Showing posts with label Tel Aviv. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tel Aviv. Show all posts

May 6, 2014

What, Bacon in Israel.....I'm Going there Right Now


Israel’s newest delicacy is delicious — if far from kosher

Smuggled into Jerusalem in shopping bags, the Aziz Butchers' bacon dazzles foreign journalists and diplomats alike


Israel's newest delicacy is delicious -- if far from kosher
This article originally appeared on GlobalPost.
Global PostBEIT JALA, West Bank — The fact of the matter is that it is not that difficult to buy pork in Jerusalem.
Most supermarkets in the city, including the large chains, are either kosher or halal, and thus do not carry the product. But between the secular, native-born Muslims and Jews, Christians, the local tribe of internationals, and Russian Jews who lost many kosher habits during 70 years under communism, a significant number of consumers hanker after the rosy meat.
In fact, the stringency of Jewish and Muslim prohibitions against pork may well serve to heighten the desire for it in a city that almost glows with religious fervor.
In recent months, among journalists and diplomats stationed in town — men and women alike — there has been a quiet thrumming about someone referred to as “the beautiful pork guy in Beit Jala.”
GlobalPost set out to uncover what the buzz was all about.
Israel districts numbered
Israel districts numbered (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Beit Jala is a Palestinian Christian town between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, right on the seam between Israel and a potential future Palestinian state. Its inhabitants are largely Greek Orthodox Christians. The fact that it is outside of Israel proper makes it illegal to re-enter Israel carrying meat, but the law is laxly applied.
The Alsoos family has had a butcher’s shop in the center of town, and a pig farm adjacent to it, since 1920.
Today, the shop is small and conspicuously well-kept, with two large meat refrigerators behind the counter and, in the front of the store, two smaller display cases holding an impressive array of salamis, mortadella, smoked bacon, and sausages in an alluring rainbow ranging from cream to a deeply rusty red, studded with points of fat.
At any given moment at the Aziz Butchers, you are likely to hear three or four or more languages murmured by customers considering their options.
Busily manning the counter is Raf Alsoos, 24, a third-generation pig farmer and general meat man, who, as GlobalPost can attest, possesses a winning smile and warm manner that easily draws customers who may have more mundane sources of pork closer at hand.


All the fresh meat is produced at the Alsoos farm. For any locavore meat-lover trapped in a desert of pre-cut, mass-industry meat counters, the cuts here are a sigh-worthy dream: bright and light and pink. Raf commonly advises the doubtful about which cuts better fit an Easter barbecue (chops and souvlaki cubes), and which would be best roasted and served on a platter. Sixty percent of their current business, according to Raf, comes from “journalists and embassies.”
To the almost certain surprise of his international clients, many of whom delight in the titillation of crossing from Israel into Palestine for the procurement of a taboo substance, all the smoked and processed meats come from … “Tel Aviv,” Raf says, laughing. “Some friend of my dad’s makes it. They’ve known each other since 1993.”
These meats can be said to be doubly smuggled: spirited informally into Palestine in the trunk of a car, and then carried back into Jerusalem in small portions in shopping bags, under the eyes of checkpoint soldiers who do not seem unduly exercised by the prospect of illicitly imported salami.
Aziz, Raf’s father, says that business boomed between 1970 and 2000. That is local code for describing the relatively prosperous years bracketed by the Six Day War, in 1967, and the second intifada.
“Before the intifada and the wall going up,” Aziz says, referring to the security wall Israel built during the eruption of violence in the early 2000s, “eighty percent of my clients were Israelis. I have a lot of Israeli friends.”
In the early ’90s, looking for new partnerships, he met Chanan Abramovich (the Tel Avivite Raf mentioned), who had recently acquired a flagging pork business from Karl Berg, a retiree.
Abramovich, who is 62, says “Aziz and I met many, many years ago. It wasn’t just salami. We’ve been friends for years. He and I worked together trading males and females for our farms, or I’d bring him medicine for the animals.”
Today, Karl Berg, which retained its original name under Abramovich, is established as one of Israel’s top pork producing operations, beneath the unrivalled pork superpower Kibbutz Mizra. Historically, the collectivist kibbutz movement has been militantly secular, and several kibbutzim currently produce pork products.
The Romanian-born Abramovich, whose family fled the communist regime when he was 12, owns the processing plant in Holon, a Tel Aviv bedroom community, and a pig farm of about 10,000 heads in Iblin, a Christian town in the Galilee. In Holon they smoke the bacon, for example, that the Alsoos family’s customers so crave. The Abramoviches also own a shop in Mahane Yehuda, Jerusalem’s central market, which proved useful to Aziz Alsoos after the wall went up. For a while, ”when I had orders from Jerusalem I’d take the meat from Karl Berg in the market and not from my shop, because of the checkpoint.”
In 2004, the Alsoos family moved to Canada to seek a better future. Aziz now runs a Middle Eastern restaurant outside Toronto, from which he spoke to GlobalPost.
But last July, Raf, who had helped his dad out every summer, decided to come back and run the family business with an older brother. ”I have my own business,” he shrugs. “Why would I want to work for anyone else? And it’s fun to work with meat,” he adds.
The next generation is taking over at Chanan Abramovich’s business, as well. When he spoke with GlobalPost, Abramovich, who travels frequently, was “in Normandy, enjoying the seafood.” Back at the meat plant, his son Ran, 29, was expecting a pick-up from Raf Alsoos that very day.
Like Raf Alsoos, Ran Abramovich proudly says the business is “100 percent meat, no fillers, no substitutes.” The two families’ intertwined businesses — youthful, artisanal, local — could be a Brooklyn cliche, all the more startling considering the West Bank surroundings.
But it’s no surprise that the Alsoos family’s Jerusalem clients are willing to bend the rules to get their hands on the meat. The pork chops grill up crisp and succulent, and Karl Berg’s black pepper salami is an irresistible accompaniment for a cold beer.
The fact of the matter is, not only is pork available in Israel: It’s superb.
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Roger Waters Begs Mick Jagger for the Sake of Palestine


Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and Nick Mason: Why Rolling Stones shouldn’t play in Israel

Band's founding members come together to argue in favor of the BDS movement -- and urge the Stones to reconsider


Roger Waters at Earls Court, London. Pink Floy...
Roger Waters at Earls Court, London. Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason joined the group, alongside drummer Graham Broad for Dark Side during the Saturday show. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
English: Mick Jagger with The Rolling Stones 1...
English: Mick Jagger with The Rolling Stones 1972 tour at Winterland in San Francisco, in June (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
TOPICS: ROLLING STONESPINK FLOYDISRAELPALESTINEBOYCOTTBDS,
Pink Floyd's Roger Waters and Nick Mason: Why Rolling Stones shouldn't play in IsraelRoger Waters (Credit: AP/Vadim Ghirda)
With the recent news that the Rolling Stones will be playing their first-ever concert in Israel, and at what is a critical time in the global struggle for Palestinian freedom and equal rights, we, the two surviving founders of Pink Floyd, have united in support of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), a growing, nonviolent global human rights movement initiated by Palestinian civil society in 2005 to end Israel’s occupation, racial discrimination and denial of basic Palestinian rights.
The BDS movement is modeled on the successful nonviolent movements that helped end Jim Crow in the American South and apartheid in South Africa. Indeed, key figures who led the South African freedom struggle, like Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mandela’s close associate, Ahmed Kathrada, have come out in support of BDS for Palestinian rights. BDS offers us all a way to nonviolently pressure the Israeli government to fully realize that its injustices against the Palestinian people are legally and morally unacceptable and unsustainable.
The movement does not advocate a particular political framework — one state or two — and neither do we.  Rather, we call for a resolution that upholds freedom, justice and equal rights for all, irrespective of identity, and does not cause additional suffering for either people. 
So, to the bands that intend to play Israel in 2014, we urge you to reconsider. Playing Israel now is the moral equivalent of playing Sun City at the height of South African apartheid; regardless of your intentions, crossing the picket line provides propaganda that the Israeli government will use in its attempts to whitewash the policies of its unjust and racist regime. 


We are nearing the tipping point in global awareness that the denial of Palestinian rights has had a devastating impact on generations of people, and that they need our support now more than ever.  Consequently, we encourage you, fellow artists, to ask yourselves what you would do if forced to live under military rule and discriminatory laws for decades. If the answer is that you would resist until justice prevailed, we ask that you champion BDS as a nonviolent, collective means of securing a better future for all. If you wouldn’t play Sun City, back in the day, as you, the Rolling Stones did not, then don’t play Tel Aviv until such time as freedom reigns for all and equal rights is the law of the land.  
“Together We Stand”