Sunday, May 9, 2010

Hakotel

This week we'll be celebrating 43 years since the reunification of Jerusalem, on the 2nd day of the Six Day War. So I'll be posting some of the shirim of those days.

Ofra Chaza (1957-2000) was born in Tel Aviv to a family of Yemenite Jews. She was one of our most important singers, and straddled various genres. When I presented Shirim Mizrachi'im last week a number of readers admonished me for not presenting Ofra, since she was an important performer of them. Yet she didn't start there, nor was she ever only a singer of mizrachi music. Since I'm bringing songs about Jerusalem this week, I've chosen one she sang.

Hakotel - the Western Wall - was written in the flush of victory after June 1967. Given that an event had just transpired which had been fervently anticipated for 1897 years, it would have been forgivable if the shirim of those days had been triumphant songs of victory. They weren't, not in the simple meaning of the words. Here, judge for yourselves: the words in Hebrew, English and transliteration are all on the You Tube page; if you look carefully you'll see Teddy Kollek, mythological mayor of Jerusalem, in the final frames of the film; the recording was probably made sometime in the 1980s, and the venue is the open-air auditorium below the wall of the Old City.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very nice.

Yaacov did not include a link to the song on Youtube. There are several versions of just this performance. Here is one with words:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK3nrk3pwC4

Yaacov, if this is not the version to which you were referring, please correct me.

David E. Sigeti

Avigdor said...

Yaacov, is it possible that people actually liked that 80s hair? Shoulder-pad, fine, but that hair, it's like a rug! She was beautiful without all those bombastic curls back in the 70s.

Anonymous said...

Victor
...and that was even before hair extensions became de rigueur - maybe they were invented so that "western" women stood a chance of competing with that lusciousness
as to rug hair - somewhere there is a site featuring pictures of German soccer players who liked it upholstered also - so for once not only the females opted for gaga.
Silke
PS somehow you imbedded URLs are quite a nuisance to use with Safari - there maybe a smart trick to move back once one has clicked on them but I haven't found it yet