1. Roofs
I love Tel Aviv. I usually get around on old bikes on relatively regular routes. See and experience the city through its streets. But during the corona I discovered the rooftops of the city. I started doing something I had not done before – going upstairs. And from our roof I saw many more roofs on which all sorts of things happen – friends, sports lessons, lectures, romantic encounters. I am always curious to see more roofs but for some reason I have a special fondness for the neglected ones. Those that consist of patch by patch. Just like our roof.
Do you miss Tel Aviv roofs in the days of the Corona (Photo: Shlomi Yosef)
2. Gaza Garden
In May 2021, I came with my sister to a demonstration in Gaza Park in Jaffa. What we experienced there I will not forget. I have already been to demonstrations in the territories, I already knew the practices, but to see unbridled police violence in the center of Jaffa – it was scary. At one moment we stood and there were quiet speeches and then within a second – stun grenades, undercover attacking minors, arrests, a battlefield. It’s getting so scary, something that never happens in Jewish demonstrations. My sister and I fled into the home of a Palestinian family who let us stay there until the explosions were over.
Demonstration in Gaza Park, May 2021 (Photo: Muhammad Jarbali / AFP / Getty Images)
3. Tamar Coffee
I would sit there with awful coffee for many years and feel at home. He is no more. Not only him but also the people who were sitting there – journalists, poets, actors. The whole scene is gone. The building was demolished and a new building was built in its place today. It’s part of the city’s change. The song “Mythologies” by Rafi Weichert summed up the closing of the coffee accurately:
“… Those who drank here died. Those who talked around the tables are not
Settlements nowhere. No one knew of their existence
Unless he reads a poem, sees a painting, flips through it
In a photo album in a used bookstore… “
I met my best friend at Cafe Tamar and miraculously her name is Tamar.
Tamar Cafe, 2015 (Photo: Yotam Ronen)
4. Jaffa Theater
A place in Jaffa again. The Jaffa Theater allowed me to do events that nowhere else dared, events such as “Prison Notebooks,” which gave a voice to political prisoners, and “The State of Israel Against the Poet Darin Tator.” Yigal Ezrati is a committed and brave artistic director who is not afraid to pay prices either. After we agreed to close the play “How to Make a Revolution” in the theater, he joined the cast to visit Hebron, to see with his own eyes apartheid and oppression. The play is basically an investigation into oppressive systems like the military court and military control in the West Bank through the story of one man – Issa Amro, a man who devoted his entire life to non-violent resistance.
An important and brave place. Jaffa Theater (Photo: Lily Ovadia)
5. The sunken garden in Habima Square
The sunken garden is one of the most peaceful and pastoral places in the city. It is located in Habima Square, surrounded by culture – the National Theater on the one hand and the Hall of Culture on the other – and faces the most invested boulevards in Tel Aviv, Rothschild Boulevard. In the sunken garden there will always be colorful flowers in full bloom, classical music, girls in fluttering dresses, young couples. But when you sit there out of the cracks, cockroaches come out. Lots of dirty and ugly cockroaches that can’t be seen in the distance. It’s actually a small Tel Aviv – beautiful on the outside and sick on the inside. The beauty rests on the fact that other neighborhoods are neglected and filthy.
Pastoralism at the price of neglect. The sunken garden in Habima Square (Photo: Shatterstock)
The play “How to Make a Revolution” by Einat Weizmann and Issa Amro will be staged at the Jaffa Theater on July 14 and July 16. In the documentary, Weizmann relies on transcripts of Issa’s trial in the Ofer Military Court, in which the conviction rate is 99.7%, and the judges and prosecutors are all on the side of the state. The sentence is known even before the trial begins, and the defendant knows how the trial will end before the jailer calls his name. Details and tickets on the website