All about "normal" life in Israel

Was this the last Jacob’s Ladder ever?

Festival founders Yehudit and Menachem Vinegrad are staying mum. It really depends on whether they broke even on the weekend held this year between Yom Kippur and Sukkot.

Being a chutzpadik Israeli, I asked Menachem and Yehudit point-blank.

“We’re British!” Menachem protested. “We don’t talk about such things!”

Yehudit did share that the weekend was nearly entirely sold out, which is a good sign. But Jacob’s Ladder, the three-day extravaganza of country, bluegrass and indie pop that was held for dozens of years in the early summer, most recently at Kibbutz Nof Ginosar on the Sea of Galilee, has had some challenging ups and downs since Covid-19 led to the festival’s cancelation in 2020, followed by the years of war with Iranian proxies starting in October 2023 that left Israel’s north bereft of residents – let alone festival-goers.

2025’s reconstituted festival was held not on the expansive lawns of Ginosar, but at the tony Pastoral Hotel at Kibbutz Kfar Blum. Lush grounds, gorgeous rooms, and a proper concert hall – indoors – transformed the festival into a more high-end experience.

That had its pros and cons: No more sweating in 36-degree humidity; the hall was air-conditioned to a frighteningly cold setting (we had to wear sweaters, and we were still shivering).

But the higher priced tickets and a prohibition on camping at the kibbutz (which constituted the main “accommodations” at Ginosar), along with a limit of 500 attendees at Kfar Blum (compared with Ginosar, which would regularly attract close to with 3,000 attendees) meant that this was a more geriatric crowd.

We did our best to bring the age range down.

One thing we’ve always loved about what’s been dubbed “Israel’s friendliest festival” was its multigenerational flavor – and so we were delighted when our daughter and son-in-law came with their two toddlers in tow. They may have been too young to really appreciate the panoply of bands appearing on stage, but the soap-filled bubble-wand stations on the lawn outside kept their attention.

Another difference – also in the “pro” column – between this scaled-back festival and its predecessors: There was no need to “split.” Rather than three stages offering up multiple acts at once, there was just the single indoor one, so you didn’t need to miss out on a new discovery.

And discoveries there were a plenty.

Before we even made it to the main hall, a three-piece Dixieland jazz band, the Speechless Band, played classic pop tunes (think “Stand by Me”) in a funky New Orleans style while we lined up to enter the hotel’s dining room for dinner. It was a joy to watch our nearly two-year-old granddaughter, Roni, dancing with her mother to Guy Gurevich’s expressive trumpet.

The highlights of Friday night’s performances included the five-piece Black Velvet, which has specialized in Irish and Celtic music since they debuted at Jacob’s Ladder in 1980. The band hosted guest musician Ronit Shahar, whose guitar-driven indie folk leanings blended well with Black Velvet’s banjos and flutes. Shahar has seven albums out (including the 1996 hit “Ahuv Yakar” – “Loved one”), so she may not be a true “discovery” for everyone!

Black Velvet was followed by the Rusties, a Neil Young cover band, that takes its name from Young’s iconic 1979 “Rust Never Sleeps” album. Lead singer Dan de Jong channels Neil Young quite nicely, but it was bassist Tzili Yanko who, by adding a female voice, transformed the Rusties into more of a Neil Young “re-interpretation ensemble” than your typical tribute group.

Yanko has for years played guitar and sung backup vocals in Shlomo Artzi’s band. The Rusties’ performance was divided into two – the first half classic Neil Young acoustic songs (“Harvest Moon”) followed by a harder-rocking electric set (“Hey Hey, My My”).

The next day’s standouts included gospel singers Maple and the Ecosystem, whose band members parade on stage in gospel robes while pushing a message of ecological awareness; Shai Tochner and friends Gabriella and Abigail Lewis performing folk rock covers; and Yair Dalal and the Good Band, who combine the Iraqi folk music Dalal grew up with at home with Western classical music.

The festival closed with my personal favorite: the Abrams, the bluegrass turned country-pop duo, returning for a triumphant seventh visit to Jacob’s Ladder from their native Canada. The Abrams were the only band to come from overseas, and they made a point of showering the crowd with love and support – something we’ve been in dire need of as Israel is pilloried by the world media and boycotted by artistic communities.

There’s a special connection between our family and the Abrams: When Jacob’s Ladder was hosted at Ginosar, the Abrams would meander down to the beach to jam with the young people – including our kids. We’ve stayed in touch, and John and James Abrams have followed my cancer journey online. (Indeed, being able to attend Jacob’s Ladder was, for me, a personal celebration after the last hellish health year.)

Still, we were shocked – and delighted – when they gave our family a shout out from the stage – pointing to the very intergenerational mixing our family was so proud to continue.

The festival, as always, included Menachem’s corny jokes between sets. The best this year? “What do you call a fake noodle?” “An impasta.”

It’s unlikely that Jacob’s Ladder will be back for its former summer extravaganzas. But we can hope that the weekend at Kfar Blum was enough of a success that the Vinegrads will not be able to say good night just yet.

