Grapevine: Save our surfers’ best beach

Ashkelon Mayor under attack by surfers from around the country.

By GREER FAY CASHMAN
Tourists cool off at Tel Aviv beach (photo credit: Niv Elis)
Tourists cool off at Tel Aviv beach
(photo credit: Niv Elis)
ASHKELON MAYOR Itamar Shimoni is under attack by surfers from around the country, who are enraged that he is about to destroy the country’s best beach for surfers.
Shimoni, in deference to the haredi community to whom he owes his electoral success, is building separate beaches not only in the sand, but in the water. He intends to build a separation wall in the water to facilitate separate swimming areas for men and women. Surfers say that they will be unable to pursue their favorite sport, and are charging Shimoni with ruining one of the country’s most prized beauty spots.
Shimoni, who is the former CEO of Atarim, the company responsible for developing all the jobs, entertainment, culture and leisure on the Tel Aviv beachfront, says he knows what he’s doing and that everything will be done properly. People familiar with the treachery of the water say that by putting up a wall in the sea he will be building a death trap.
■ UNDER THE auspices of the Israel-Japan Friendship Society, Ran Levy-Yamamori – a writer, illustrator and publisher of children’s books on environmental education, who also produces nature films for NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) and environmental organizations in Israel and around the world – will today, Friday, May 23 at 11 a.m., deliver a lecture in Hebrew at the Japanese Embassy in Tel Aviv’s Museum Tower. The lecture title is “Children Bring Storks into the World,” which is the name of a book he published in Japanese, English and Hebrew.
It tells the remarkable story of a small Japanese country town, Toyooka City, where the people made the dream of a 12-year-old resident possible after a harsh typhoon hit and flooded the city. Her dream: To reintroduce the Oriental white stork, a species that became extinct during the environmental changes in the postwar, growth-oriented economy of Japan. The girl’s dream moved her classmates, and received the full support of the municipality and the cooperation of all of the city’s citizens and farmers.
When their efforts were finally rewarded, not only was the Oriental white stork improbably reintroduced to nature, but positive changes also occurred in the environment, economy, social life and self-esteem of the population.
The video, The Stork Madness, produced in 2010 by Levy-Yamamori together with Eyal Bartov and commissioned by the Municipality of Toyooka, will be screened at the end of the lecture.
■ FORMER CHIEF rabbi of the British Commonwealth Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks attracts huge audiences whenever and wherever he speaks. Thus it is somewhat surprising that the Tel Aviv International Salon together with the Reut Institute have chosen the Einav Center, which has very limited seating capacity for their Sunday, May 25 event in which Sacks and Gidi Grinstein, president and founder of the Reut Institute, will discuss leadership challenges in Israel under the heading of “Designing Altneuland.”
The Reut Institute is a non-partisan nonprofit advocating 21st-century Zionism inside Israel and throughout the Jewish world. Prior to founding, Grinstein served as secretary and coordinator of the Israeli negotiation team on the Permanent Status Agreement between Israel and the PLO, and later, during Ehud Barak’s term as prime minister, Grinstein worked in the Prime Minister’s Office. In July 2000, during the Camp David Summit, he may well have saved Barak’s life by using the Heimlich maneuver to dislodge a peanut from the prime minister’s throat.
The event with Sacks is in celebration of the Reut Institute’s first decade.
■ FEELING THERE was insufficient public awareness of the contributions of Anglo Jews to the upbuilding of Israel, Rabbi Yehoshua Fass, the founder and executive director of Nefesh B’Nefesh, which has brought literally thousands of Anglo immigrants to Israel, decided to institute the Bonei Zion Prize, to be awarded annually to Anglo immigrants who have made a difference.
The inaugural Bonei Zion awards ceremony was held last week at the Knesset with the participation of Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein. Out of some 200 applicants, seven were chosen and each was awarded $10,000. Only one of the seven, New Jersey-born Prof. Shimon Glick, dean emeritus of the faculty of health sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, was given a lifetime achievement award; the other awards were in various categories.
Glick, one of the founding members of BGU Medical School, recalls the time immediately after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when “if you talked rationally, there was no realistic way you could set up a medical school. It was more of a dream than a reality.” At the time, Glick had been invited by legendary medical educator Dr. Moshe Prywes to move from the US to Israel to help set up the school. He left prestigious positions in New York as chief of medical services at Coney Island Hospital and clinical professor of medicine at Downstate Medical Center, and moved to Beersheba with his wife, Brenda, and six children.
“We really started the school with nothing – a few crazy people. But Prywes was that kind of a dreamer, and we just went ahead,” muses Glick in retrospect. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.