Kobi Oz has an explanation for why Tunisians had "low-genetics" • His mother Rachel remembers the reception in Israel, with disinfectants
"She became an emitter, an absorber, then an absorber."
Oz and his mother, Rachel, this week
Photography:
Disposal pins
While we wait
for his mother in a small public garden in the center of Tel Aviv, Kobi Oz notices the bloom of tiny brown mushrooms at the foot of the trees, on whose branches a bunch of noisy deer gather.
He lives on the street corner, spends quite a bit in the garden with his young children, and yet, this non-urban discovery leads him to pull out a phone and take pictures from all angles.
The excitement of a giant snail entering the frame is interrupted by his mother.
Rachel Raymond Ozen, 87, who is perhaps half her son's height, walks slowly toward us, is supported by a nursing worker and tries to hide the pain in her right shoulder injury, reminiscent of an encounter with a parked scooter that fell on her on the sidewalk near her home.
She is still waiting to be vaccinated for Corona and is keeping her distance.
Kobe dies to hug her, but settles for a half-hesitant touch.
"There is a great difficulty with the corona," he says, and she continues, "because they are not allowed to see me. I have to be guarded. His children also keep saying, 'We are guarding Grandma.'"
Kobi: "She lives on the parallel street, and was used to coming to us every day. During the closures we stopped, and it ended her. It was really bad for her. When we did not see each other, she reached a worrying state of mind. I am an only child, she has grandchildren, and suddenly she does not see Them for such a long time. It was really sad to see this disconnect.
"Now she visits us more.
The house is big, it sits in a distant place, windows open.
The children know not to run to grandma and not to hug. "
Rachel:" Before the plague I had a very close relationship with them.
We met a lot, went on joint trips, flew together abroad - to the Netherlands, Belgium ".
Kobi: "My mother was a very working mother. As a grandmother she is much more present, is there for the grandchildren. I am very excited to see it."
Rachel: "I would cook for them, and they would take in boxes for Friday. Couscous, soup."
Kobi: "She speaks as if it is nostalgia. I continued to take food from you until two weeks ago, until she was injured in the hand. In two weeks you will return to cooking. I am already informing you."
Rachel and Kobi
will receive the "New Pioneers Medal" next week, an initiative of the president of the World Spanish Association, Prof. Shimon Sheetrit.
The prize will be awarded to 73 of the founders of the development cities, moshavim and neighborhoods during the period of immigration and settlement of the beginning of the state, and it came to honor the contribution of immigrants from the countries of Spain and the East to the development of the country.
Rachel was born in 1933 in Tunisia, in the northern port city of Bizarre, and grew up in a vibrant Jewish community.
Her family lived in her grandparents' house, walking distance from the beach.
When she was 9, and her mother pregnant with the eighth child, they arrived in the ship city of Nazi Germany.
"The entrance to the port of Bizareta passes through a sea route in the middle of the city," Kobi explains, "so that the ship enters a bridge, and suddenly the ships are very high and the city is low. Then imagine a big ship saving the whole city. And they arrived, ship after ship, and suddenly Nazis start spinning "As a Jew, you immediately understand that it will not work."
Rachel: "The next day we went to school as usual. We were put in the trenches because they said, 'This is a war.' When we returned home they explained that there was a need to evacuate, and everyone tried to leave the city, convoys of Jews started outside.
" We paid Arabs and rented two carriages with horses And there we loaded mattresses and some things we took from home, and another carriage in which the rest of the family rode.
We drove like this for 24 hours, until the entrance to the capital Tunis.
In the middle of the road we were stopped by Germans, who thought we were smuggling weapons.
Do a search and release us. "
Kobi:" Tunis was full of Zionist activity, a very cohesive, idealistic and ideological Jewish community.
Therefore, when the Nazis arrived there, the Jews organized themselves in all sorts of hiding places. "
Rachel: "We settled in a Jewish school. We marked a square on the floor for each family, and that's how we lived for a while. When my mother knelt to give birth, we built a side hide behind sheets for her, and there she gave birth to my brother. The Germans just came to recruit men for labor camps. "Guys behind the sheets, opened and saw a woman giving birth. My father managed to escape in time."
Rachel: "My mother's relative lived in the school shelter. She had small children, and her husband was taken to a labor camp. He returned from there in critical condition, with severe pneumonia.
" This is how it went on for about a year.
We tried to adapt, the adults were looking for ways to make money - for example, they made cookies in Primus and sold them on the street. "
How was the attitude of the Muslims?
