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The Lure of the Crater
Netty C. Gross
ESTEBAN ALTERMAN |
Nir Ben Gal, 41, bearded, barefoot and intensely blue-eyed, sits on a sofa sipping tea in a converted factory loft. We're in the abandoned industrial zone of Mitzpeh Ramon, the Negev working-class town 160 kilometers south of Tel Aviv most famous for its proximity to Israel's sensationally beautiful Ramon Crater. The loft's d�cor is 60s chic: hand-painted murals, incense, stacks of unwashed pots and plates, scattered Indian prints.
Wandering through the loft are an assortment of dogs and various beaming, barefoot adults, including 30-year-old Liat, an ex-Tel Avivian, and 21-year-old Marcelo, a tourist from Brazil. Doris, 40, sits on the floor reading a New Age self-help book. Behind a wall, there's a long row of what Ben Gal calls "visitor accommodations:" connected burlap tents, each containing a foam mattress and a light with a homemade shade. It all adds up to a pleasurable mix of intimacy and informality - India-sur-Negev.
Until two years ago Ben Gal and his wife, Liat Dror, dancers, choreographers and founders of the Adama modern dance troupe, which made a middling name for itself touring Europe, were habitu�s of the highflying Tel Aviv arts demimonde. It was a life of carefully calibrated frenzy, centered, by their telling, on being seen at the right restaurants and parties, romancing important people, appearing in the gossip columns. "I was your typical egomaniacal Tel Aviv artist," recalls Ben Gal, as though describing a particularly unpleasant recently deceased relative. "Successful, driven but always upset, competitive, chasing down lucrative bookings, demonstrating at Rabin Square. I had no God."
Then they had an epiphany. Homeward bound after a weekend in Sinai, they were passing through Mitzpeh Ramon when their car broke down. "I looked around and said, 'What an incredible place.' It was quiet," Ben Gal recalls. "The desert was amazing. Folks were helpful. We suddenly wondered, 'Who the hell needs Tel Aviv? Why can't we stay here forever?'"
They came back the next day. "We felt suddenly very removed from our war with the Palestinians. Felt God's presence. Not the angry God who resides in Jerusalem," says Ben Gal, who's secular in his lifestyle, "but a calm, benevolent desert God. We decided to stay. The whole thing was mystical."
The mystique, however, was lost on several members of the Adama troupe, who wondered aloud whether Ben Gal and Dror were undergoing simultaneous nervous breakdowns and quit. But eight dancers followed the couple to Mitzpeh. Adama stopped its international touring and reestablished itself in the loft - as a dance company-cum-commune-cum-New Age exercise studio and hostel for rat-race time-outers.
Amusingly, Ben Gal and Dror have never been busier, and their finances are in good shape too. Mayor Dror Dvash, grateful for the hip, avant-garde image they brought to town, rented them the immense loft dirt cheap - it was out of use because industry had long since vanished from Mitzpeh - along with more industrial space for a performance studio and an exercise hall. Government tax breaks for poor outlying towns, substantial for new residents, also help.
Last autumn, 1,000 dance patrons trekked here for Adama's "Rite of Spring" premiere in their facelifted factory. The printed schedule for spring is jam-packed with performances - in Mitzpeh and around the country - workshops, lectures and other activities, including an afternoon of "catered lunch and meditative exercise" for stressed-out yuppies. "Nir Ben Gal is Mitzpeh Ramon's Intel," says Yaakov Shavit, Mitzpeh's director of development, referring to the computer firm whose giant plant resuscitated Kiryat Gat, another struggling southern town.
But Ben Gal and Dror aren't alone in seeking a better life in this town of 5,600, whose image is composed equally of regular headlines about joblessness (now at 11 percent) and the allure of the Ramon Crater, under consideration by UNESCO to become a world heritage site on par with such regional wonders as Masada and Petra. Unlike most "development towns" - old Israeli Newspeak for the undeveloped instant slums built in the 50s and 60s - which attract no newcomers except Russian-speaking immigrants in search of low-income housing, Mitzpeh Ramon has, in the past five years, proved a strange draw for an assortment of people from Israel's established class.
Recent arrivals include a Netanyah architect who was attracted to the desert air and quiet; a drama coach and high-school teacher from Holon who "had to get away from the mall culture" (there's no mall in Mitzpeh); and a well-traveled Parisian immigrant businessman named Stefan Azoulai whose own eclectic apartment is filled with hi-tech goodies and four new red jeeps.
