Tel Aviv Rooftop

Just seen the hard-hitting Israeli film Ajami, named after a neighbourhood in Yaffo a few minutes drive from the rooftop. Ajami tackles the plight of young Arabs, like those in the photo above, caught up in a tangled mess of crime gangs bound to an Arab honour system all intertwined with social exclusion from Jewish society, the occupation, the differences separating 'Israeli Arabs' from Palestinians over the Green Line and even the sharp class and religious differences between Christian and Moslem Arabs in Israel. All this is wrapped up in a rivetting and complex drama that leaves the viewer stunned. Yaffo In one scene inthe film, one of the Arab characters who has a Jewish girlfriend, says he is going to move in with her in Neve Tzedek. But Neve Tzedek is out of reach and he ends up overdosing. Flea market Yaffo The version we saw was in Hebrew influenced Arabic with Hebrew subtitles but I'm sure it'll come out in an English version abroad. Go and see it.

A succah on the balcony of an old house on Rehov Lilienblum, a spit away from the rooftop. In the background one of the luxury residential towers still under construction. Succot . In Tel Aviv, as all over Israel, religious and not so religious people, erect a succah or booth or 'tabernacle' in their back gardens or on their balconies and spend time there during the week long Succot festival. The custom derives directly from the bible. "In Leviticus , God told Moses to command the people: “On the first day you shall take the product of hadar trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook” (Lev. 23:40), and “You shall live in booths seven days; all citizens in Israel shall live in booths, in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt ” (Lev. 23:42-43). Why God should want future generations to know that he made his people live in booths remains a mystery...

Synagogue, Pitigliano, three Jews left When visiting a place as rich in history as Italy, the tourist (the photographer) can follow his/her own religious or cultural inclinations and take a personal trail. On Rosh Hashana we shared apple, honey and songs at 'home' in a converted farm cottage in Montefesciano. Christians might look for churches, Moslems for mosques, we tend to look out for synagogues. In the Tuscan hilltop village of Pitigliano we found one, part of a sort of Jewish heritage centre in what was once known as "La Piccola Gerusalemme" Here it was sobering to recall that 'ghetto' is not only an Italian word but an Italian invention. The Jewish community of 500 that shared the complex of synagogue, bakery, slaughterhouse, mikve etc were confined to these narrow quarters from the middle of the 16th century until 1871 when Italian unification also brought emancipation to the Jews. There are shops nearby professing to sell Jewish food, consisting main...

It's easy for someone coming from a Mediterranean country like Israel to immediately feel at home in Italy. The landscape resembles the Galilee, the Mediterranean menu suits our palate, the people are open and friendly. Given the outward similarities, the real points of interest are to be found in the differences. These images from a recent trip to central Italy (Lazio, Tuscana, Umbria) and Rome sparked some thoughts on how different we are but also on the howItalians appear to live in their towns and what, if anything, we might learn from them. For example, the scene above (actually some sort of church statue shrouded in black cloth sharing the back of a van with some flowers) would not normally be encountered on the streets of Tel Aviv. In Montefiascone, a town of about 13,000, a lady, dressed to kill, strides across a mediaeval piazza. In the background is an older less fashion-conscious local lady, and behind her, Il Caffe is a supertrendy, streamlined custom designed cafe-bar...

Workers rebuilding the tiled roof of the old house next to the rooftop. August. Back to blogging, after another long break. Thanks to A for reminding me that I'm meant to be "archiving the city" and even for dangling the possibility of a mention in an important academic publication. I've also been taking a few more photos recently so here's a quick foray before we fly off the rooftop for a holiday. Soviet/early Zionist style street art on Herzl this morning. September is art month in Tel Aviv and the ART TLV Biennale opened on Thursday. This wasn't one of the exhibits. We started by cycling down Rothschild Blvrd, one of several boulevards hung with hundreds of banners containing painting and photographs of Tel Aviv(for some reason can't find them now) . Then headed for the Betzalel gallery on Salame 60 where there was an excellent exhibition and we could wander into some of the studios of the resident artists. One of the ARTTLV exhibition spaces was the c...

Gay Pride, Rabin Square, August 8, 2009 After a long break - for which the lethargy induced by a Tel Aviv summer is only partly responsible - I'm back. It took a dramatic event and a fractionally less humid day to force me to return to blogging. But I also return with a resolution - only to blog when I have at least one of my own photos to display. The rest - whether it's the Israeli Palestinian conflict, religious vis. secular, planning disputes in Tel Aviv, Iranian missiles or what to do with refugees- you can explore yourself. If I'm to develop more skills, I need to concentrate on photography and let the words flow from the images, So, from now on, no pix - no blog. The dramatic event was last week's murderous attack by a black-clad assassin a week ago at a club for gay youth on Nahmani Street called bar noar (youth bar). When the assailant had finished pumping bullets into his terrified victims, two were dead and 15 injured, some critically. At first, the immed...

Neve Tzedek (Nehushtan) tower as seen from the rooftop next to the rooftop. Another six are planned along the same road, two adjacent to this one . The local Neve Tzedek community centre was buzzing with activity the other night with about 100 local residents cramming in to hear speeches and sign up to volunteer and contribute. Even some of the local celebs could be seen among thge locals. There was a catalyst for this sudden spurt of community action in our normally placid and increasinghly gentrified neighbourhood. This came in the form of a policy documentadopted by the Tel Aviv local planning and construction committee recently approved a policy document for building in the mesila (old train tracks) area running along Rehov Eilat/Derekh Yafo. The document refers to an area of 128 dunams and includes seven towers. The new buildings will add some 650 residential units to the 750 now existing in the area. Included in the buildings referred to in the document is the 38 storey Neve Tze...