Foto Friday – Robert Gorsoun sees Israel’s beauty
Filed under: Art, Foto Friday, General, Travel
Robert Gorsoun is a photographer who takes pictures for the love of it. Wherever he travels, he snaps pictures and Israel is beautiful through his lens…
…the Banias in Israel’s north…
…a rainbow, captured in mid-storm over the Herzliya beach…
…a field of flowers by the roadside, stretching on forever…
…a water lily…
…or flowering cacti at the Utopia Orchid Park…
…and on through to the crater at Mizpe Ramon.
More photos by Gorsoun — including some spectacular panoramas that don’t fit on an Israelity page but should be seen — are posted on Panoramio.
Welcome to Beersheva – Israel’s mall capital
A couple of months ago we were on our way back from Eilat with friends when the kids started to get hungry and fractious. We decided to stop in Beersheva.
My memories of Beersheva were of some hot dusty town with a dilapidated center, and a few basic restaurants that looked like they were decorated in the 1980s. Our friends, who had lived in the nearby army base of Hazerim for some years, took us on a short cut from the main road through a neighborhood and then out into the retail district of the city.
The sheer size of this area was flabbergasting. We drove from one power outlet or outdoor mall, to another – seven in total – all seemingly lined up one after the other. There were so many restaurants and cafes to choose from that we actually got confused. It went on and on for miles, and because it was a Saturday evening, the roads were heaving with people.
Hundreds of shops, restaurants, cinemas, bowling alleys. It was as if we had taken a wrong turn out of the barren and empty Negev desert straight into America. “It’s the biggest mall in Israel,” our friends told us, and we certainly weren’t going to argue that point.
Well not any more. Apparently the biggest mall in Israel is just about to be built. Where? In Beersheva, of course.
The Lahav Group has announced that it plans to build the Beersheva Mall over a stretch of about 100,000 sq. meters at a cost of $180.5m. The shopping center, 2km from the old city, and 3km from the central bus station, is due to be completed in 2012, and what makes this entirely different from all the other malls, apparently, is that it’s going to be the first green shopping center in the country. This means recycling rainwater, solar panels, and a few bike lanes.
What it also means is that the citizens of Beersheva and the environs will have yet another mall to shop at. How many stores can one town possibly need?
Maybe this is what happens to desert towns. Maybe in a boiling, often inhospitable climate, shopping is the only resort. But it seems to me, and please correct me if I’m wrong since I don’t live in Beersheva, that rather than create yet another out of town shopping area, this money might be best served by actually turning the still run down but potentially interesting center into a place where people might actually like to just hang out.
Ostrich farming rollercoaster
Filed under: Business, Environment, Food, General, History and Culture
What with mad cow disease fears, concern over the unhealthy effects of eating animal fats and reports on the environmental damage caused by cattle farms, “alternative meat” (not to be confused with “meat alternatives”) is a growth industry.
Compared to other meats, ostrich meat cooks faster, has richer flavor and contains less than half the fat that even chicken has. Hence the relatively heavy marketing efforts associated with the burgundy poultry meat, especially in England.
Here in Israel, the ostrich meat industry started to gain momentum in the Nineties, although in 2007, some new legislation was necessary in order to make it retroactively legal, when Environmental Protection Minister Gideon Ezra reclassified ostriches and crocodiles as “nurtured wildlife.”
Mike van Grevenbroek, a Dutch immigrant to Israel, and his wife Tsophia, have been farming ostriches for 27 years now in the western Negev’s Besor district. The van Grevenbroeks and their organization, called Exotic Crops, were recently profiled in depth in Ha’aretz. The farm keeps a living inventory of some 7000 ostriches currently, and its managers estimate that they export over 150 tons of meat annually – all to Europe. Soon they’ll start marketing to locals too.
Although the large birds were once an indigenous species here, they disappeared from Israel back in the Twenties. So in 1973, van Grevenbroek smuggled 50 chicks from Ethiopia:
This was no easy feat. “At the time, you weren’t allowed to take ostriches out of South Africa,” [he] explains. “The Africans knew they had a gold mine and didn’t want to share it. In those years, they were the only ones in the world who raised ostriches, primarily for feathers and the leather industry, and they didn’t want any competition. But we were already swept up in the fantasy, and felt there was no other way except to smuggle some eggs to Israel. And so one day, I put a few eggs that were almost ready to hatch in a carry-on bag – the chicks were really ready – and within a few hours we were on an African Airlines flight from Johannesburg to Tel Aviv.”