Yehudah Honeybud, a 45-year-old recent arrival who heads an arts and science boarding school for high-school kids who can't or prefer not to live at home, also believes the desert's serenity has curative powers. "Our kids flourish here," says Honeybud, who was raised in the neighboring town of Yeroham. At 9 p.m., Honeybud insists on taking us to a dorm room to see pictures painted by a now reformed 12th-grader - of rats eating a man's head. "At least he's getting the anger out," Honeybud says.
The town is also a magnet for the religious. Itzik Zagari, 39, formerly of Jerusalem, helps run a "democratic, ecologically aware" boys high-school dormitory yeshivah with 120 students. The school is located across from the Ramon Crater, the largest of three Negev craters, and the one located within the town's parameters. When students get restless, says Zagari, "we close our Talmuds and go for treks in the desert. It calms them."
And consider Mitzpeh's latest arrivals: an entire hesder yeshivah - whose students alternate between army service and Talmud studies - with some 250 pupils and 45 staff families. Midbarah Ke'eden left Dimonah, another Negev development town, for Mitzpeh last year. According to yeshivah official Shmuel Klein, the school was always committed to settling Jews in the Negev but, he says, "Dimonah is a mess. The local government is paralyzed. People are bitter. Here, the air is clean. It's peaceful and people are tolerant." Citing the "new" him as a prime example, Klein says that while he's not "crazy about" Ben Gal's "lifestyle - I hate to tell you, but it looks like a cult to me" - members of both the yeshivah and the dance school, many of whom rent apartments in the same housing complex, get on well.
All this is good news for ex-trucking business owner Dvash, the energetic, 45-year-old Likud mayor, who won office in a bitterly contested 1998 election campaign against local Labor kingpin Sami Shushan.
Shushan's tenure was marked by heavy investment in new roads and cheery street signs that, among other things, direct visitors to Mitzpeh's "new" industrial zone.
Dvash eliminated the 11-million-shekel ($2.75-million) deficit he inherited; now he wishes the term "development town" would no longer be used to describe Mitzpeh. The mayor was instrumental in attracting the hesder yeshivah, which, he says, has filled up empty rental space and boosted the local economy. Moreover, he adds, "Many of the rabbis' wives are highly trained professional teachers who teach in our elementary school. The yeshivah head's wife runs our community center and gives the disco parties her blessings." If these people are drawn to Mitzpeh Ramon, reasons Dvash, who arrived here 20 years ago from Beersheba, so could others be.
MITZPEH RAMON'S STORY started as the standard-issue pioneer fairytale or nightmare, circa 1956. As part of its policy of quickly popu-lating the empty Negev to make sure it stayed part of Israel, the government settled several hundred North African immigrants on this elevated mountain plain overlooking the desert. The blueprint was the same one deployed in neighboring development towns Dimonah, Ofakim and Yeroham: Draw a town in the desert, build Soviet-style housing blocks, bring Sephardi immigrants, build an industrial zone filled with factories paying unskilled or semi-skilled workers at the bottom end of the salary scale. And all the predictable, development-town things happened. The factories created blouses, irrigation equipment and plastic containers that would eventually be produced more cheaply abroad. And by the 80s, they were closing one by one, triggering massive unemployment and bitterness.
The Ramon Crater, whose multi-hued rocks and sands and spectacular vistas have the potential to draw a billion dollars' worth of tourism, was ignored, says Shavit. One of the Israelis who became a desert nut in the days when Israel held the Sinai, Shavit built Mitzpeh's field school after moving here from another nature education center at the base of the purported Mt. Sinai. The 400-square-kilometer crater is the largest in Israel and, according to Shavit, the only crater of its kind in the world that has hidden springs in a unique desert terrain.
And so, Mitzpeh Ramon developed two distinct identities: One as an unhappy town plagued by unemployment, a largely boarded-up industrial zone and aggressively ugly housing projects; and, another as home to one of the planet's greatest natural treasures. Hiking through the canyon, many residents recall, was their version of skipping stones in the local pond.
The first acknowledgment of the canyon's potential in providing income occurred some 30 years after the town's founding, with the opening of a tourist center. The first hotel, the four-star Ramon Inn, opened in 1991. Today, the inn's lobby and its restaurant are the most important places in town, offering
a sense of luxury; the hotel is also the only place to buy lunch on Shabbat.