Rachel:" They were a bit on the German side, so we were careful of them. "
Kobi:" My father was sent to school with Arabs From the aristocratic class.
They would beat him, which was a waste of time, until he stopped walking.
The traditional attire of the Jews in Tunisia was a red turban half the size of the others, so that God forbid the Jew would not be taller than the Arab.
I mean, their life there was subdued, not upright.
"If you ask me, from the height of my years, the absorption of Tunisians in Israel was easier than that of other testimonies from North Africa, because we were more submissive from the beginning. We accepted all the hardships of absorption in an attitude that 'it is better than it was in Tunisia.' And were deprived of their senior status, with us it was different. The Tunisian government did not nurture the Jews. It allowed them to exist and they had rights, but pretty soon the Arabs joined the Nazis.
"At the entrance to the beach in Bizarre, near my grandmother's house, one day they put up a sign. And to the Jews. '
When you see it, you realize that your future is not in this country. "
In May 1943, Tunisia fell to the Allies." American soldiers roamed the streets handing out candy.
There were a lot of cheers, "Rachel recalls Victory Day. But at that point it was already clear that it would be a matter of time before the family would move again. After several years of living in the city of Freeville, the family decided to immigrate to Israel.
In 1950, they again
abandoned their belongings and sailed for the south of France.
They spent a month in a transit camp in Marseilles alongside other immigrants, waiting for their turn to immigrate to Israel.
She remembers sailing on the mythical ship "Theodor Herzl" as a special experience.
A 17-year-old girl is full of optimism.
"There was an extraordinary atmosphere, we just waited to go down and kiss the ground. When we stepped on the land of Israel, we were immediately sprayed with DDT, a disinfectant, so that we would not bring diseases into the country."
Kobe: "Do you remember it as an insulting experience, when they came to you with suits and sprayed disinfectant?"
Rachel: "It was insulting only in retrospect. We did not think of it that way at the time."
Kobi: "There was evidence that for them it was a slap in the face. A lot of people were offended. I think the Tunisians, who fled the Nazis and suddenly spoke Hebrew to them, were in euphoria."
Rachel: "In those years we did not feel deprived because we were not mixed with the Europeans. We did not know that we received less well, or that we were not treated properly."
After the DDT and the vaccines, Rachel and her family were taken by truck to the Sha'ar Ha'aliya immigrant camp in Haifa.
"Everyone walked around this camp. Persians, Iraqis, Kurds, Georgians. Full of languages, all kinds of types and all kinds of smells. After a week we were sent to a transit camp in Masmiya, and from there to a transit camp in Gan Yavneh.
" .
There were a lot of small children in the transit camp, the wind uprooted tents, flooded lands and tossed huts.
We just wanted to save the kids.
Rescued some of my brothers and sisters for a religious meeting, to keep them out of danger.
Moshe, the brother born during the Nazi occupation, returned home with wigs.
His
parents
shaved his hair there and left wigs. "
Her parents found work in the local council. Her mother was a cleaner, and her father a tax collector, who went from house to house to collect property tax payments." To this day people approach me who remember my grandfather telling them 'no need to pay', despite the debt "Because he understood how difficult it was for them financially," says Kobi.
Rachel: "My mother had a piano, and my father knew how to sing piyyutim.
That's how they connected.
He would recite to the sounds of the piano.
Besides, they were also cousins. "
Kobe:" In the small towns in exile the families got married into themselves, and that created a genetics of short stature.
Then, when they immigrated to Israel and dispersed, they were amazed at how tall children grew up in the family.
It happens when you get married outside the gene pool.
We have uncles who are not the tallest in the world, my mother is short, and I also went out like that, because there is a family bond between my parents on both sides - both on the mother's side and on the father's side. "
After the move, the family received a small apartment in Gan Yavneh. For a time, Rachel met the late Joseph Jojo Ozen, Kobi's father.
"Dad was a girls' foreman picking watermelons and melons. They were all Yemenis, finishing a furrow in an hour, and only Mom, who is a small and very slow woman, would lag behind everyone else. But Dad would not push her."
Rachel: "He would see me, come and help me move forward."
Kobe: "His patience for her pace - that was their love. I saw it a lot throughout their relationship. Say, when she had to cook something, it took her a lot of time, but it always came out terribly delicious. And he was always with a lot of patience. That connection between them. "It was harmonious and special. They got married in 1958 in Gan Yavne, and three years later moved to Sderot, following the work she received there."
