Israel Travel

Pope Benedict XVI starts today his first papal visit to the Holy Land, after visiting Jordan. The Pope's Holy Land Pilgrimage, from May 11 until May 15, will include visits to the holy sites in Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem.

During his five day visit, the Pope will deliver, on the afternoon of 12 May, a Holy Mass at the Kidron Valley in Jerusalem, where thousands of worshipers are expected to participate. The Pope will also visit Yad Vashem (11 May) and the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, Mount Zion, the Cenacle and Gethsemane Church (12 May). After a visit to Bethlehem and Mass at Manger Square, (13 May), Pope Benedict will deliver another Mass in Nazareth at Mount Precipice and will pray at the Church of the Annunciation (14 May).

More than 15,000 Christian pilgrims are expected to accompany the Pope on his trip to Israel. The Pope's visit is expected to generate more than $50 million for Israel, according to BBC news.

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New Orleans is coming to Caesarea. Three of the leading jazz musicians in traditional jazz - Ken Peplowski, Duke Heitger and Jeff Barnhart, to headline this year Caesarea Jazz Festival. The tree jazz artists with their very best international ensembles will carry with them the authentic spirit of the early 1900s in New Orleans.

The jazz festival at the ancient harbor of Caesarea takes place for the fourth time from Thursday, June 12 until Saturday, June 14, 2008.

This opening show hosts Ken Peplowski's Swing Quintet. The clarinet and tenor-saxophone artist will be accompanied by jazz pianist Cyrus Chestnut and the wonderful guitarist Howard Alden. Along with them plays the Australian contrabassist Nickie Parrott, and drum legend Joe Ascione.

New Orleans jazz trumpeter Duke Heitger's nine-man-band will perform at the second evening of the festival. Heitger's large ensembles will play a rich variety of style in traditional jazz music, including a combination of swing, Dixieland and the music of New Orleans.

The brilliant stride-pianist Jeff Barnhart and his septet play last on the festival's closing night. It's an international team of extraordinary players like, Antti Sarpila, Pieter Meijers, Jim Fryer, Bob Leary, and Danny Coots.

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As part of the project "Sixty Years of Art in Israel", six major Israeli museums are each presenting artwork from one of the decades of the nation’s history. The Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art will stage an exhibition which will focus on the young art of the 1990s.

Entitled: Eventualy We'll Die: Young Art in Israel of The Nineties, the exhibition presents works from the 1990s by leading Israeli artists such as Arnon Ben-David, Michael Sgan-Cohen, Nir Hod, Hila Lulu Lin, Sigalit Landau, Miriam Cabessa and Guy Bar Amotz.

The 1990s in Israel were characterized by a cultural boom, fueled by the euphoria over the Oslo Accords and the dream of a New Middle East, and by an opening to and cultural simultaneity with the world at large.

The 1990s were also the decade in which Israeli art most distinctively assimilated the postmodern discourse, in the form of extensive preoccupation with the politics of identity, feminism, Mizrahi identity and Orientalism.

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Dani Karavan retrospective at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art is summarizing a rich and fruitful oeuvre spanning more than sixty years. As the exhibition curator Prof. Mordechai Omer is going far back as the early 1960s, in order to study the early phases in his work.

The present show unfolds a coherent and sequential course between the early and the later, internationally acclaimed, works, and points to the manner in which his artistic language gradually grew from a formal vocabulary of an illustrator of children’s weeklies and leaflets in the kibbutz to the design of national exhibitions and stages of the Israeli army entertainment troupes. His “Negev Monument,” created in the mid-1960s, is today considered a masterpiece in Israeli art.

Born 1930 in Tel Aviv, Karavan is best known for site specific memorials and monuments which merge into the environment. Throughout the periods of his work Karavan is attuned to the demands and circumstances of the specific time and place, which form the basis for his way of thinking and the modes of his artistic creation. In 1977 Karavan was awarded the Israel Prize and in 1998 was one of five recipients of the Japanese annual Praemium Imperiale art prize.

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More than 60,000 Christian pilgrims are expected to visit Israel in Christmas holiday 2007, a rise of 50% compare to 2006, according to The Israeli Tourism Ministry estimation.

