Never too old to paraglide
Here’s a great news item. Trudy Bibring, 89 years old and a native Austrian who has been living in Israel for 30 years, paraglides to raise funds for 600 children at risk in childrens’ homes throughout Israel.
Her paragliding adventures began when Bibring, who lives in Netanya, would watch from her apartment window the paragliders jumping off the Netanya cliffs nearby. Netanya is considered the home of paragliding in Israel, as the city’s moderate cliffs plus a stiff offshore breeze provide the right environment for gliders, who are often seen cruising high above the beach, just along the cliff line.
Bibring thought to herself, hmm, that’d be a great stunt for raising money. Given that she’s a proper Austrian lady, she may not have said it just like that, but that was the gist of the idea.
Her friends, say Bibring, are proud and a little bit envious. And she’s still doing it, as seen in this YouTube video taken June 17, just a few weeks ago, from a cliff near Netanya’s Carmel Hotel.
89!
Small belts
Filed under: General, History and Culture, Life, Sports
One of Israeli schoolchildren’s favorite methods of exercise is martial arts. Thai boxing, kickboxing and judo are enormously popular, and karate is also huge. For most Israeli karate instructors, the teen and adult sets represent a tiny minority of their teaching time, with littler ones taking up the lion’s share.
A recent piece in Ha’aretz examines the phenomenon in depth, exploring the question of whether children aged four or five truly have much to gain by studying the martial arts. Also noteworthy is a list of potential benefits from martial arts training, which include increased self-esteem, increased levels of fitness, development of a sense of competition, fostering a sense of self-discipline, garnering a healthy outlet for letting out aggression, and other types of increased spiritual grounding.
The article also notes that according to the 2000 Sport Law, all phys-ed instructors must be licensed as sports instructors, which has increased the demand for certification courses like those offered at the prestigious Wingate Institute. Located near Netanya, Wingate offers instructors’ training on a high level, with an emphasis on educational techniques (the institute also houses training programs and facilities for Israel’s internationally exported athletes, including our Olympians).
Picking a good teacher, though, can be as important a decision as choosing when to get your kid started – check out these guys:
“After one or two training sessions I can tell parents about their child’s problems if there are any,” says Arthur Gribetz, the chief Tora dojo trainer in Jerusalem, a method based on Japanese karate. Gribetz notes that karate training “is very systematic and it teaches students to feel the body and the breath,” and therefore also helps decrease excess muscle tension, improves motor skills, teaches distinguishing between left and right and more.”
Shalom Avitan, chairman of the Karate-Shotokan Association in Israel, says that any sport in which there is correct training, with the appropriate trainer, contributes to a child’s development, but the acquisition of self-confidence is not to be taken for granted. “Self- confidence is built up over time,” says Avitan. “It is necessary to train for at least a year and a half or two years to start to see results, and that on condition that the trainer is a professional and aware of the children’s needs. If you throw a small child into combat with children who are bigger and more experienced than he is, this isn’t going to contribute to his self-confidence,” he says.
So no, you can’t just force your children to wax the car, scrub the floor, paint the fence and hope that they’ll be champions after a few weeks.
Image courtesy Tomer.Gabel from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
Blue carpet
Filed under: General, Israeliness, Movies, Pop Culture
Israelis love their celebrities. When locally celebrated pop culture figures reach even just the cusp of major international recognition, these figures feel the need to defend themselves as not being proper divas (see Shiri Maimon). When a local unknown becomes a blip on the international pop culture radar, let the Israeli embracing begin (see Eden Harel or Yael Naim).
And when a local becomes a full-blown international sensation – whoo boy, watch out for the storm of disproportionate Israeli love (see Zohan Dvir – yes, yes, we know he’s fictional – and supermodel Bar Rafaeli).
It all stems from a nation that has been deliberately starved of international pop culture contact since its birth – that is, until globalization and cable TV made such isolationism an irrelevant impossibility. The ebb and flow of Israel’s celeb-isolationism can be tracked as a parallel story to the ebb and flow of the profile of international rock acts that perform on her shores.
Known Zionist and big-time studio mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, on the other hand, is working hard to make Israel a standard destination for Hollywood’s elite – or at least for Hollywood’s elite comedic voice talents. Last year, he arranged for Jerry Seinfeld’s much-examined visit to Israel to promote his Bee Movie.
Now Katzenberg has arranged for a big-time Netanya premiere for Madagascar 2, with Ben Stiller, Chris Rock and Jada Pinkett Smith attending the screening yesterday. With the right red-carpet arrangements, apparently experiences like the Refaeli-DiCaprio debacle are avoidable. Yesterday, fans lined up, and autographed were signed.
The talent even joked about adoration here exceeding fan buzz back in the US. According to the Jerusalem Post, Stiller was quoted as saying, “This is better than any premiere we have had so far,” while Rock said of Israel, “It’s much better than Hollywood. They don’t like us in Hollywood, but here they love us.” Maybe that’s because American fans have been trained – to an extent, anyway – to ignore celebrities so as to not make them uncomfortable.
Referring to his Madagascar 2 character, Rock took the love to another level: “Marty the Zebra [pictured] loves Israel.”
So yes, Katzenberg, keep them coming. And keep this great land of ours in the international press for items that are happy and light.
