Category Archives: חיי הרחוב

a window to herzl street

Posted on by

 

 

(If you click on the picture you can see a bigger version)

Herzl Street in south Tel Aviv was one of the city’s first streets. There are still plenty of signs of its former glories and it’s also a great place to walk if you want to see a quite different side of the city from the center.

The image on the right is a giant clock with Zodiac signs on the southernmost section of the street. It’s been broken for years (of course it’s still right twice a day). This is the seedy end of the street, near No Name Alley. There are a couple of falling-to-pieces old pre-State houses here with crumbling and bricked in arched Arab-style windows, with phoney for-sale signs on them (if you call to ask the price they tell you some ridiculous sum.) This section of the street is devoted to motorbike and motorscooter shops.

The left image is a toy store in the center of the street – an area devoted to similar stores selling wholesale and retail kid’s toys and costumes. These two guys are employed to stand outside, wear silly hats and blow bubbles all day to attract customers.

The middle image is a dusty lamp and lighting store, from the light fixtures part of the street. If you walk here at the right time – round about the late afternoon as the sun goes down – you can sometimes hear a beautiful jazz trumpet being played. The player works here – he has a music school but he plays right from his light fixtures store and fills the street with music.

Further up are wholesale clothes stores. Lots of the owners are Arabic-speaking Jews and Arabs. There are also plenty of Persian Jews here, many of the older ones were born in Iran and you can hear lots of Persian being spoken if you listen carefully. At lunchtime they congregate at the two Persian restaurants in the vicinity. It’s cool to listen to snatches of Persian here and there.

empty lot

Posted on by

This huge piece of land has been empty for over five years, an eternity in an area where new buildings are springing up all the time. So there must be either a dispute over it, or it’s contaminated and has to lie empty for a time. On the other three corners of the junction are olive groves, a weird thing to have in the middle of a city. Who does the land belong to and what’s its story?

(NB: the pictures look rather small in this new template, but if you want to see one larger, you can just click on it. Easy!)

back street, jaffa

Posted on by

My neighborhood has turned into a hipster photography theme park. Every weekend, the streets are invaded by roving packs of people with huge Nikons and Canons, massive lenses, flashes and all manner of photographic bells and whistles, crowding around locals and snapping frantically at walls and hummus restaurants.

It’s like a plague of photographic locusts. They come in a swarm, they descend, they wreak their havoc, then they go home to Ramat Aviv.

The other weekend, I noticed a large pack of photographers surrounding a bench, furiously snapping away. Foolishly, I thought something had happened, so I rushed into the pack and elbowed my way to the front. There, sitting on the bench were the usual bunch of pensioners, playing backgammon like they do every single day. The photographers were excitedly capturing images of these “quaint south Tel Aviv locals”. Some local businesses are having a field day with this phenomenon, though – one kiosk is making a killing selling “traditional gazoz” (fruit flavoured soda in neon colours) and “traditional burekas” to tourists.

Whatever happened to the photographic trend of carrying a crappy Russian camera? Is that over now?

jaffa women

Posted on by

Jaffa women at the protest march a week ago. The situation in Jaffa is very complicated and the impetus for this march came from many things, but was sparked when local community leaders saw religious Jews from a newly-established yeshiva marching and, so people told me, lobbing stones at a mosque during prayers. So easy to think this march was a simple case of “Jews v. Arabs”. But it’s more complex. Even within Jaffa communities there is enormous diversity of culture, religion and class. Jaffa’s Arabs are Muslims, Eastern Catholics, Orthodox, Maronites; there are Jews from many different cultures and countries, there are secular and all shades of religious people. There is poverty here although there are big gaps between rich and poor. There are conflicts within these societies as well as between them but there is much consensus within and between them too, and a lot of work has been done by local people to improve community relations in Jaffa. A lot of the public anger is about people from outside Jaffa moving into the area and threatening that delicate balance.

 

Jaffa faces

Posted on by

 

I wanted to post these next few images as they are people shots, something I rarely post, and I thought you might like to see some actual human beings in my shots. So I should give some background. These are images of a big demonstration in Jaffa last Saturday in response to what local people feel are non-Jaffa residents trying to stir ethnic tensions in the mixed city.

clothes

Posted on by

Clothes belonging to refugee children from Sudan and Eritrea hanging out to dry in south Tel Aviv. About 500 homeless refugees sleep rough every night in south Tel Aviv, mostly in Levinsky park, although because it is cold people are now sleeping in Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station or in half-built homes on construction sites, anyplace that is warm.

On Rehov Kedem

Posted on by

Rehov Kedem in the Ajami neighbourhood of Jaffa. It’s a mixed neighbourhood of Christian and Muslim Arabs and Jews. I took this on a warm afternoon before the Christmas holiday when many homes and businesses here had Christmas decorations up (you can see a cross on one of the balconies).