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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Picture of the week: Bar Refaeli – in trouble again with Israel’s ultra-orthodox

November 25, 2009 - 10:40 AM by · 4 Comments
Filed under: General, Israeliness, Life, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Religion 

Bar Refaeli reveals all - almost

Earlier this month, it was Bar Refaeli’s billboard for Fox that made Israel’s ultra-orthodox population threaten boycotts, now it’s Refaeli’s billboard for clothing company Bonita De Mas.

They just don’t like to see her naked, or even semi-naked, or even, come to that matter, any hint that she might be naked under her clothes.

When Fox put up their billboard on the Ayalon Highway in Tel Aviv showing Refaeli lying provocatively under a blanket next to Israeli Survivor winner Noam Tor, with jeans on I might add, and not actually showing the slightest bit of breast, they immediately threatened a boycott if Fox didn’t take the advert down.

So what did clothing chain Fox do? They caved of course. They thought about the outlets they have selling clothes to the orthodox and panicked. The risqué, and rather sweet, ad was immediately replaced by a modest one of Refaeli and Tor fully dressed in winter clothes . Boring.

Now the ultra-orthodox are up in arms yet again because Bonita De Mas has put up a billboard of Refaeli wearing nothing but a bra and knickers.

Now I can think of many reasons why we should be campaigning against this kind of ad – mainly because of the objectification of women, the damage this kind of picture does to women’s self image etc. etc., but somehow when the ultra-orthodox population complains that this is poisoning the public environment, I get a little narked.

These are the same people who force women to sit at the back of their buses, the same people who conduct aggressive modesty patrols, attacking women who they deem to be wearing the wrong length of hemline or cuff. These are the same people, in fact, who are trying to make women completely invisible.

And let’s not get into the protests against Intel, the riots in the streets, the firebombing of shops that sell ‘provocative’ women’s clothes, or even the stoning of motorists who drive in the wrong areas of Jerusalem on a Saturday. Enough already.

Hell, I hate to see naked women adorning posters, but I hope Bonita De Mas sticks by its guns and keeps those posters up for all to see.

Photo by Gili Yaari/Flash 90.

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Going to the zoo

November 6, 2009 - 10:57 AM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: coexistence, General, Israeliness, Life 

I’ve been waiting for the right moment to introduce my baby boys to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, and given that their ears perk up every time they hear a dog bark, bird chirp or see a bird cross their path, I figured the time had come. Enough with reading about animals and faking a tiger’s snarl; we had to actually see some live animals.

The aggressive goat

The aggressive goat

The wait was well worth it — as is the annual membership which varies for singles, couples, couples with one child, two children, etc. — as they were equally enthusiastic about all the animals we saw, from ducks and flamingos to meerkats and yes, a couple of tigers. They both were slightly flipped out by the goats who swarmed their stroller in the ‘pinat chai’ (petting zoo), one trying to grab the remnant of Lev’s cookie out of his small fist. But once the goats butted out, it was on to bigger thrills, like stroking a sheep and watching turtles crawl around their enclosure.

The choices of animals to visit seems endless on that first trip to the zoo — elephants! zebras! monkeys! And what I also liked is the coexistence effect of the place; on a Thursday morning, the place was pleasantly full with ultra Orthodox boys on a school trip, Arab elementary school children in their red sweater uniforms, also on a school trip, as well as Arab high schoolers and similarly-aged Jewish high school kids. And just to prove the zoo’s coexistence effect, all signs next to the animals’ enclosures are written in Hebrew, Arabic, English and, often, Yiddish.

30seczoo01.MP3We’re [all] going to the zoo…

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Shas trying a bit of feminism

February 5, 2009 - 6:34 PM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Politics 

Livni and feminismThe Shas party has had the upper hand on Tzipi Livni ever since the Kadima leader’s aspirations to take over from Olmert as prime minister were dashed by Shas’s coalition holdout tactics.

As a result, Livini and Kadima were forced to keep Olmert at the country’s helm, and the general elections scheduled for next week became a necessity. With Kadima trailing in the polls, one can’t resist wondering if Livni has been secretly regretting her decision to not kowtow to Shas back in the fall.

