Neighborly relations
Filed under: General, health, Holidays, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life
A typical Jerusalem co-op
We were on our way home from Kol Nidre services in Jerusalem; me, my boys, sister, brother-in-law and one of my nephews, walking in the middle of the street, reveling in that particular freedom offered by the car-less Yom Kippur stretch. As I walked in the house, the phone rang, which is highly irregular on Yom Kippur, and made me think “emergency.” And it was, as my mother was on the other end, calling from Hadassah Ein Kerem to let me know that she’d fallen and been brought to the ER by an ambulance. I called my sister, whose phone was busy, also unusual. It turned out that she was speaking to “Harry the plumber”, known to many in this area and also my mother’s neighbor.
As we pieced the story together — and got a contingent to the hospital — it transpired that despite being on her own, our mother was taken care of by her neighbors, both near and down the block. She fell in a friend’s stairwell, was helped by her friend’s neighbors who knew her peripherally and who ran to get my mother’s downstairs neighbor, a Shaare Zedek doctor. He checked her out called the ambulance, while Harry let himself into my mother’s apartment to get our contact information. In the meantime, while we were trying to piece together the story, I called Harry who walked down to the doctor’s apartment to help me figure out the order of events.
In the end, everything was okay, and we got Mom home fairly quickly, with neighbors dropping in over the next days to check in on her. It may be just a simple Jerusalem co-op, but it’s great to have good neighbors.
A new take on an old woman
When I was in college, I was a big fan of conceptual art. I would spend my free time trawling avant-garde museums in search of a performance art video of a man writing on the floor for 25 minutes or a theatrical piece narrated entirely on a Walkman tape player. I even created my own multimedia project, which combined dance, original music and psychedelic video.
I still enjoy the wackier side of art, but my tastes – or perhaps my tolerance level – has become more discerning over the years. But when a show of young Jerusalem video and animation artists took place just around the corner from my home – well, how could I resist?
The program, called Home.Video (yes, that’s spelled correctly), took place at the recently relocated Merkaz Hamagshimim center, a combination absorption, community and activist center for English-speaking new immigrants, sponsored by Hadassah’s Young Judea Zionist youth movement and located in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem.
The exhibit, which included students from Jerusalem’s prestigious Bezalel art school, the Sam Spiegel film school and Sapir College in Sderot (in the news more for its proximity to Gaza and its rockets).
The projects displayed were pretty eclectic, including a woman contorting herself into a narrow bookshelf and a video that featured both a ballerina and a cute kitty (can you say viral YouTube video?)
Our favorite was by Mizmor Watzman (full disclosure: she’s our kids’ old babysitter and the reason we knew about the show in the first place). Nevertheless, her work was an intricate animated piece playing off the classic “Old Woman in the Shoe” folk tale. In the video, the woman had to contend with an animated chalk drawing that was wreaking havoc on her obsessive quest to keep the shoe squeaky clean.
Mizmor told us that it had taken her a week of sleepless nights to film and another 3 months to edit. You can find it on YouTube here. At just a few minutes in length, it’s well worth a look.
Nostalgia Sunday – Welcome to Eggs-rael
Filed under: Food, General, health, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Travel
Pinch me, I must be dreaming. For the first time in all my years here, I’ve found a place with egg white omelet on the menu. Not that you aren’t able to order an omelet made of egg whites in Israel. But this generally this involves making long explanations to young wait-persons who generally respond with everything from a blank stare of utter confusion to a just-as-confused-but-trying-to-be-helpful, “Are you sure you only want the whites? I’m going to have to charge you for a regular omelet anyway, you know.” So, having it on the menu is a big deal.
It got me thinking about eggs, which are a very important part of the daily diet for most Israelis – and not just during Passover when it’s all eggs, all the time. According to a 2007 report by International Egg and Poultry Review, hen egg consumption in Israel was 30.98, putting Israel 36th in world per capita consumption. In 2004, Globes reported that the average Israeli consumed 239 eggs per year.
One of the reasons consumption is so high is because eggs aren’t just for breakfast in Israel. I still remember this revelation at the age of 7 or 8 when I was invited to dinner at the home of a little girl in my Grandmother’s Jerusalem neighborhood. Her mother served us fried eggs, sunny side up. Wow! Breakfast food for dinner! This must be a pretty good country to live in if you can have that.
Of course, actually coming here to live meant dealing with some of the peculiarities of egg procurement. For example, during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, eggs were taken away from consumers and delivered straight to our soldiers. The only eggs available were tiny little substandard ones — and then only through the black market.
Meanwhile, Israel’s soldiers were being stuffed silly with four, five and six eggs a day. Eventually, this artificially created shortage ended, eggs came back to the grocery shelves and those soldiers — now in their 50s and 60s — treat their high cholesterol levels with statin drugs. (Israel’s Hadassah Hospital, you should know, was a pioneer in the use of statins for controlling high blood pressure).
Another weird thing was that there were no egg cartons, just trays of eggs. If you just wanted to buy a few eggs, say 6 or 8, the grocery store proprietor would place them very carefully in a little brown paper bag and hand it to you to carry gingerly back home. And if you were lucky, most of them would arrive whole. This led to the development of the portable plastic egg carrying case.
Even before the State was founded, most of Israel’s eggs were marketed by evil monolith (I am not kidding) Tnuva which at one point in the 1980s marketed 66% of all of the country’s eggs. To its credit, Tnuva did standardize levels of production and was the first Israeli company to qualify for ISO 9002 international standardization. Nonetheless, times have changed and today Tnuva has to make do with controlling a mere 35% of the egg market in Israel.
