Grapevine: As big as ever?

By GREER FAY CASHMAN
Alesia Weston 521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Alesia Weston 521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
AS ALWAYS, the Jerusalem Film Festival, which opened yesterday, received considerable advance media attention.
While conducting an interview, Israel Radio show host Yoav Ginai commented that this year’s film festival seemed smaller than those in the past. Film critic Rita Koren said that the Cinematheque was not the same since its founder, Lia Van Leer, had allowed others to direct its operations.
However, Nir Becher, the Cinematheque’s incoming executive director, who will replace Alesia Weston after the festival, disputed this, saying that Van Leer was involved in every decision-making process and that her presence was very much felt. It was true that the festival was operating on a smaller budget than in the past, he said, and that in future it would have to find additional sources of funding, but he insisted that in terms of content, it was just as big as ever.
Van Leer, who will celebrate her 89th birthday next month, continues to be involved in culture in general. She is on the guest list of numerous cultural institutions in various parts of the country, and makes it her business to attend their events, just as she wants their executive staff to attend events at the Cinematheque. She is also on the guest lists of embassies that promote the films of their respective countries at Cinematheque film festivals throughout the year, and was seen traipsing around the Jerusalem International Convention Center at the 90th birthday celebrations for President Shimon Peres. At the beginning of this week, she was also given a front-row seat at the Women’s Convention at the Jerusalem Theater, where a series of speakers warmly welcomed her.
AT THE second annual Women’s Convention run by Kol Ha’ir – the Jerusalem local supplement of Haaretz – in cooperation with the Jerusalem Municipality, moderator Linoi Bar-Gefen introduced Mayor Nir Barkat as the only man who would be gracing the stage. Barkat said that while he may be the only man on the stage, he went home from work every day to a wife, three daughters and a female dog – and loved every minute in their company. In a more serious vein, he said that his municipality, more than other municipality, had provided increasing opportunities and incentives for women to be part of the decision-making process.
Edna Friedman, who chairs the municipality’s Committee for the Advancement of the Status of Women, confirmed this.
The municipality also runs a forum to train women for leadership positions. Bar-Gefen announced that Jerusalem, moreover, was the only municipality in the country with a female chief of staff, in the person of Michal Shalem.
IT TAKES courage to be a salmon swimming upstream, and at the Women’s Conference, Rebbetzin Shulamit Melamed – a mother of seven and the manager of the Arutz Sheva Internet site, as well as of Arutz Sheva Radio – caused something of a furor when she announced that she was not a feminist and could not understand why some of the legislation favoring women had ever been introduced, considering the extent to which some women abused and exploited it.
This was not the first time that Melamed had raised hackles with her anti-feminist stance. She said that she had never suffered nor felt any gender discrimination, and she thought that legislation protecting a pregnant woman from being dismissed from her job was ludicrous. She gave two examples – one of her assistants taking extended maternity leave without a replacement to answer the phones and do other secretarial work; and the other of a teacher who was really not suited to the profession but who, when the school board wanted to fire her, turned out to be pregnant and was therefore able to keep her job.
The following year, when a second attempt was made to dismiss her, she was pregnant again. The same thing happened in the third year, by which time she had received tenure, even though there was total dissatisfaction with her performance as a teacher – aside from which, she had spent almost a third of her career on maternity leave.