One of the most popular of the second-tier parties, the ultra-Orthodox Sephardi Shas party doesn’t stand a chance to elect a prime minister, but it always finds a way to obtain big cabinet appointments and budgets for its programs as coalition bargaining chips.

But until now, Livni has had one clear advantage over all of the other parties: the feminist card. No other major contending party in this race has a woman at the top of its list, which, as we know, can be a major draw.

And Shas can always use some good PR for believing in the leadership potential for women – especially given that the party’s spiritual figurehead, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, makes a habit of saying politically incorrect things. Shas has been “trying a bit of feminism” (as our friend Ali G puts it) ever since it launched a “Strengthening Women” platform in December.

This week, the party upped the feminist ante by allowing Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s daughter-in-law (and flat-mate), Yehudit Yosef, to take on a more public role, Haaretz reports. Apparently, Yehudit Yosef has for years been a major playing behind the scenes with Shas, but this week, she began campaigning on behalf of the party, rallying supporters with an inspiring speech in Jerusalem on Monday:

“I know how concerned [Rabbi Ovadia Yosef] is about women’s issues, how he educated his children to take care of their womenfolk so that they would not lack for anything,” she said. “When he gives his class on Saturday night and comes to the issue of women, he gives them a lecture on how to treat a woman, what to do for her, how to behave, what to buy her, and so forth. It’s such a lovely thing.”

Will lip service like this woo away some potential Kadima voters? We’ll know next week.

Image courtesy tzipilivni2009 from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

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Israel picks up the bill

January 5, 2009 - 3:17 PM by · 3 Comments
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, General, Israeliness, Life, Medical Breakthroughs, Politics, War 

While the news is full of Israel’s “crimes” against the civilian population in Gaza, here’s one “crime” you probably haven’t heard about. Israel routinely admits residents of Palestinian Authority controlled territory into its hospitals – and the Israeli taxpayer foots the bill. Not only that; Israel even helps pay for treatment of patients in PA hospitals, where the patient never even comes near an Israeli hospital!

While many of us probably have heard of exceptional cases of Israeli doctors treating PA Arabs, I, and probably you, were under the impression that it was limited to high profile or complicated cases, such as the Save a Child’s Heart Foundation – with ill PA residents coming to Israel as a last resort. That kind of thing has been going on for a long time – even during the current war, as evidenced by the photo (courtesy of the IDF spokesperson), captioned “Injured Palestinian receiving medical treatment by Israeli and Palestinian medical personnel at the Erez crossing.” 010109injured2_b

But Israel’s contribution to the health of Palestinian Authority residents goes far beyond emergency assistance; according to some folks I interviewed for a story on a new database system being developed by an Israeli software company for hospitals in Bethlehem and Ramallah (an amazing story in and of itself!), Israel’s Health Ministry often pays for care of PA residents both in Israel and in the Palestinian Authority itself!

The company building the database, called i-Rox, is located in Bnei Brak, and consists almost entirely of ultra-Orthodox women programmers (this story just gets better all the time!). According to the company’s CEO, the programmers are building in a component that allows PA hospitals to share their information with Israel’s Health Ministry, because in some cases, Israel’s health funds help provide – and pay for – treatment of patients in PA hospitals.

Yes, I had a hard time believing it too – until I Googled this World Health Organization PDF document. According to this eye-opening reporting (for 2006-7), “Approximately 60,000 Palestinians from the West Bank area have been treated in Israel hospitals over the past year. Around 20,000 were hospitalized, and about 40,000 received ambulatory services of all sorts. Approximately 5,000 patients from the Gaza area have been treated in Israeli hospitals over the past year – about 2,000 hospitalized and about 3,000 receiving ambulatory services of all sorts. Among the patients receiving medical care in Israel, approximately 2,500 were children, the majority of whom received long-term treatment for cancer and complicated operations.”

As far as Israel providing services to PA hospitals, “Public health laboratories at the Israel Ministry of Health continue to regularly provide assistance to the Palestinian Health Authority in the way of laboratory tests for poliomyelitis, measles, mumps, influenza and other viral diseases,” the report says. Israel – via the health funds and the Health Ministry – continued those tests throughout the year, “in spite of the fact that the Palestinian Authority delays or halts payments.” Of course, the anti-Israel forces out there have never let themselves get confused by the facts – but at least we know the truth, and in this day and age, that’s no small feat.

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