I’m too young to have experienced the austerity regime of Israel’s early statehood but the excellent Nostal site (in Hebrew but with lots of pictures) has a nice entry about powdered eggs, which seem to have characterized the era for many.
But I am old enough to have seen one of the last egg stores in Tel Aviv, which was located on Shenkin Street right next to Cafe Tamar. It was not a boutique. It was a dumpy little store that sold one thing and one thing alone: that perfect oval symbol of rebirth.
Today, we have egg cartons by the dozen, restaurants like Tel Aviv’s Benedict that serve eggs all day and all night, and shakshouka, a North African dish consisting of eggs poached in tomato sauce, is a staple on every menu. (The Israel Poultry Council has a nice recipe here).
As for the aforementioned egg white omelet, it was served to me at the Si Espresso cafe. Located at the Latrun junction, the cafe is a popular hangout for mountain bikers from all over Israel (hence the healthy Lite Breakfast)*. Definitely recommended, even if you aren’t wearing biking shorts.
*This past Friday morning was no exception; the bikers hadn’t yet received the news that one of their own, triathlete Shneor Cheshin, had been killed while riding by a hit-and-run driver. You can read more about it in Yossi Melman’s impassioned editorial, Drivers to Blame, in Haaretz.
High anxiety over high cholesterol
I’ve always enjoyed good health and now, past the half century mark, have never had to take any medication for any chronic ailments. But it looks like the end of the streak is near.
Just before leaving for a week’s visit to North America, I went one morning with my wife to our local Maccabi health clinic to do our annual routine blood tests.
Even while I was away, a nurse at the clinic called the house and told my wife I should come see a doctor right away upon my return – my cholesterol and triglycerides didn’t look good. When my wife called me and said, “I have some bad news,” my first thought went right away to the car – something happened to the car.
When she told me it was just my cholesterol, I sighed in relief, thinking it would be a lot less expensive to fix my health than it would be to fix the car.
When I went to the doctor’s yesterday to get the word about the results, I was shown in to a young, British born doctor, a recent immigrant to Israel who was replacing my vacation-bound usual family doctor.
He looked over my blood results and said, ‘Did you fast before taking the test?” I knew that couldn’t be good, and told him that indeed, I did.
“Your cholesterol is high, but treatable. But your triglycerides – I’ve never seen triglycerides this high on someone,” he responded.
I started feeling weak and clammy as he said he wanted me to do another blood test to see if there was some mixup in the results. But if there weren’t he wanted me to go see a specialist at Hadassah Hospital.
So now I’m awaiting the results of the second blood test, due in the morning. If the original results were wrong, and my triglycerides were just high in the normal sense, then I forsee a visit to a dietician, a change in diet, increased exercise, and some weight loss in hopefully reducing the numbers without starting any medication. Perhaps if the latest Israeli innovation to lower cholesterol, as reported in ISRAEL21c, was already on the market, then that might be the answer.
And if not, well, I can swallow pills with the best of them.
Summer high-tech scandal keeps Israel amused
Filed under: Business, Crime, General, Life, Technology
Israel is agog. This week we’ve watched the best high-tech scandal to unfold since Kobi Alexander ran off to Namibia.
It all began at the start of the week when an Israeli newspaper broke a story about Bnei Brak company, Life Keeper, which has developed a heart monitor patch, selling a 37 percent stake in the company to a Taiwanese computer hardware manufacturer for $370 million, at a company value of $1 billion.
Someone's not telling the truth.
In these recessionary days, journalists across the country leapt on the story. Israeli company makes good – we just love that kind of story here. There were a few puzzling things, however. Number one of which was why no one had actually heard of this company before, especially given that it was developing such cool technology – the patch apparently could forecast when you were going to have a heart attack and send your location to a doctor.
The next day the doubts began. Israel’s financial daily, Globes carried out a bit of uncharacteristic investigative reporting into the sale and discovered that the Taiwanese company, Micro-Star International (MSI), hadn’t actually reported the deal, while its London office claimed it didn’t know a thing about it.
Not so, said SafeSky CEO, Dr. Gabi Picker. “The deal is valid and alive,” he told Globes. “We hold an MOU signed by a notary by both sides from Seligman & Co. law firm that accompanied the negotiations. They have a copy of the document.”
Globes also pointed out that none of Israel’s VC funds had heard of SafeSky – the company’s parent company, and nor had any of Israel’s leading doctors.
The next day Ha’aretz waded in, pointing out that the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem – supposedly conducting clinical trials for the device – had no connection to the company or the patch.
Picker, who joined SafeSky just a few weeks ago, also seemed to be getting cold feet, hinting that company director Hagai Hadas – a former Mossad man who had encouraged him to join the firm – for the mess. Ha’aretz said Picker told confidantes that he wasn’t entirely sure that either the product or the deal were real.
Doubts also surfaced about Aharon (Arik) Klein, supposedly the inventor of the patch technology. Turns out he’s serial con man who has numerous debts and various prison sentences for fraud. Even the police in Cyprus are hunting for him.
Now the latest news in the saga is that Picker has resigned. His resignation comes after a lawyer at Seligman & Co. refused to give Picker’s attorney a copy of the document about the transaction.
So what comes next? We’ll just have to wait and see. Ah. There’s nothing like a good scandal to keep you going through the slow, scorching days of summer. Far better than stories about aliens and crop circles.
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