborhood. Our boys’ film father was Mark Ivanir, a Russian-born actor who came to Israel in 1972 and now splits his time between Israel and the U.S. Eran Riklis, the director and a big bear of a guy, was genial enough with the babies, although a tad confused about what 12-month-olds are supposed to be doing. He wanted them to crawl, but also sit quietly in an infant seat; start working at 4:30 in the afternoon, and go strong until 8 pm. And when I questioned whether a 12-month-old sitting in an infant seat perched on a chest was realistic (and safe), I could see the word balloons next to their mouths, saying “Overprotective American mother!”

We worked it out, the boys cooperated for the most part, and now we just sit tight and wait for the movie premiere, with Ziv and Lev’s names in the credits. And it’s probably safe to say that I’ll never do this again, but you never know.

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