Grapevine: French open house

Jean-Christian Coppin held an open house at the French Institute to celebrate Bastille Day.

By GREER FAY CASHMAN
Gilad Schalit at Bastille Day fete in Jaffa 370 (photo credit: GIL SHEFLER)
Gilad Schalit at Bastille Day fete in Jaffa 370
(photo credit: GIL SHEFLER)
■ WHILE IT is customary for ambassadors to host national day events in their residences, mainly in Herzliya Pituah and Kfar Shmaryahu, they also utilize Tel Aviv hotels.
However, if the visit of their president, prime minister or foreign minister coincides with the national day, the venue is usually moved to a Jerusalem hotel.
The consuls of these countries also host receptions in the cities in which they are resident and, like the receptions hosted by the ambassador, they are generally by invitation only. Not so in the case of Jean-Christian Coppin, the French consul in Haifa and director of the French Institute in Haifa, who held an open house at the French Institute to celebrate Bastille Day and invited all and sundry to come and dance.
■ FOR THE seventh consecutive year, legendary Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball player and former captain of the national basketball team Tani (Tanhum) Cohen Mintz provided scholarships for promising young female tennis players. The scholarships help girls in the under-16 division pay for their participation in international tournaments.
They were presented at a ceremony at the Israel Tennis Center in Jaffa. This year’s recipients were Nicole Saveljev from the Ramat Hasharon Tennis Center and Alona Pushkarevsky from the Haifa Tennis Center. Tani and his brother Shaul Cohen Mintz give the scholarships in memory of their mother and sister.
Their mother, Edith Cohen Mintz, was a champion tennis player and one of the pioneers of tennis in Israel. Before coming to Israel, she had been a tennis champion in her native Latvia and had participated in the Maccabiah Games in the 1930s. Their sister Mara Kinston was a former Federal Cup player and coach to many talented children.
Mara’s son Daniel and his wife, who live in Australia, came to Israel to attend the scholarship ceremony.
■ RECOGNITION FOR one’s good deeds or one’s accomplishments is always a balm for the ego, but in the case of lawyer Ori Slonim, he had a double dose.
Last month, Slonim was among the first group of recipients of the President’s Medal of Distinction. The award was initiated by President Shimon Peres in recognition of outstanding contributions to humanity, the Jewish People and the State of Israel.
Within less than a month of the awards ceremony, Slonim attended a second ceremony in Ra’anana, where he lives. There, he was given a citation for volunteerism by Mayor Nahum Hofree in recognition of his contribution to the community, to Israel’s society at large and to the children of the world. The citation was presented to him at a special meeting of the Ra’anana Municipal Council.
Slonim is the chairman of Variety International and former chairman of Variety Israel. He has been involved for many years in negotiating for the release of Israelis taken captive by enemy elements.
■ ONE OF the perks of being a minister of culture or a minister of education is that one gets a lot of entertainment in one’s life. Culture Minister Limor Livnat and Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar get to go to a great number of plays and concerts that they might not otherwise attend.
Last week, Herzliya Mayor Yael German invited Sa’ar and senior members of his staff to the opening performance of the new Herzliya Ensemble Theater production of A.B. Yehoshua’s play They Walked Together, directed by Oded Kotler and featuring Gil Frank and Rami Baruch in the lead roles. Among the people attending the postperformance reception were A. B. Yehoshua, former Bank Leumi CEO Galia Maor, Oded Kotler and members of the cast. The play, which is about the love-hate relationship between David Ben-Gurion and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, is scheduled to be staged at the Knesset on July 23 in the presence of President Shimon Peres.
Memorial ceremonies and symposia were held for Jabotinsky this week to mark the 72nd anniversary of his death. Ben-Gurion harbored so much animosity towards the man that after Jabotinsky’s death in 1940, he would not allow his remains to be transferred to Israel. It was only after Levi Eshkol became prime minister that Jabotinsky’s will could be carried out. Jabotinsky, who died in the United States, asked that once the state was established, his final resting place should be in Israel.
■ THE NAME of tycoon Yitzhak Tshuva is usually associated with mega-business deals in Israel and abroad or with generous financial support for Netanya Academic College. Tshuva, who was raised poor in a large family in Netanya, tried to persuade his mother to move out of the humble apartment in the economically depressed Netanya neighborhood in which he had grown up and to move into something larger and more comfortable in a better part of town. After all, he could easily afford to pay for it. But she refused, saying that she felt just fine where she was.
His mother died not long ago, and his father before her. When going through the contents of his mother’s home, he came upon the bloodstained coat of his grandfather Rabbi Yosef Tshuva, who had been killed in a Nazi pogrom in Libya long before Tshuva’s birth 64 years ago. The rabbi had been a prominent figure in his community, and his family had preserved his memory. When Yitzhak Tshuva found the coat, he had a replica of it made, which he donated to the Libyan Jewish Museum in Or Akiva. Tshuva is one of the leading supporters of the museum.
The original coat was buried this week in a symbolic ceremony in the Netanya cemetery. “Even though I never knew you personally, I always admired you,” an emotional Tshuva said at the burial site, adding that the bloodstains on the coat meant that something of his grandfather would be buried in Israel. Tshuva also said that he would spare no effort in trying to locate his grandfather’s remains and transferring them to Israel to be forever laid to rest with the coat he was wearing at the time of his death.