Aliyah sketch

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Arik Einstein (1979)
Uri Zohar (left)
Palmach

The Alija Sketch ( Hebrew העולים החדשים“New Immigrants”) by Arik Einstein (1939–2013) and Uri Zohar (born 1935) is an Israeli television skit that parodies the fact that every wave of Jewish immigrants from different countries is only a short time after their arrival in Palestine or Israel is already harassing and discriminatory towards newer immigrants. The sketch dates from the early 1970s and is a little over seven minutes long. Arik Einstein and Uri Zohar play all the main roles in it.

For the first time he was seen in a broadcast of the television show "Lul" ("Chicken Coop"), which ran 1970-1973 on Israeli television. The term Aliyah ( Hebrew עלייה, literally "ascent"; plural Aliyot ), which comes from the Bible , describes the immigration of Jews as individuals or groups from the Diaspora to the Promised Land in Judaism since the Babylonian exile (586-539 BC) . Participants in an aliyah are called Olim in Hebrew (singular: fem. Olah , masc . Oleh ).

construction

The sketch is set in a port on the Mediterranean coast and is supposed to show the different times of the great waves of immigration. New waves of immigration keep arriving there: from Russia , Poland , Yemen , Germany , Morocco and finally Georgia and Russia in the former Soviet Union . These waves of immigration are embodied by the two actors who, in different costumes and behaviors , parody the character of the different nationalities - different languages, customs and traditions, culture and their hopes associated with immigration to the promised land .

Your arrival will be critically examined by two representatives of the nationalities previously encountered, i. H. the people already resident on site. At the beginning, before the first wave of immigration from Russia, there are two Arabs (with keffiyehs ) who are skeptical about the arrival.

While the comments made by those already resident target the peculiarities and characteristics of the respective representatives of different countries, their linguistic and cultural peculiarities (accent, eating habits, behavior ...), in the final scene there is a general abuse of all those who have already immigrated towards the immigrants, where finally everyone (Einstein and Zohar facing the viewer, the supporting actors in the clothes of the immigrants) unite in the chorus looking towards the sea (and seem to agree on the abuse). The newly arrived immigrants in the final scene initially visibly relate this to themselves, but gradually realize that they cannot be personally referred to. The climax of the skit is that immediately after realizing this, they meet each other. H. Immediately after their immigration, join the choir gesticulating and speaking in the direction of the sea and also start insulting the direction of the sea (from which all previous immigrants have arrived).

Musically, the sketch is held together by the song Po b'eretz chemdat avot (“Here in the land of the lust of our ancestors”) by Hanina Karchevsky , which is repeated several times as an instrumental leitmotif . The humor is extremely complex and ranges from the use of numerous languages ​​- in addition to Hebrew and Yiddish, there are excerpts in Russian, Polish, German, French and Arabic - and the parody of Zionism to the burlesque final scene.

literature

  • Adia Mendelson-Maoz: Multiculturalism in Israel : Literary Perspectives. 2014 ( partial online view )
  • Larissa Remennick: Russian Jews on Three Continents: Identity, Integration, and Conflict . 2013 ( partial online view )

Web links

Videos

References and footnotes

  1. ↑ In Israel they say: Israelis love Aliyah, but not Olim.
  2. ↑ The two actors were members of the artist group "Chawurat Lul", which also included Shalom Hanoch, Zvi Shisel, Boaz Davidson and others. It is comparable to the English comedian group Monty Python .
Alija-Sketch (alternative names of the lemma)
Aliyah sketch; Aliya Sketch; Immigrant sketch by Einstein and Zohar