The industry endured a rocky road since then, with demand increasing in the Eighties and peaking in 2000, with 20 ostrich farms in operation in Israel, export laws changing all the time due to pressures from the kibbutz movement. But it wasn’t always about the meat – Exotic Crops only opened its slaughterhouse in the early Nineties – and even now, with ostrich meat booming in international popularity, competition has become stiff, with many firms around the world making for a crowded market.
Ostrich meat has even given new meaning to our nation’s ongoing conflict with the Iranians. But Israeli ingenuity seems to be up to the task. And another local ostrich farmer Reginald Michiels offers us many savory recipes beyond enormous sandwiches, if you’re interesting in trying it at home.
Image of an Israeli ostrich courtesy thenotbelonghereguy from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
Out With the Old, in With the New
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.
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 
combination 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.”
Harvesting rays, finally
Filed under: A New Reality, Business, Environment, General, Technology
It’s hard to believe, but the private solar power station that Moshe Tenne recently activated on his Negev farm is actually the country’s first. Israel Electric (IEC), the state-run monopoly utility, has been both praised (for its international business savvy) and criticized (for its wasteful ways) in the press lately, but its innovative new program to offer compensation to private do-gooders who feed power back into the grid seems to be working.
The Tenne family established its farm three years ago, and makes its living from a sophisticated dairy barn with 70 cows producing about 800,000 liters of milk a year.
Tenne’s power plant has thin-film solar panels made by Sharp on 600 square meters of the cowshed’s roof. He also installed another array of multicrystal silicon solar cells, a different technology. These are mounted on systems that track the sun during the day and are spread out over about a dunam of his farmland, about a quarter acre. The arrays were installed by the company Solar-Power. Tenne paid for the new power generating system with loans and out of his own funds.
The customers will settle accounts with the IEC by offsetting the power they sell back to the electric company each month against the rest of the electric bill, based on the readings of new electric meters. The system is already powering the farm, and will be hooked up to the national grid in another two weeks.
Tenne reportedly spent NIS 1.3 million on building the power plant, which he estimates will pay for itself in electric bill savings within six years. He’s already hard at work installing wind turbines as well.
But the strange part of this story is that despite Israel’s reputations for technological innovation, sunny weather and apprehensions when it comes to energy, it took until the summer of 2008 for IEC’s incentive program to pave the way for projects like these. (Although to be fair, a private Jerusalem firm called Luz has overseen the construction of nine California solar power plants.)
The country has been working on plans for non-grassroots solar power farms for at least five years, and one such proposal could mean the launch of the biggest plant of its kind in the world. Prof. David Faiman, director of Ben-Gurion University’s National Solar Energy Center in Sde Boker, estimated in 2003 that solar energy plants in the Negev could potentially produce all the country’s power on just 225 square kilometers of land, so it will certainly be interesting to see where this trend takes us.
Foto Friday
My husband is one of those alarming adventure types. He’s always into some kind of action sport – either mountain biking, snowboarding, surfing, offroad motorbiking or paragliding.
I remember him leaping off a steep cliff on a paraglider some years ago. It was his first time, and he’d had no training that I could see. After about 30 minutes he yelled down to a friend as he circled above the cliff top – “So how do I land?”
You get used to it gradually. As well as the occasional hospital visits for broken fingers, stitches, torn ligaments, and a range of other – thankfully – minor injuries.
The one thing about these trips is that he gets to go to all sorts of places off the beaten track that most of us never get to see. On a recent offroad motorbike trip to the Negev, he came back with these beautiful pictures.
Makes me almost wish I’d gone with him… yeh right.
Foto Friday – BGU Through Dani Machlis’ Eyes
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, Foto Friday, General, Life
Dani Machlis is staff photographer for Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. You might think his job entails an never-endlng parade of faculty head shots and donor dinners, but in fact, it affords him endless creative opportunties. Sent to shoot the new Alon Building for High Tech on the University’s Marcus Family Campus, Machlis came back with a stunning composition in blue and gold.
Photo by Dani Machlis
A visit to the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research at the University’s Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, yielded an image that captures the tactile satisfaction of hands-on research.
Photo by Dani Machlis
The last image, entitled “Wow”, placed first in the news and features category of American University’s May photo competition. Machlis captured the fire dancers in motion amidst the clatter of plates and cutlery, at the University’s recent Board of Governors’ meeting. The din of dinner fades into the background and Machlis captures BGU’s essence: a magical oasis of advancement and technology emerging, mirage-like, out of the desert night.
Photo by Dani Machlis
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