Cholentpalooza
Now that the winter months are upon us once again, it’s time to bust out the old crock pot. The heavy stew that we call hamin or cholent might not have been so appropriate during the heat of the summer, when the manner in which it sits in the stomach can become cumbersome (although many argue that it should be served 52 Saturdays a year), but now pretty much all of us can agree to dig in.
It’s the definitive savory, hot, dense pan-Jewish comfort food, and it always has been. When you are forbidden by your Deity for thousands of years to light a fire or cook on Shabbat morning, loading up a pot with savory goodness on Friday afternoon and praying for a yummy mush to come off the fire 30 or so hours later made a lot of sense. Even the goyim agree that slow-cooked stews are the way to go.
In my home, when late February rolls around and we start to get a little less excited about the standard Ashkenaz combination of barley, beans, potatoes, onions, garlic, cubed beef and our off-the-record blend of seasonings, we sometimes opt for alternate recipes, like pseudo-East Asian cholent (heavy on the shitake mushrooms, green beans, sesame oil and soy sauce) or pseudo-Hindu cholent (coconut milk, whole cinnamon sticks, many sweet potatoes and no meat).
Others keep cholent new by adding secret ingredients, such as lamb fat (gives the whole thing a glossy coating of sinful flavor), whole heads of garlic (fun to peel and spread on bread), beer, hot dogs and the like. There are many recipe variations out there.
Now Netanya’s Blue Bay Hotel is gearing up for its first annual Hamin Festival, a celebration of the onset of cholent season. With festivals – especially those built around consumerist themes – popping up across the land at an alarming clip, why shouldn’t they? From 11 a.m. through 2 p.m. on each Saturday in December and January, Blue Bay is set to offer a cornicopia of hamin options, including traditional recipes from the Ashkenazi shtetl, Persia, Morocco and even Libya (they put beets in it!).
There will even be traditional ethnic musical performances (bouzouki, oud and wind instruments abound) to enhance the flavors, and when the weather permits, guests will be invited to sit outdoors, facing the sea. Admission costs NIS 59 for adults (children pay slightly less, dessert costs slightly more), and there are takeout options as well.
In the Simpsons episode “Homerpalooza,” Homer goes on a festival tour thanks to his formidable stomach. If he thinks getting shot in the belly with a cannon makes for a difficult yet exhilarating gastronomical festival experience, he should try visiting the Blue Bay Hotel over nine upcoming Saturdays in a row.
Good eats
Still got my head in the mercaz, local lingo for everything north of Jerusalem and south of Haifa, more or less, and following our weeklong stay in Hofit. It’s not that we’re starved for entertainment or consumer opportunities here in Jerusalem, but the towns and cities of center Israel offer just a tad more in terms of choice and range, which is not a bad thing to have for a change.
So a brief mention of two, nay, three places of interest that we visited over the course of the week, and not to worry, I’m not including Ikea, although we did spend a very intense morning there amidst the annual summer sale. Never again. But, for a food shopping experience that even the kids will like — and we were there with at least four of varying ages — check out Eden Teva Market, a Whole Foods-like emporium in Netanya that is right next door to Ikea.
Said to be the largest health food store in the Middle East, Eden Teva’s shelves are stocked with more than 14,000 products in 20 different departments. They’ve got aisles of unusual dried fruits and nuts, a specialty chocolate counter, an organic hummousiya in the middle of the store, right next to an Aldo sorbet and ice cream stand, with summer features such as green and red grape sorbes and fig ice cream. And if you check it out on a Friday, they’ve got many free treats to taste, as well as fresh greens and other veggies brought straight from nearby organic farms. There is also an Eden Teva Market in Rishon Lezion and one in Or Yehuda.
Just to complete the fresh food bonanza, make one more stop on your way out of the Netanya industrial zone and check out Lehem Artisan (5A Giborei Yisrael Street), a really wonderful local bakery with breads, cakes and other baked goodies that also offers many free samples for the hungry and cranky. It’s worth the trip.
Medusa
Filed under: Environment, General, History and Culture, Israeliness
As we head to a week-long beach vacation in Hofit, a little yishuv near Netanya, I’m dreaming about cool sand between my toes in the early morning, and salty seas in the late afternoon, just before the sun starts setting. But everyone has been telling me to watch out for the medusot, or jellyfish, that are plaguing the Mediterranean Sea this time of year.
Even the New York Times, well, International Herald Tribune for those of us on this side of the ocean, featured a front page, below-the-fold story the other day about jellyfish, the canary in the ocean’s coal mine, forcing beaches to close in Australia, France, Hawaii and Virginia. Benji Lovitt, in a recent Ynet piece, tells us to urinate on jellyfish stings when beachcombing in Tel Aviv, while my nephew said vinegar does the trick. Both sound fairly vile.
But I’m taking the more literary, esoteric approach, and thinking about jellyfish in the Etgar Keret manner, that is, as presented in his movie, Jellyfish, which won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in May. Saw it during the Israel Film Festival in July, and haven’t been able to get it out of my head. As J. Hoberman, a Village Voice reviewer, phrased it, “The movie’s title suggests that its principles [three lonely characters] are amorphous creatures subject to the ocean’s mysterious currents.”
Not stingers out to get clueless swimmers, but bloblike creatures bobbing along the ocean floor. Sort of like I plan to be on vacation, on the beach, in the water. Or as in the Greek sea nymph Medusa, when she still had hair, and before she sprang a head full of snakes and a reputation as a monstrous beast.
It’s all about attitude.
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