Dvash acknowledges that locals are bitter; they're tired of promises of a better life, tired of hearing about hotels that never get built and armies of tourists who never arrive. Some of this is due, he says, to "development town syndrome. You lie to people for years, they become brittle and break. But when the hotel went up, folks were also dismissive. Today it employs 70 people. I have a lot of hopes and dreams for this place."
IN FACT, DVASH HAS AN AMBItious plan to turn his town, which currently has the one hotel, the field school, a small inn and a handful of B&B;'s, into a world-class tourist attraction. In mid-April, ground will be broken on a 20-million-shekel local airport, and brochures describing the proposed, luxurious 120-room Desert Adventure Hotel are already in print. "We're walking distance from one of the great natural wonders of the world," he says. "I want to turn Mitzpeh Ramon into Israel's Santa Fe." The influx of schools and of yuppies like Ben Gal is, for Dvash, a down payment on the dream: proof that an isolated place in the desert can be reframed as paradise.
Some of the longer-term residents find all this burgeoning excitement bizarre, even infuriating. There are virtually no jobs to be had in Mitzpeh, they say - most of the employed are career soldiers or army employees who move away when their stints, and their newcomer's tax-free status, are over - and youths rarely return after the army. Joblessness is rife among the original Moroccan residents, who now make up only a quarter of the population, and among newer Russian-speaking immigrants.
Similarly, life in a town that doesn't have a single coffee shop is described as crushingly boring. The notion of reinventing Mitzpeh into a great hub of tourism, scoffs Havatzelet Ingver, 42, is nonsense - a dream that will never come true. "All this talk of peace and tranquility is a bitter joke," says Ingver, a seamstress and mother of four. "Because it's the peace and tranquility which is, frankly, killing us."
Last November, Indian-born Ingver, a town resident for two decades, became an overnight national celebrity. Vowing not to go peacefully onto the dole, she led a four-day sit-in at the Mitzpeh Ramon Sewing Factory, whose owners had just announced its closure, firing all 54 employees. It was one of the last manufacturers still operating in town. Ingver and others barricaded themselves in the plant, demanding the government bail the factory out and save their jobs.
The all-female act of defiance triggered intense media coverage that resulted in an uncommonly happy ending: With government and municipal loans and promises from the military for clothing orders, and from the Kitan textile firm for linens and drapes, the women went into business for themselves, purchasing the machinery and other equipment from the former owners.
Located across the road from Nir Ben Gal's properties, the newly named Mitzpeh Atzma'ut cooperative (which translated freely means "Freedom's Lookout") is, despite its newfound celebrity status - during our visit a Tel Aviv TV producer was filming them for a documentary - just scraping along. Ingver, who in between interviews continues to sew at warp speed, admits being frightened for the future. "I just hope and pray the orders keep coming," she says, her class-president smile tinged with defiant anger.
At 11 a.m., while Ben Gal and 12 workshop participants meditate in silence in a black-walled studio painted with psychedelic-colored Age of Aquarius symbols, the sewing factory is abuzz with the noise and energy created by 54 women hunched over their machines, sewing officer's uniforms, drapes and linens. A month ago, a fire swept Ben Gal's studio and Ingver and others came by with food and offers to help. But few evinced much enthusiasm for what they found. Few were curious to attend any dance productions. And few, despite their personal stake in their saved factory, have been moved from the typical Mitzpeh veterans' despondency.
"We are working people who have to fight for a minimum-wage job. We don't have the luxury of standing on our heads and looking for inner peace," says 40-year-old Etti bitterly, as she sews buttons on a man's uniform. "This place is a dead end, a trap. We have no life here, no future. A place made up of little groups of people who have nothing to do with each other. No one stays here if they can help it." Adds Galia, another seamstress: "Those who have young children at home are lucky. Between the silence at home and in the street, you can go crazy. People are lonely."
With two radically different visions of Mitzpeh at play, it's hard to gauge whether the town will go from backwater to oasis.
Are the ex-Tel Avivians seeking solace a sign of the future? Or are the weary faces of the Mitzpeh sewers the real story? As we wind up two days in Mitzpeh, we travel deep into the canyon. Except for the wind, it is silent and, with the sun setting on the majestic ridges, frightfully beautiful. The desert of Mitzpeh Ramon seems just the place to dream.
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