Grapevine

Celebrities go Gaga

By GREER FAY CASHMAN
Lady Gaga performs in Tel Aviv (photo credit: Lahav Harkov)
Lady Gaga performs in Tel Aviv
(photo credit: Lahav Harkov)
■ IT’S NOT certain that everyone who attended the Lady Gaga spectacular at Hayarkon Park on Saturday night was indeed enamored by her genre of performance. But when a celebrity of Lady Gaga’s stature comes to town, it also becomes a status symbol matter of see and be seen, especially for those who can afford to pay for tickets in the Golden Ring VIP section.
Among the many members of Israel’s business and financial community who were seen there were Yair Seroussi , chairman of the board of directors of Bank Hapoalim; socialite Batsheva Bublil ; architect Ilan Pivko ; television host Guy Pines and his wife, Ruthie Rudner ; celebrity hairdresser Michel Mercier ; fashion designer Alon Livne ; businessman Roni Mena and his wife, fashion model Jen - ny Cervoni ; Tamira Yardeni , owner and CEO of Teddy Productions; and former beauty queen Sivan Klein .
One of the surprises was the appearance of veteran crooner Tony Bennett , who arrived in Israel for the first time on Saturday and sang a duet with Lady Gaga, who has been one of his admirers since she was a little girl. They both come from Italian back - grounds, have sung together on stage before and recently recorded an album together entitled Cheek to Cheek .
Bennett, 88, performed the following night at the Bronfman (formerly the Mann) Auditorium in Tel Aviv for an 88-minute nostalgia concert for an audience that by and large grew up without electric guitars and other instrumental devices that tend to drown out the singer.
■ EMC, A global leader in the development of cloud-based computing technologies that enable businesses and service providers to provide IT services, together with Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) and BGN Technologies (the technology transfer company of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), announced on Sunday the creation of the CyberSpark Industry Initiative, a nonprofit organization that will engage in the international promotion of the cyber center, which is based at the Advanced Technologies Park in Beersheba.
The CyberSpark Industry Initiative will serve as a coordinating body for joint cyber industry activities with government agencies, the IDF, the public and academia.
The CyberSpark Industry Initiative will promote a multi-year business plan that will leverage the significant potential in the field of cyber technology in the area.
The organization will brand and market the region as a global cyber center, encourage joint academia-industry research studies, support the development of plans to recruit and develop human resources in the field and incentive plans to encourage other companies, both international and Israeli, to come to the region, among other things.
Roni Zehavi , a hi-tech entrepreneur and former pilot in the Israel Air Force, has been appointed CyberSpark managing director. The organization’s board of directors will include representatives of the founding companies. A public board of key players in Israel’s economy and in the fields of education, government, academia, culture and technology has yet to be established.
EMC, JVP and BGN Technologies are the first core of companies in the cyber center in Beersheba. It is anticipated that other cyber companies will join these companies in the CyberSpark Initiative and open offices in Beersheba’s Advanced Technologies Park, as well as in other areas of the South.
“After forging the path as pioneers in the development of Beersheba as an international hi-tech and cyber zone, it is clear to us that realizing the vision and the transition from words to deeds requires an active high level of involvement on the part of local and international industry in the field,” said Dr.
Orna Berry , corporate vice president, Growth and Innovation, EMC Centers of Excellence EMEA and the US.
“It is a complex and sensitive mission that integrates parties with different interests and needs that must be coordinated to ensure achievements and significant progress,” she emphasized. “Creating the CyberSpark Industry Initiative is a necessary process to implement the operational plan to promote the cyber campus in Beersheba.”
Zehavi said that the main goals of the CyberSpark Industry Initiative were firstly to bring more Israeli and international cyber companies to the Negev, and secondly to build a wider spectrum of national cyber expertise by supporting technological edu - cation in high schools.
■ TODAY AT 11 a.m. Prof.
Ofra Goldstein Gidoni , an anthropologist who has been studying in Japan for more than 20 years and is the former chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University where she teaches East Asian studies, will give a lecture in the library of the Japanese Embassy in the Tel Aviv Museum Tower on changing gender relations in Japan.
The lecture, in Hebrew, will be based on her book Housewives of Japan: An Ethnography of Real Lives and Consumerized Domesticity . It will include her current research on the new fatherhood in Japan, where fathers are playing a greater role in sharing the burden of rearing children. Similar changes are taking place in Israel, so many young parents will be able to identify with their Japanese counterparts