The number of Christian tourists that visit Israel this year increased by 30% to one million, half of them were Christian pilgrims.

Israel has numerous sites of importance to Christianity, from the Old City of Jerusalem to Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee, Mount Gilboa and Caesarea.

More than 2.1 million tourists visited Israel in the first 11 months of the year, a 24% rise over the same period in 2006. Israel's Ministry of Tourism is expecting 2.8 million tourists in 2008.

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The city of Tel Aviv has become a paradise for international business travelers seeking to stay in touch with their home offices while they visit the Holy Land. With the many hotspots and free Wi-Fi services offered at hotels, restaurants, fast food chains and cafés, business travelers can check e-mail almost everywhere, make free transatlantic VoIP calls using Skype, and browse the net to keep abreast of the latest news in their respective fields.

The rapid growth in the number of wireless Internet users around the world has created a need for many people to rely on Wi-Fi connections while traveling. The advantage of using Wi-Fi is that it gives business and leisure travelers added mobility and flexibility.

The ability to access the net from almost everywhere has become a necessity for business travelers who want to keep in touch with colleagues and clients regardless of their physical locations, and who want to check e-mail between meetings. Those equipped with smart-phones and other wireless handheld devices, such as Blackberry, can use them all around Israel without difficulty.

Unlike Europe and the United States where most places charge for internet use, almost all establishments in Israel's business capital offer Internet services free of charge. Take, for example, the Atlas Hotel chain. Atlas grants all its guests free, unlimited broadband access to the Web from the hotel lobby, meeting rooms or from private guest rooms using a Wi-Fi hot spot, which is an area that allows high-speed wireless Internet access.

According to a recent survey, there are more than 200 hotspots available for laptop users in the greater Tel Aviv area alone. The majority of these are offered by hotels, restaurants and coffee shops, but visitors to Israel can also access the net at gas stations, hospitals, parks, universities, shopping malls and other places of interest such as Rabin Square in downtown Tel Aviv.

The number of hot spots in Israel has been doubled in each of the previous few years and is expected to continue growing at that pace in the foreseeable future. Any businessman with a laptop computer can check e-mail almost anywhere without having to pay for it.

Here is a list of hotspots in Tel Aviv that offer free high-speed wireless Internet access:

Hotels
The Atlas Hotel Chain offers unlimited and free of charge Wi-Fi services in six of its hotels in Tel Aviv: Basel Hotel, Tal Hotel, Melody Hotel, City Hotel, Cinema Hotel and Center Hotel. The services is available in the main banquet halls, restaurants, poll area, bar and the in the lobby.

Coffee Bars
Arcaffè chain is not only bringing real Italian espresso bars to Tel Aviv, but also offering high quality wireless access in all its coffee bars around Tel Aviv, from Ramat Aviv Mall in the north of Tel Aviv to Rothschild Boulevard at the finance center of the city. Other large coffee chains – such as Aroma, Cup 'O' Joe, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and Coffee To Go - offer Wi-Fi services for free. Such services are provided also by many other cafes such as Merelin Monroe Café, Noah Coffee, Coffee Print and others.

Restaurants
Leading American Fast Food Chains McDonald's and Burger King Offer free of charge wireless services in their branches in Tel Aviv. There is Wi-Fi spot in the brasseire restaurant, which is located on Iben Gavirol Street near Rabin Square. Kyoto Salsa Restaurant, and Messa, one of Tel Aviv's most elegant restaurants, are also offering fast internet access.

Public Places
At the trendy Tel Aviv Port there's no need to enter one of the many restaurants or bars in the area. This prime entertainment center features Wi-Fi Internet access, meaning web surfers and businessmen can take a seat on the boardwalk and connect to cyberspace.  Dizengoff Shopping Mall in central Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion InternationalAirport also feature Wi-Fi hotspots.

So don't think twice about taking a laptop on a business trip to Tel Aviv. One is immediately connected upon landing in Israel - not just to the warm, friendly people of the Holy Land, but to all people connected to the net. Home away from home, they call it in the hospitality industry.

