Here’s what two weeks of reporting in the Holy Land can produce. I had such an amazing experience there, and I certainly produced a lot in

Tel Aviv at 100

a short time. Next step, really learn Hebrew. Please see my five articles below, as well as my friend Yoav Sivan’s editorial about the non-religious nature of the city.

Growing Up With Tel Aviv

  

“Tel Aviv developed a lot; it became the big city of the state,” Natan said, looking back through his seven decades as a Tel Avivian. But there is a sense of longing for his and Mirtza’s young days together. “Life was much better then,” Natan says.

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

The moment he laid eyes on Mirtza Antin 74 years ago, Natan Abramovitch was determined to win a date with her. Little did he know that they’d end up fighting through a War of Independence together, witness the growth of a Jewish state and one day celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary as Tel Aviv — their city — turns 100 years old.

It’s still their city, sure, but the urban center that Tel Aviv has become is hard to recognize for them now, and they prefer to think back to the carefree days when they were newly married, and both they and their country were young.

“He had horses, he had a car,” Mirtza, told The Jewish Week over coffee and cake in the Tel Aviv apartment that she and Natan have owned for the past 68 years. Her youthful eyes glimmering under vibrantly dyed red hair, she poked fun at the handsome young man who she said “followed her around” for four years until they were married. “He was born specially for me,” Mirtza said. Continue reading…

How Green Is My Landfill

  

The Hiriya landfill, above, dominates the landscape from the highway below. Left, part of the state-of-the-recycling effort at the site. Photos by Sharon Udasin

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Just southeast of Tel Aviv, a huge mountain peak looms over the highway below, harboring swarms of flies and wafting scents of decaying garbage down its sprouting hills. The manmade mound — called Hiriya — may contain a colossal pile of trash, but the landfill is quickly becoming Israel’s icon of environmentalism: a space to recycle waste, produce energy and cultivate greenery.

Hiriya, named for the former Arab village of al-Hiriya, served as Israel’s largest landfill from 1948 through 1999. During that time, flocks of birds posed a danger to aircraft at nearby Ben Gurion Airport, according to Danny Sternberg, former Hiriya engineer and current CEO of Ariel Sharon Park, which is located directly below the landfill. Ten years ago, the government closed the dump and converted it into Israel’s largest waste transfer station, and since 2001 the site has been home to several environmental innovations, including what is being billed as a revolutionary water-based recycling project. By 2011, Steinberg said, developers hope to open Hiriya to the public — not as an odorous garbage dump, but instead as 2,000 acres of sprawling green landscape filled with bike paths and wildlife, two and a half times the size of New York’s Central Park. 

“It’s really the entrance to Israel — everybody who flies in sees this space,” Sternberg said. And revamping Hiriya is just one major example of the Tel Aviv area’s newfound efforts to become a greener, more sustainable place; the city is becoming increasingly filled with yellow recycling bins and new, tree-lined bike lanes.

Hiriya is part of no municipality and remains completely under national jurisdiction. Locally, the site is managed by the Dan Region Association of Towns Sanitation and Solid Waste Disposal board, half of whose members are from Tel Aviv, according to its chairman and deputy mayor of Tel Aviv, Doron Sapir.

Yet the space is crucial to southeast Tel Aviv and the surrounding area as “an environmental social project,” Sapir explained, because it will drastically improve the quality of life in the area, which is known to be among the poorest sections of Tel Aviv. Continue reading…

Pride OF PLACE

  

“The real breakthrough was not the fact that [the LGBT Pride Center, above] was even built, but the fact that it was financed by the government,” says the center’s chairman, Etai Pinkas, inset. Photos by Sharon Udasin

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

In San Francisco, the Castro district teems with gay life — there are drag shows, gay-run boutiques and the signature of the gay rights movements — the rainbow flag — seems to be everywhere.

In the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, gay life has taken root, transforming that West Side area into a mecca for men with well-developed pectorals in tight T-shirts and jeans, and for the wider the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

But try to find a “gay neighborhood” in Tel Aviv, believed to be one of the most gay-friendly cities in the world, and you’ll come up short. Likewise, there are very few exclusively gay social establishments or bars in Tel Aviv — a sign of how well woven into the fabric of the city Tel Aviv’s LGBT community has become. This is due in large part to the city’s overwhelmingly accepting culture, observers say.

“I don’t think people ever felt particularly threatened, so that’s why there was no need to group up” in a gay neighborhood, Etai Pinkas told The Jewish Week. Pinkas, chairman of the new city-funded LGBT Pride Center, is having lunch at the center’s café and reflecting on the city’s gay community, the victories it has won and the unfinished work that stands before it. “Generally, LGBTs in Tel Aviv are very well integrated.” Continue reading…

‘The Great Neck Of Tel Aviv’

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

You can play the national pastime — the American national pastime, that is — on a baseball diamond in Ra’anana, one of the few fields of dreams in all of the country.

In this affluent Tel Aviv suburb, you can get Gatorade there, too, and American candies can be had on the grocery store shelves. And you can join the Penn Club and reminisce about the old college days in Philadelphia.

“I would say Ra’anana is the Great Neck of Tel Aviv,” said American Joel Leyden, president of the Leyden Communications group, founder of Israel News Agency and a Ra’anana resident for the past 10 of his 22 years in Israel. “Ra’anana really stands out as the most cosmopolitan, most modern town in the country.”

And while the influence of American culture can be felt in much of Israel, it’s particularly strong in Ra’anana, the suburb to beat all other Israeli suburbs, to hear the locals tell it. Continue reading…

Bauhaus Is Our House

  

Photo Sharon Udasin

by Sharon Udasin

Cream-colored stone apartment buildings line nearly every street in central Tel Aviv, each varying slightly in shape and size but adhering to a loosely defined style of openness and movement that is particular to Israel’s “White City.” (In 2003, the area was designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.)

