Goat farm wedding

-

Good friends invited us to the wedding of their daughter who lives on a goat farm near Yodfat in a beautiful corner of the western Galil.

The groom's family comes from Yodfat whose residents worked en masse for days to turn the simple farm into the set for one of the more unconventional Jewish weddings I've been to. We missed the entry of the groom on a camel but arrived in time to catch this line of local Bedouin neighbours doing a wedding debka.




There were lots of musicians down on the farm, many of them wielding instruments picked up in India. Here a tabla player and a local Arab flute player accompany the dancers. Many of the young people were of the shanti shanti type, i.e. 21st century hippies deeply influenced by India.







Here's the girls' debka circle with the beautiful bride in white. About 500 people showed up for this wedding which turned into a celebration for the whole village, like a wedding in an Arab village or on kibbutz for that matter.

As the sun set the crowd gathered around the chuppa (click the photo and you'll see it) where there was a simple ceremony carried out by a cheerful orthodox rabbi. There were several ultra-orthodox haredi families in the crowd together with the shanti shantis , the Bedouin and the city slickers like us.



The traditional seven blessings were recited by family members, the groom sanctified the bride with a ring , broke the glass and India was instantaneously transformed into the shtetl . As a klezmer quartet belted out the Jewish wedding classics, ecstatic, whirling hora circles carried the bride and groom aloft.


The food, by the way, was great. A trestle table about 50 metres long was heaped with excellent breads created by a celebrity baker together with wonderful goats cheese, olives, and almonds from the farm. Old casks could be tapped for excellent wine made by the groom. Soon, trays of kubeh appeared and for the main course (consumed on cushions in huge Moroccan style tents) there were platters of savoury rice with raisins and almonds, tangy salads and excellent meat tajines, all prepared in a nearby field.

The dancing, fuelled by shots of ouzo, continued into the night but we had to get back to the big city. Before leaving we paid a visit to the permanent residents (children of the tajines?) as they bedded down for the night.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zoltan Kluger

-
Image
A Hagana despatcher in the 1948 War of Independence on what seems to be a stationary motorbike. I took the photos in this post at today's exhibition. Went to see an exhibition at the Eeretz Yisrael Museum. Zoltan Kluger, Chief Photographer 1933-1958." These are official Zionist propaganda photos, some of them staged, but many of them impressive nevertheless. He also photographed Palestinian refugees (although not for the Zionist institutions) and workers clearing the rubble from abandoned Palestinian villages after the War of Independence. Although a staunch Zionist, the Hungarian born Zoltan also had an uneasy relationship with the Zionist institutions that provided his livelihood and, like many Israeli artists even today, fretted about being unnoticed because he was working in a Levantine backwater. Well to do residents of British Mandated Palestine taking a flight from Haifa to Tel Aviv (1930s) "I'm suffocating," he was quoted as saying. "I'll die....
Read more

The only matkot museum in the world

-
Image
Meet Amnon.  We met him on a stormy Shabbat morning on the side of a steep side road in Neve Tzedek. He was putting away his bicycle after giving up the idea of playing matkot on the beach, something he does on a daily basis and has been doing for at least 50 years. He invited us to see his apartment otherwise known as the Only Matkot Museum in the World. Amnon was born and bred in Neve Tzedek and is a major figure in the matkot community. There are some 350 matkot (beach paddles) of every conceivable size and colour in Amnon's matkot museum interspersed with large paintings of the northern European forest scenes so popular among people who live in hot countries. His devotion to the sport is boundless. Amnon, still sprightly now, thanks to matkot, is surrounded here by photos of him in action in younger days (click to enlarge). Now he and his fellow matkot-obsessed friends play on a concrete strip underneath one of the hotels on Gordon Beach where they have been gr...
Read more

My Unfinished Apartheid Thriller

-
Image
                 An Israeli Prime Minister as imagined by the DALL-E AI programme     About six months ago, I was revisited by the writing bug and decided to try my hand at fiction  - a "diplomatic thriller" to be more specific. The choice of genre was not dictated by any literary preferences. I'm not a big fan of thrillers. But the idea was to use the thriller as the most suitable vehicle to write about what was really bugging me - Israel's inevitable slide into apartheid.      I also thought that my professional experience might come in handy. For more than two decades I worked as the press officer for the EU Delegation to Israel and followed the sometimes turbulent relations between Israel and the European Union from the vantage point of an Israeli working inside the EU, in other words as someone with a split identity. I believed that this familiarity with the mind-sets and decision making processes of bo...
Read more