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The pianist and Music Advisor of the Jerusalem International Music Festival Elena Bashkirova and the conductor Karl-Heinz Steffens, will perform in a special concert of a New Series of the Israel Chamber Orchestra in Jerusalem.

The Concert will take place on Monday, November 26, 2007 at 20:30 in YMCA, Jerusalem, and on Wednesday and Thursday, November 28, 29, at 20:30 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

The program include:
Grieg Romanza & Presto al Saltarello from string quartet in G minor, op. 27 (100 years for his death, World Premiere to A. Bar-Droma's orchestration)
Mozart Piano concerto no. 27 in B-flat major, K. 595
Odön Partös Concertino for strings (100 years to his birth)
Haydn Symphony no. 88 in G major

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The first concerts of Cohen in Israel, with his acoustic trio of Shai Maestro (piano) and Mark Giuliana (drums), will take place at Jerusalem’s The Lab art center on Thursday October 11. The Israeli bassist will also perform at Tel Aviv’s Zappa Club, starting from Friday, October 12 till Sunday October 14.

Avishai Cohen, born April 20, 1970 in Israel, is a musician who has been called a jazz visionary of global proportions by DownBeat, and was declared one of the 100 Most Influential Bass Players of the 20th Century by Bass Player Magazine. Until late in 2003, Avishai was a member of the Chick Corea New Trio, and accompanist to other jazz note-worthies, including Bobby McFerrin, Roy Hargrove, Herbie Hancock, Nnenna Freelon, Claudia Acuna, Paquito DRivera and many others.

His new album offers an overview of his career with highlights from his recordings: Smash, Elli, Samuel, One For Mark and Nu Nu are from Continuo (RazDaz, 2006), Remembering and Feediop were featured on At Home (RazDaz, 2005), Etude stems from the recording Unity (Avishai Cohen & The International Vamp Band, Stretch, 2001), and Bass Suite #1 is a stand out track from Avishais debut release, Adama (Stretch, 1998).

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UK low cost airline bmi is intends to launch a daily non stop service from Heathrow to Tel Aviv starting next spring. The move come after the successful conclusion of bilateral talks between the UK and Israeli governments, allow the designation of a second UK and Israeli airline on routes between London and Tel Aviv.

“The opportunity to be part of the growing business links and ties between the UK and Israel is extremely exciting and we shall look forward to playing our part in widening the competitive air links between the two countries, and the economic growth that this has historically achieved,” said Nigel Turner, bmi CEO.

The launch of services from Heathrow to Tel Aviv will grow the total number of destinations served by bmi, Heathrow’s second biggest airline, from Heathrow to 39. Earlier this month bmi announced the largest-ever expansion of its route network, with the opening of sales to 17 new destinations, including Baku, Cairo, Tehran, Beirut, and Amman. The move marks the completion of the integration of BA destinations that were operated by BMED under a franchise agreement. BMED was purchased by bmi in February 2007.   

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The first Israeli Biennial of Contemporary Art will open in Herzliya on Sunday, September 23, 2007. Entitled "The Rear", the week-long exhibition will feature approximately 70 Israeli artists, whose works will be presented in some 15 venues in Herzliya's new city center, at the intersection of Sokolow and Ben Gurion streets.

The Biennial, curated by Joshua Simon, will span works in diverse media and techniques: from photography, painting, and video, to urban interventions, needlework, and acts of masquerading.

The fine art event will present works by contemporary Israeli artists who respond to the space in which they operate – "The rear" (Ha'Oref in Hebrew, which also denotes "home front," "hinterland," "nape"): the home front as opposed to the front line – civilian society in Israel versus the army. "The Rear" is a general term that surfaced repeatedly during the recent war in the summer of 2006, when a million Israeli citizens in the country's north sat in bomb shelters, and a million Lebanese became refugees, fleeing from their country's ravaged South.

The Herzliya Biennial of Contemporary Art is a joint initiative of the Herzliya Municipality and the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. As part of the Biennial events, the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art will stage an exhibition which will also open on September 23 and will be on view until December 15, 2007.

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