From the beginning of her life
in the transit camp, Rachel functioned as a social counselor for the agency and helped new immigrants adapt.
Because she knew how to speak Hebrew, Arabic and French, she used to accompany them and guide them through the mazes of the Israeli bureaucracy.
In 1961, she was sent to fulfill this role in Sderot, was given a small apartment on Olive Street, and in time became a key figure in the development of the city.
"She went from being absorbed to being absorbed, then to being absorbed," Kobi boasts. "Everyone who came to Sderot from the 1960s to the 1980s did it through her. Moroccans, Russians, Romanians, Ethiopians. As a child I remember her constantly traveling to the airport to fetch "People would knock on our door when they needed something, or when they wanted to say, 'Thank you, Mrs. Rachel.'"
Rachel: "To this day I am told about people who come to Sderot to look for me. They ask, 'Where does Rachel live from the agency?'
It makes me feel good to hear that I am remembered. "
Kobi: "On Mother's 85th birthday, we brought her 'The Suburbs' to perform. It was important for Amir Peretz to come to the event and greet her personally."
Rachel: "I was the one who made sure that he and his brother were enrolled in an institution of youth aliyah, when they were children. Later he became mayor. He is such a good person."
Kobe: "The things my parents saw in their lives are 'history.' I asked myself all my life, 'When will history come?'
And here, the corona is the first moment you say, 'Come on, this is the history they talked about', because for all the generations before us history has been knocking on our heads all the time, but for the last decades we have somehow managed to escape it.
"The main thing I did in my life is Teapacks , Which is a combination of Sderot and kibbutzim.
Accordion of a Hebrew singer with the Moroccan lip band.
This is my contribution.
But that's nothing compared to my mother's contribution.
Although we both win the 'new pioneers' award, I feel I do not deserve it as much as she does.
In my opinion, many more people like her should have won this award, and I am just a showpiece. "
Kobi was born in 1969
as Yaakov Ozen, after 11 years that Rachel was married.
"They had a hard time bringing children into the world," he says.
So you see I was born a celebrity. "
In the same year came from Tunisia aunt Rachel, the sister of his father, who was widowed husband before coming to Israel and volunteered to help take care of nephew new. As she spoke French, even the toddler Kobe spoke mostly French.
Rachel:" When he went to kindergarten for the first time Alone, he cried a lot.
Rachel was called to come and calm him down, but she worried him terribly ... "
Kobe:" So she just ripped me out of kindergarten and took me home on my first day, just because I cried.
The next day I went back to kindergarten.
Later, at school, I would go straight back to Aunt Rachel's house and go home only when my parents finished work.
As for my aunt, I was literally her son.
"She was a different kind of culture. She missed Zionism and was very French. You could say so arrogant, a kind of European snob. She had a subscription to newspapers that reported royalty, and she was interested in what the Princess of Monaco said about the Prince of Sweden. She died in 2006, some. Months after my father. "
As a child, Oz dreamed of becoming a Walt Disney.
"I wanted to beat Disney, do animation, and have Ozland instead of Disneyland. I would draw in bulk on printer pages with holes in the sides. Then they bought me a floor organ from a musical instrument store in Ashkelon, and that's how I started recording.
" My cousins, Hannah's sons, My mom's sister, they had already formed a band on the streets, and I would sit at home with two tapes, record on the organ, play the recording and add another recording and another recording.
Then I went to Tel Aviv to study electronic music.
I studied with Arik Rudich, Bnei Negri and even Yizhar Ashdot. "
Rachel:" At the age of 14, his father and I would drive him from Sderot, once a week, to a class in Tel Aviv. "
Kobi:" I was already an organist in a lip band.
My youth was very busy.
I released two singles, I was very active in the working youth, I both mentored and wrote in the movement newsletter.
I won the 'Shadrushir' competition. "
Rachel:" Music passes through our family.
His grandfather was a bard, who wanted everyone to hear his piyyutim, so we had no problem with the profession he chose for himself.
We took him to learn piano, we tried to push, but he did not persevere.
Learn a little, and that's it.
He said, 'I don't like playing the piano.' "
Kobe:" Because I started composing.
I was sitting at the piano and suddenly I invented some tune, so what, I'll start studying now?
I can read notes and I know how to write chords, but it's not the same.