Tel Aviv urban development began with the “eclectic style” of the 1920s, largely through the plans of Scottish architect Patrick Geddes said Jeremie Hoffmann, 42, the director of  Tel Aviv’s municipal Conservation Department. In the 1930s, Tel Aviv saw an influx of bourgeoisie, as well as famed architects from the German Bauhaus School eager to construct the stone buildings. Continue reading…

Temple OF THE NOW

by Yoav Sivan

Few cities define themselves by what they are not, but Tel Aviv prides itself on being the city that is “not” Jerusalem. Indeed, the distance between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is precisely that between a living-in-the-moment present and a layers-of-history past that can sometimes be a burden to creativity.  

In contrast to Jerusalem where you inhale thousands of years of history in a single breath, Tel Aviv lives today intensely. And much of that life gets lived in cafés. First-time visitors are in awe at the number of cafés a city of 400,000 people can sustain. You won’t find a block without a café and free wireless Internet. Tel Aviv’s coffee shops have become Israel’s modern temples for secular thought, where students finish their homework, businessmen conduct their meetings, couples meet for dates, friends hang out and artists hash out new ideas. These are the places to seize the moment. Continue reading…

Well, I found a new apartment.

Yet it was quite a difficult — and unexpected — struggle to get there. An almost movie-worthy scenario!

I wonder if finding an apartment in Israel is any easier — probably not. I also wonder if I can write a single blog post without mentioning Israel — probably not.

But anyway, back to New York. Keep in mind, I’m going to have to change a lot of the names and places that appear in this story to protect both my own safety and the identity of the brokerage firm, who have dealt with the situation very professionally in the end. After fumbling around on CraigsList and contacting 489859458 real (and fake) brokers, I finally found an apartment I liked Wednesday, and luckily it was on the market through a big, reliable brokerage firm — we’ll call it “NY Broker Firm.”

For some reason, however, I was suspicious of the specific broker with whom I was dealing, partially because he failed to answer any of my calls, e-mails or text messages promptly, as most eager-to-rent brokers would. So naturally, being a reporter, as soon as I got home that evening, I Googled this guy — we’ll call him “Boris” for the time being. Immediately, I found out that Boris was arrested last year for a couple different things, related to business fraud. Clearly, I didn’t want this guy having my social security number or my parents’ identity (because obviously, with the copious amounts of money I make as a journalist, I require guarantors for any lease. Well maybe not for an apartment lease in Sierra Leone, no offense to Sierra Leone.

So basically, my immediate next thought was to contact his team partner — we’ll call him “Ed” — who was significantly higher up in the company’s hierarchy than Boris. When my father found out about this, he was enraged and told me I was inappropriately overreacting and putting a guy’s job on the line for no reason. I’m sorry dad, but I don’t agree. You’ve always taught me to be fastidious about protecting my identity — and yours — and I was just doing what you’ve always told me to do. It was certainly not in my best interest to give a fraud felon access to my finances.

Up until I warned them, Ed and the entire company were unaware of Boris’s criminal past — though I don’t understand why because it’s the first thing that comes up when you Google his name. But regardless, Ed was going on vacation, so he put me in touch with another boss, whom we’ll call François. Eager to help, François contacted me nearly immediately to arrange a meeting so that we could move forward with the apartment. Meanwhile, Boris finally got back to me and was also asking me to come into the office.

I got to NY Broker Firm’s office at about 12 last Thursday, and as I entered the waiting area I saw Boris sitting in the glass-paneled conference room on my left — he gestured toward me, and then asked me to come in and close the door behind me. Stupidly, I consented. As soon as the door was closed, Boris began confronting me in a very threatening manner, tell me that he had found out through Ed that I had told the bosses he had been arrested. In retrospect, I tend to doubt that Ed actually told Boris the information, and I’m assuming Boris was just lying through his teeth to fish for information out of me.

But I didn’t think of this at the time and therefore didn’t deny what I did, and Boris continued his angry rant, telling me that while he wasn’t fired, his job had almost been on the line. “How could I do this to him?” he went on, claiming that the person in the Google stories was not him by pulling out a (presumably fake) driver’s license that had a different first name, with “Boris” as his middle name. Meanwhile, to this day, I’m nearly 100 percent sure that he, as his character would suggest, was lying because the Boris from the newspapers had the same master’s degree and worked in the exact same fields and the exact same places to the “t” as this Boris.

But after getting out of that uncomfortable situation, I ended up sitting down with François to make my deposit I the apartment I had loved, and I thought that everything was OK. Apparently, though, after NY Broker Firm investigated Boris that same mid-day, they discovered that yes, he was that same fraudulent Boris from the newspaper articles — and they fired him, which I found out a few hours later back at work, when I searched the NY Broker Firm Web site agents out of curiosity. Immediately, I was frightened (/hyperventilating in the work hallway) because I realized that Boris had all of my contact information, the address of the apartment I was moving to, as well as possibly my father’s Social Security number. Clearly, I could not keep this apartment. But the money had already been paid.

Thankfully, Lior came to my rescue and helped me negotiate with NY Broker Firm because obviously I was just upset and confused about this whole mess and had no idea what I was supposed to do. What’s funny is that François claims that Lior was fighting with him, but clearly, François had never been involved in Israeli bargaining — in Israel that’s not yelling, it’s normal conversation. So thank you, thank you, thank you to Lior. In the end, it turns out that the big boss of NY Broker Firm called me to thank me for notifying them about Boris, and he apologized to me profusely for the lack of professionalism. And on Friday, François and his partner were able to find me another apartment! Cheaper, in fact!

Obviously, this time I’m not revealing the address, but hopefully I’ll be happy there. Better be worth all the time and energy that went into this hunt.