Evacuees miss their kitchens, even dishwashing, in new exhibit
Tel Aviv food institute Asif helped people who lost their homes find comfort after the Hamas attacks, and now marks one year with new projects
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
As Israelis reeled from the shock of the October 7 Hamas attack, Tel Aviv’s Asif Culinary Institute was one of the many food organizations and restaurants that took part in an ad hoc effort to supply meals to soldiers and evacuees, for weeks on end.
Now, as the country prepares to mark one year since the terrorist attack, Asif has launched an exhibit to show how it leaned on meals and food preparation to help people amid the crisis.
The exhibit space, tucked into a corner of the Asif premises that house a cafe, shop and library on Lilienblum Street in Tel Aviv, melds videos, photos, original illustrations and a display of kitchen items in “The Open Kitchen: Memories From a Home Left Behind” to tell the stories of those who passed through the organization’s doors this year.
There are videos of northern and southern evacuees using other peoples’ kitchens to bake bread, cook savory matbucha and roll out cookies, and describe the experience of being evacuated from their homes and the role of food in rediscovering their independence and confidence, said curator Matan Choufan.
Illustrator Maya Ish Shalom painted watercolor images that accompany the videos, using dreamy blues and reds that point to the loss of home and hearth, while industrial designer Shaul Cohen created miniatures of kitchen objects, including a simple stove and a snow globe of a sponge submerged in soapsuds, reflecting one evacuee’s declaration of missing the simple task of washing dishes in her own kitchen.
“I thought about the world of the kitchen, dishes and shopping and cooking,” said illustrator Ish Shalom.
The display “Objects” by Yifat-Sarah Pearl centers on the food and kitchen utensils of evacuated families, like flour canisters, home-pickled cucumbers, a coffee mug — simple items that were missing from their daily lives.
“I gathered kitchen items as is, with greasy fingerprints and however they’d been left,” said Pearl, who even included a kitchen rag in her curation.
The coffee mug displayed isn’t even the one that an evacuee grabbed from her kitchen before leaving her home: She offered a substitute because she found it too hard to part with the actual mug.
There are chocolate molds that belonged to chocolatier Dvir Karp from Kibbutz Re’im, killed by Hamas terrorists alongside his partner in front of his children. His ex-wife and business partner, Reut Karp, has vowed to continue the business and opened a counter of his chocolates in the new Cafe Otef in south Tel Aviv.
Pearl said Karp had concocted his chocolates from his head, but during the coronavirus closures, Reut Karp wrote the recipes down.
Upstairs, in Asif’s rooftop farm, the culinary team planted six beds with crops chosen by local farmers from the north and south who were asked to pick one crop that was close to their hearts and related in some way to October 7.
Called “The Earth Grows Again,” the message is about hope for new growth, said Asif’s Noa Berger.
The crops include cauliflowers used by Moshbutz, a popular Golan Heights restaurant in Ramot which chef Yael Regev has been running without her husband, as he has been on extended reserve duty for months.
There are potatoes from the Gaza envelope, while organic farm Havivian offered 20 plantings of lemongrass developed by Thai workers who did not leave after October 7, and a bed of oregano — this particular strain of the desert herb developed with Bedouin knowledge and technology.
It’s all about efforts to return to home cooking, said Ben-Gurion University anthropologist Michal Rozanis, who spoke at a panel gathered at Asif for the exhibit. Rozanis spent the last months interviewing and researching evacuees to understand the role of cooking and food in finding a semblance of routine in their daily lives.
“It made me realize how much home cooking matters and how important it was to them to take matters in hand to do that,” said Rozanis. “How people cook and eat is an experience of their identity.”
