Demonstration Dayreams

Photo courtesy of JoeSettler, my demonstration co-attender of many years. Note, this picture is not of my son...or me.


Last night along with over 100,000 people, I attended the hafgana (demonstration) at Kikar Zion in Jerusalem, where we protested against the Israeli government-sanctioned police brutality towards the Amona protestors last week.

My three oldest kids wanted to attend, but due to logistical issues of getting them from the Muqata, Yeshiva, and the like, only my 11 year old son made it to Jerusalem.

Squeezing my hand tightly, my son and I snaked through the packed streets of Kikar Zion, listening to the speakers drone on and on. Hardly anyone really listens to them anyway – you go to be a number, one little extra added space to a sea of people. The ideological teenagers go for the same reason they were at Amona. The less committed go for the social scene; imagine seeing 100,000 of your closest friends from school, camp, your neighborhood and those you met on every vacation you ever took.

No matter how many people show up, you always see familiar faces…my son even found his best friend there. While I saw the requisite number of friends, it bothered me that the median age had dropped significantly since I started going to these hafganot. OK, so I’m getting older, but I was still there -- maybe just because I’m young at heart. But where were all the tens of thousands of people my age – they only decided to send their kids?

Spotting JoeSettler, the 3 of us continued walking around, till we decided to get a bite to eat. Maneuvering through the crowd, we ended up at Apple Pizza off the King George pedestrian mall. And that’s when the daydreaming started…as I was transported back 20 years in time…

Apple Pizza hadn’t yet opened during my first year in Yeshiva; there was only one place for yeshiva and sem students, one year programmers, and tourists to get decent pizza and hang out -- the semi-mythical Richie’s Pizza on King George. Their pizza wasn’t amazing; the crust was flat and the cheese wasn’t really mozerella, but at the time it was the closest thing to homestyle American pizza. But it wasn’t only the pizza that brought everyone to Richie’s pizza. Back then, cell-phones were a dream that hadn’t been invented yet, payphones were sparse, and news traveled a lot slower. The easy going desert pace in Israel back then bares almost no similarity to the high-tech, hyper connected Israel of today.


Calling oversees in those days from a payphone meant dropping “asimonim” – little round phone tokens into the payphone and calling the international operator somewhere in Tel Aviv. If you were lucky enough to get through, you would tell her the number you wanted to call (collect, of course) and she would call you back with the connection. As soon as she hung up, you would pray with all your might that:

1) The number she was calling would answer.
2) The operator would call you back and not decide to take a falafel break
3) The person standing on line behind you, also waiting for the payphone wouldn’t try to kick you off the line
4) The phone would still work well enough to receive the call from the operator
5) The phone wouldn’t ring with someone other than the international operator.

Lots of things could go wrong…and they often did. It’s not surprising how religious we all became after a year or two in Israel – it wasn’t the yeshiva, it was from the spiritual experience of successfully calling oversees on the payphone.

Yet what made Richie’s pizza so special was the huge cork message board that covered the wall opposite the counter. A patchwork of folded over notes, napkins, and random papers, it was a modern tribute of the notes-stuffed Kotel, except instead of messages to G-d, this message board was the epitome of modern communications in Israel. With no easy way to contact anyone, you would leave a message on this board with the recipient’s name on it, and when they got around to it, they would pick up their message from the cork board, and maybe leave one as a reply.

With many parents having no way to contact their kids in Israel, they would call Richie’s pizza in Jerusalem and leave messages to be written down onto notes and then tacked to the message board. This service alone made it worthwhile for parents to give their kids extra pizza money – since it was the easiest and surest way of getting a message across the ocean.

The other main attraction at the time was the grand opening of Carvel ice cream across the street, at the bottom right of the Shalom Tower. Thursday or Saturday nights we would wait on line for over an hour to get that cool and smooth, soft ice cream. Waiting on line was half the fun, as guys and girls hung out on line, laughing away the evenings...with not a worry or care in the world. Where else would people wait on line for over an hour, in stormy cold winter weather, for ice cream?

Strolling around the center of town, I would meet friends from all around Israel; Yeshivot, Seminaries, University, Bnei Akiva Hachshara…and some friends who volunteered for the IDF…

And then, dragging me out of my daydream, my son asks me for more pizza.

It’s so odd that my children are not far from that age when they’ll be hanging out at the same places I did.

We hang around the hafgana a bit longer, buy some t-shirts and sweatshirts, and head for home.

And the daydream still lingers in my head.

Wherever I am, my blog turns towards Eretz Yisrael