world

Under The Radar

Casspi's cereal, Angry Birds and an Israeli 'Raymond.'

Marcy Oster
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Jerusalem

H

ere are some recent stories out of
Israel that you may have missed:

Breakfast With Omri
The face of Israel's first and only NBA
player will be seen soon in his native land
endorsing the "Cornflakes of Champions."
Omri Casspi, who plays for the
Sacramento Kings, has a long way to go
before he graces a box of Wheaties, but
he will earn $200,000 for pushing Telma
cornflakes, dubbed the "Cornflakes of
Champions."
Casspi formerly played
with the championship
Maccabi Tel Aviv team.
"We want to express
the meaning of the
message, `the power to
succeed:" Unilever Israel
marketing manager
,
Omri Casspi
Ruth Salomon-Goldberg
told the Israeli business
daily Globes. "Casspi is one of the persons
best identified with Israeli success" and
the link between him and the Telma cereal
brand "is natural."
Casspi said that he grew up with Telma,
like most Israelis.
"It is part of my home and family:' he
said. "For me, the connection with Telma,
and especially the message it will convey
— the power to succeed — is natural, and
I am glad for the opportunity."
Meanwhile, American basketball legend
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is scheduled to visit
Israel in July to meet with former the chief
rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Israel Meir Lau.
Abdul-Jabbar plans
to meet with Lau, cur-
rently the chief rabbi
of Tel Aviv and chair-
man of the Yad Vashem
Holocaust memorial,
to discuss a film he is
making based on the
Kareem Abdul- book Brothers in Arms,
Jabar
about the American
troops who liberated
Nazi concentration camps at the end of
World War II.
Abdul-Jabbar, whose father served in
the 761st Tank Battalion that liberated
the Buchenwald concentration camp in
Germany, is co-author of the book. Lau

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May 19 a 2011

and his brother were liberated from the
camp.
Lau told Ynet that Abdul-Jabbar's father,
Ferdinand Alcindor, asked his son to visit
Israel and meet the boy who became a
prominent rabbi. The men met 14 years
ago. Lau says he remembers Abdul-
Jabbar's father from the Buchenwald
rescue.

Angry Birds
Israelis will soon
be able to buy
T-shirts, iPhone
covers, party
paraphernalia and
notebooks bearing
images of Angry
Birds and their arch-nemesis, the green
pigs.
The Israeli company YPL signed an
agreement recently with the addictive
iPhone game creators Rovio to sell mer-
chandise in the Jewish state focusing on
the furious fowls.
Angry Birds was launched in 2009 as
an iPhone application but has morphed
into a worldwide social and cultural
phenomenon. Everyone seems to be play-
ing game — apparently including Israeli
lawmakers on their government-issued
iPhones during Knesset meetings.
In the game, players use a slingshot to
launch flightless birds at pigs who have
stolen and eaten the birds' eggs. The birds
attempt to crush buildings that the pigs
have built to protect themselves.
Several months ago, the popular Israeli
comedy show Wonderful Country sati-
rized failed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks
by featuring the Angry Birds in peace
negotiations with the pigs. Online video
of the parody immediately went viral.

Israelis Are Happy
Israelis are happier than Americans and
tied with New Zealanders, according to a
new Gallup Poll that ranks the happiness
level of the residents of 124 countries.
Some 63 percent of Israelis are satisfied
with their lives, Gallup's global well-being
surveys in 2010 found. Israel was ranked
higher than the United States, which came
in 12th place — 59 percent of Americans
said they were thriving, the indicator of
happiness.
New Zealand tied for seventh in the
rankings. Denmark was first with 73
percent of respondents saying they were
thriving.
Thirty-four percent of Israelis said they

were struggling and 2 percent said they
were suffering, according to the survey.
Among the countries where fewer than
25 percent of citizens said they were
thriving were Russia, China and Lebanon.
Some 14 percent of the residents of
what the survey calls the "Palestinian ter-
ritories" said they were thriving, accord-
ing to the survey.
Results were based on face-to-face
and telephone interviews conducted in
2010 with approximately 1,000 adults per
country aged 15 and older.

Electric Car Sales Planned
Electric car producer Better Place report-
edly has closed a visitor's center to edu-
cate Israelis about the benefits of electric
cars and is refitting it as a sales center.
The company will start selling the cars,
beginning with the Renault Fluence ZE,
sometime this year, the company's CEO
said in March at the launch of the coun-
try's first battery-changing station.
Israeli media reported rumors that
sales would begin in August, but a com-
pany spokesman told the Jerusalem Post
that no official launch date has been
set. Details about the price of the cars
and usage contracts are expected to be
released this month, Yediot Achronot
reported.
The Better Place flagship sales center
will retain the test track built for the visi-
tors' center so that potential customers
can try out the car.

Love Raymond
Raymond Barone may have to find a
little more backbone if Israelis are going
to relate to their country's version of
Everybody Loves Raymond.
Israel's television
network Reshet, which
airs on Channel 2, has
signed a deal with Phil
Rosenthal, the creator
and executive producer
of the Emmy-winning
American sitcom, to
develop 33 episodes in
Israel.
Everybody Loves
Raymond ran from
September 1996 to May
2005 on the CBS net-
work. Many of its situ-
ations were based upon
the real-life experiences
Phil Rosenthal of the Jewish Rosenthal
and Italian-American

comic Ray Romano, the show's star. The
show already has been adapted for Russia.
Jeff Lerner, the senior vice president of
international development and produc-
tion at Sony Pictures Television, called the
show "universally themed and universally
funny."
Perhaps in the Israel version Ray, a
newspaper sports columnist, will be called
Yoram and write for the ubiquitous free
daily Israel Today. And maybe his curmud-
geonly father, a Korean War veteran who
was portrayed by the late Peter Boyle, will
be a veteran of the Six-Day War.
Stay tuned.

Move Over, Tenors
Four Israeli divas serenaded traffic from
the Bridge of Chords at the entrance to
Jerusalem.
Cars, trucks and taxis whizzed by the
formally dressed females as they sang
classical arias to the unappreciative hunks
of metal. The city's haredi Orthodox citi-
zens also apparently didn't notice, or the
women may have been dodging rocks as
well as vehicles.
The divas, members of the Tel Aviv-
based Israeli Opera, were promoting an
opera festival at Masada.

Where's The Chametz?
Selling chametz before Passover may be
considered a convenient fiction by some,
but a haredi Orthodox community in
Israel learned a lesson this past Passover.
Rabbi Simcha Rabinowitz of the Ramat
Shlomo community in Jerusalem encour-
aged his followers to give away their
chametz instead of selling it to make the
transaction more real. So the commu-
nity agreed to gift their expensive liquor
and other saleable chametz to a Muslim
resident of the Shuafat neighborhood of
eastern Jerusalem.
But just as the holiday began, the man
came to the synagogue where the chametz
was being stored and actually claimed the
goods, loading them into his car and driv-
ing away. Shortly after the holiday ended,
the man called Rabinowitz and said he
would return the goods.
The fiasco was reported in haredi news-
papers and the Jerusalem Post and picked
up by several Israel-themed blogs.
The Life in Israel blog suggested that
"the rabbi probably told the non-Jew to do
this whole thing, just to impress upon the
people that their `gift' or 'sale' is a real busi-
ness transaction and change of ownership
and not just a fictitious loophole." II