Evacuated by rocket fire, iconic Kiryat Shmona bar temporarily transplants to Tel Aviv
Founders and patrons of unique student hangout Patifon reunite for special events to preserve community spirit until they can get back home
Three years after it revolutionized the student experience and nightlife scene in northern Israel’s Kiryat Shmona, the Patifon student bar stands vacant and disused because of the war.
Like most residents of this drab city of about 24,000, the bar’s founders and clientele from the 4,500 students attending Tel Hai Academic College were evacuated from Kiryat Shmona in October amid still-ongoing exchanges of fire with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
This week, however, the Patifon made a long-awaited comeback – albeit in exile in Tel Aviv. There, the Patifon circle reunited for the first in a series of events that aim to serve as the axis for a traumatized but devoted community of young adults turned evacuees, whom many view as the impoverished city’s best prospect for renewal.
“OK, so I know it’s not the Patifon, but, then again, it kind of is,” Ania Girun, a journalist and local radio show host, said at a recent poetry reading event that she moderated for Patifon’s founders, Ben Golan and his wife Ronie Golombik.
About 100 evacuees gathered for Tuesday’s event at a hostel in southern Tel Aviv, which the couple co-organized with Tel Hai College, the Kedma nonprofit and other partners. The dozens of young people in attendance at the Roger House hostel were almost all familiar with the Patifon, which began in 2021 as a grassroots initiative for young music lovers. Two years ago, the municipality took Patifon under its wing, turning it into a hub of activism and a community center.
Operating out of Kiryat Shmona’s Khan House arts complex, an 18th-century structure boasting impressive Ottoman architecture that in recent years has been restored and modernized, Patifon hosts concerts and art installations. But its unique function is as the only waterhole for the hundreds of students, most of them originally from outside Kiryat Shmona, attending the city’s Tel Hai College.
Tel Hai College currently operates via remote learning. Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets into Kiryat Shmona in solidarity with Hamas, whose terrorists triggered a war with Israel when they murdered some 1,200 people in Israel and abducted another 254 on October 7. On Wednesday, one of Hezbollah’s rockets killed a man, a 38-year-old factory worker, in Kiryat Shmona. Hezbollah rockets have killed some 20 Israelis in the current round of hostilities.
Israel has killed more than 200 people, most of them terrorists, in retaliatory strikes in Lebanon. The parties mostly shoot at targets north of Haifa and south of Beirut. More than 20,000 from Israel’s north remain evacuated, even as the vast majority of the 60,000-odd evacuees from the south have returned home.
The Tel Aviv hostel’s venue, a spacious rectangular room with shabby-chic furniture and a cold color scheme situated near a noisy traffic artery and bar area, could not have been more different from the Kiryat Shmona space, which features circular motifs (Patifon means record player in colloquial Hebrew), cozy furnishings and a colorful interior.
“It feels the same and it doesn’t,” said one Patifon regular, Ori Gini, about the poetry reading event at the Roger House hostel. “What does it matter? This is what we’ve got and it’s better than nothing. I mean, it’s amazing,” she said.
Part of Gini’s appreciation for Patifon was born from seeing it get off the ground in a greying city where many young adults for decades have depended on nearby kibbutzim and moshavim or larger cities for culture and the nightlife experience.
The fact that Kiryat Shmona’s municipality decided to bankroll Patifon last year shows the value they attach to it as a tool for attracting young college graduates and students, Ben Golan, the founder of the Patifon, said.
An alternative to Tel Aviv
“I grew up in Kiryat Shmona and I saw all of my classmates leave for Tel Aviv, or even abroad. One after the other. So I decided to help keep young people here,” Golan, a music producer, said. Patifon drew several artists to settle in Kiryat Shmona, Golan said, and had hosted sold-out concerts by up-and-coming artists including Eitan Peled, Mika Moshe, Yam Gronich, and Lenny Kaplan.
“It was all just taking off in the last six months, and then the war ended everything,” said Ronie Golombik, Golan’s wife.
Golan, 30, and Golombik, 26, are expecting their first child. They were evacuated to Tel Aviv, along with a sizeable portion of Tel Hai’s student body.
“It’s ironic: With Patifon, we were showing that artists and young people don’t need to leave for Tel Aviv,” Golobik told The Times of Israel. “Yet here we are, building that community – in Tel Aviv. Bummer.” Golombik reminds herself to stay positive. “When we return, there will be a new thirst for the communal activities we do, and they will reach new heights,” she says in a tone of voice that suggests that this is an oft-repeated reminder to herself.
A community within a community
The Roger House is a temporary home to 15 students from Tel Hai who belong to the student village in Metula of Kedma, a Zionist nonprofit. Metula, a town of about 1,500 people in the Upper Galilee, was also evacuated.
“We’re a more tightly knit bunch within the Tel Hai student community,” said Shahar Meidan, 28, a Tel Hai graduate who runs Kedma’s Metula student village. It has a stronger sense of community, but its members are “also living in more challenging circumstances: At a hostel without privacy as students enter the end-of-semester exams,” Meidan said.
“It was great to interact with the broader community,” she added about the poetry reading event.
Even though it has been nearly half a year, the poems and texts that students shared were almost all about October 7 or its immediate aftermath.
“It’s because we especially are still in it. October 6 was the last day of normalcy for us,” Gini said.
Like many other students, she longs for a sense of home and belonging.
“I left everything in Kiryat Shmona, all my belongings. They’ve been there for nearly six months. Something is keeping me from taking them, even though I need some of the stuff. It’s because as long as they stay there, I have a home. Even if I can’t be there,” said Gini.
After leaving Kiryat Shmona, she moved back in with her parents in Gan Shmuel near Tel Aviv and found work as a teacher in the area. She continues her studies at Tel Hai College online, but “it’s very challenging,” she said. Struggling to make progress academically and to readjust to losing some of her independence, she finds it “increasingly important to reconnect to my people, my community. So I came here and it’s given me strength,” she said.
Michael Kovalevsky, 24, is an evacuee from Kiryat Shmona who does not attend Tel Hai but came to the event because he knows the Patifon. Like Golan, Kovalevsky also wants to return to Kiryat Shmona, where he plans to volunteer with youth from troubled homes.
“I’m somewhere I don’t belong,” he said of Tel Aviv, “but where I belong, I can’t be. So it’s lonely. Being around people I know helps.”
Girun, the journalist from Kiryat Shmona who moderated the poetry reading, had wanted “to be a little bit more anonymous” before October 7, Girun wrote on Facebook earlier this month. She’s living in Tivon near Haifa as an evacuee, and hardly anybody knows her there, she added.
“I’m no longer into anonymity,” she said. “Next time I’ll wish for pancakes, world peace, a bicycle or just to be among my people, with – or without — some party snacks on the table.”
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