I'm not Shlomi Shaban. "
In the late 1980s
, Oz, with Gal Ferman, Tamir Yemini and Ram Yossifov, formed the band Teapacks, which conquered the radio stations and marked the way to the center of the mainstream for every genre of oriental music that followed.
The band has released ten albums and dozens of timeless hits over the years.
It disbanded in 2009 and reunited four years later.
The band currently has nine members.
Oz tried to fill the shortage of performances with an acoustic personal show accompanied by three musicians, who planned to roam the courtyards.
But there was no great demand, and the truth is, neither was a strong desire on his part.
"It's pretty much going through me, I barely showed up. Until recently I also said 'no' to all the zooms they offered me. Today I do take what I can. Panel here and there, all sorts of things I would not agree to do in the past."
Surrender out of longing for the audience?
"No. I do not feed on the love of the audience, so it is not a longing for the audience to embrace. I do miss dancing, dressing in a colorful shirt, bouncing in Barbie, performing in Caesarea, doing this thing called Teapacks. It's a circus action. I miss Pan.
" Was disassembled I did a lot of intimate performances.
Today it does not appeal to me, especially when I am currently producing very subversive music in my studio at home, and all I feel like doing is just sampling silly things and dancing in the studio. "When
Oz tries to describe the music he has produced in the last two months at home, his eyes shine and his voice becomes excited. What will come of it, maybe it will be part of Teapacks and maybe not.
I took excerpts from noisy records that I like, cut, soiled and composed.
Say, a piano burps from one record, to which I added a piece of drums from another record.
That's how I created a new sound bank, and from this amusement I suddenly got seven new songs. "
In 2016, Teapacks released their latest album," Handicraft ", which did not restore commercial success from its glory days. Nevertheless, Oz is convinced that he is the best of all the band's albums. "It has all the benefits of our work and it is played all the time, you can see the numbers streaming.
"We do not expect to be Omar Adam. We have an audience in our niche, and it rejuvenates over time; the generation of 20s has discovered us in recent years. In many ways we are not a nostalgia band. When we broke up we were disappointed with the audience, and returned to hugs. Next year we'll be celebrating 20 years of the album 'Sitting in a Cafe', so I guess we'll re-record some songs, maybe in duets with other people.
"At the peak we would put out seven familiar songs from one 12-track album, which is crazy.
We have maybe 30 songs from our entire career that are played all the time.
In recent albums, maybe two or three songs have become familiar, so we decided to retire from albums.
We said, we'll just do singles.
"Now there's a problem: the nonsense I do in the studio looks like an album. I listened in the shower to what I recorded, and it sounds stuck. So I do not know what to do with it. I am a man of principles, but I also try to change them occasionally."
Last month, Oz,
along with other artists, met with Finance Minister Israel Katz in an attempt to find a solution to the crisis in the music industry. "The artists remained last.
The big institutions got money, so did the clubs, even the ballrooms, but we were abandoned.
No one cares about us.
"Before the Corona Teapacks started a tour with the East-West Jerusalem Orchestra. 40 musicians, who had to be paid. There were supposed to be ten performances, we did one before they closed. We live on ACUM royalties of 2019. The 2020 royalties will be smaller, because This year there were no royalties from the performances in cafes, clubs, etc.
Creators whose livelihoods are based on royalties will be cut in half, and we want to save them. "
What is your personal situation?
" I will always manage.
I do commercials, I do narration, I have a radio show on Fridays here on Network B.
The story is that we must find a way to protect our culture.
As artists we will have no choice but to play the political game, try to unite and push in the direction of Music Act, similar Lands cinema. "
You were one of the founders of the bridge Party Orly Loi-abksis and a strong supporter of Amir Peretz. Who will vote this time?
" I further Do not know.
But I think the trust between the establishment and the citizen must undergo restoration.
We said it on the bridge, but did not listen, because the only question was 'go or not go with Bibi'.
We wanted to fix the state user interface with the citizen, to create a situation where you can talk to the state without it treating you like a thief or a liar.
"I liked that Benny Ganz believed in Netanyahu. It moved me. I want a politician who believes. I believe a lot of people. I also think most of our politicians want to do good, and that they are not big corrupt. You can catch them in the corners, but by and large, they are there. For the right reason.
"Our problem in the country is that we are addicted to patents.
We think that if we move one person, everything will be fine.
A new method should be considered here, because a deeper change must be made than the replacement of one government or another.
There is still a lot of work to be done, and we need hardworking people to do it. "
nirw@israelhayom.co.il