I first reviewed the possible “last” Jacob’s Ladder for The Jerusalem Post.

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My birthday and my daughter, Merav’s birthday are only a week apart. So, this year, we decided to celebrate together by taking the whole family out to dinner at Janjaria, the over-the-top chef restaurant in the boutique Ramban Hotel in central Jerusalem. Janjaria is operated by the Mahaneyuda Group which has expanded in recent years to offer a number of kosher establishments as well as its traditional treife ones.

Janjaria is the kind of place that is frequently sold out, so we were fortunate to find a table for all seven of us. The wait staff pulls up a chair to explain what’s on offer, especially since the menu changes frequently (perhaps not daily as in TV’s The Bear).

We ordered several cocktails, starters including focaccia with homemade humus and muhamarrah (a dip with dried peppers, walnuts and pomegranate molasses), tuna tartare (which, as raw fish, I’m not allowed to eat for another three months following my cancer treatment) and two plates of chickpea-filled sambusak.

For main dishes, I opted for the Spaghettini Arrabiatia – which featured a spicy fish broth, shredded sea bass and cilantro on top of pasta – Merav and Aviv both had butcher block skewers of shishlik on a bed of roasted cabbage (my favorite of all the dishes I sampled from my kids), Gabe had a steak, Jody had a whole piece of lavrak (more sea bass), and Amir went for lamb neck siniyah plate – also outstanding. To end it all – since the evening was to mark our birthdays – there was the obligatory chocolate mousse with a candle on top and seven spoons.

The music was loud – that’s the vibe at all Mahaneyuda Group restaurants – and when we asked, the manager refused to turn it down, so this is not the best place for intimate conversations. But the food was as out of-this-world as was the final bill, which was probably the most we’d ever spent on a single night of fine dining.

Everything should have been perfect. And then we heard it on Merav’s mobile phone – the scritch-scratch warning that everyone in Israel is intimately familiar with now – an alert indicating “incoming missiles; take shelter.”

Darn Houthis again.

You get the scritch-scratch on your phone whether you want it or not. The only way to not hear it is to put your phone on airplane mode, which I do in any case when I go to sleep. (Save your chiding. My wife, Jody, leaves her phone on.)

When we’d hear the scritch-scratch at home, we developed a system. If it was an attack from Iran, we’d immediately head down to our apartment’s shared safe space. But Iran hasn’t attacked with its highly precise and lethal weapons since June – all the ballistic missiles and drones heading our way these days are from the Houthis in Yemen whose aim has been notoriously wonky (a direct hit on Ramon Airport and a hotel in Eilat do not make for a formidable terrorist force, just one that can annoy the heck out of you).

To appropriate my favorite quote from Nuchem Shtisel, who plays Akiva’s shifty uncle and father of his bride, Libby, in the Israeli TV series Shtisel, when the Houthis come a ‘calling, I want to scream out “reshoim arurim,” meaning, in Nuchem’s colorful Yiddish, “Damned wicked people” or “Cursed villains.” Seems appropriate.

The phone alert covers a wide area, but air raid sirens only sound if the missile is headed your way – and with the Houthis, many if not most would be intercepted outside of Israeli airspace or would fall in a location other than where we are in Jerusalem. So, we could be woken up by an alert but not actually need to rush to the shelter.

Jody, being an alert-abiding citizen, would bolt out of bed (for a while, the ideal missile arrival time seemed to be 4:30 am) and head to the shelter when and if the siren sounded. I would usually only get as far as the top of the staircase outside our front door, which was fine until the Houthis started using cluster bombs which can cause more damage over a wider area. At that point, I considered going down the two flights to the shelter, but the siren always seems to stop by the time I get to the stairs and then it seems silly to keep going, with our neighbors already heading back, even though those are the “rules.”

I’ve had sirens sound several times while I was hospitalized, but never in a restaurant. What would we do? I wondered. Could we stay in our seats and pretend it was already over, like at home? Would this ruin the evening?

The wait staff was as clear as the hospital nurses: Head to the safe space … now! I didn’t hear any sirens in the din of hundreds of diners getting up from their tables, although Merav says she did.

What happened next never happens at home.

Most of the restaurant’s patrons were congregated in the stairwell into which pranced the wait staff carrying trays of alcohol – arak and tequila, specifically. They turned the Houthi missiles into an opportunity for additional inebriation. They had obviously discussed and practiced this maneuver.

I hadn’t drunk any alcohol in ages – it doesn’t tend to mix well with my meds – but this time I nursed a shot of tequila. I think we all earned it.

I thought Janjaria’s freshly proffered shots were one-of-a-kind, but my friend Sarah Tuttle Singer was dining at another top-ranked Jerusalem restaurant, Eucalyptus, at the same hour, and there, too, the wait staff brought arak into the safe room.

“We cursed the Houthis, and toasted one another,” Sarah summed up her evening.

Yet another way Israelis are coping with a situation – missiles during dinner – that may be unique in the world.

I first wrote about missiles from Yemen and tequila from Israel for The Jerusalem Post.

Photo by Andrew Svk on Unsplash

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