Media & Blogs

Always a commotion when Yosi`s aroud. The Jewish Journal Of Greater Los Angeles 2001-06-01 * Shabbat on the Boulevard By Adam Wills Yosi Levy, left, and Jimmy Gamliel perform Israeli favorites during a recent Shabbat dinner at Tempo in Encino. After the candles were lit, the wine blessed and the bread broken, Jimmy Gamliel and Yosi Levy, standing on a small stage in front of patrons at Tempo Restaurant in Encino, broke into traditional Shabbat songs from Israel. The crowd, nearly 110 strong, sang and clapped along with the band. Some mothers stood, holding their children, and swayed to the music. Other patrons, moved either by memories or the melodies, joined Gamliel and Levy onstage to dance.. This Friday-night dinner has kept some, like Sol and Esther Jackel, coming back regularly for 15 years.. ”I love the music and the whole Shabbat atmosphere,” said Esther, who teaches preschool at Baldwin Hills Elementary. ”After a week of school, this really relaxes me.” For 7-year-old Adam Gootnick, who was visiting Tempo for the first time with his family, Gamliel and Levy’s music was the best part of the evening. ”I like the singers,” he said. ”They sing good.” excerpt from the Jewish Journal on 2001-06-01 ** The rabbis of Bangkok, Part Two By Douglas A. Konecky(11/24/98) The sound boy throws the switch and the power surges on, along with the lights. Yosi starts playing a hora beat and I follow him. The people get up to dance, men with men and women with women, each in their own circles in the Orthodox manner, and we all start to sing. The joy is intoxicating. Every single person here is suddenly dancing, in all this heat. Everyone is singing, children, parents and grandparents; all are sharing in the joy of achieving the unlikely, the improbable and the impossible, until there is a tremendous burst of static, all the lights blink out, our instruments turn off and our mikes drop dead. We are now standing in semidarkness as the Thai sound engineers start laughing and laughing. They point up at the buildings around us. We look up; the whole neighborhood -- the whole world -- is dark. I turn back to the noisy audience -- and realize they haven't stopped dancing. Chrane glides by and shouts: "It's just Thailand. Don't worry. Five minutes. Keep singing." The rabbis are determined to dance and no power failure will stop them. So Yosi and I continue singing, without microphones, clapping our hands for the beat as the dancers continue to dance, shouting out the words to all the songs themselves. Inside of five minutes, as Chrane has forecast, the power surges back on again, the lights come up and our instruments are working once more, so we pick up right where we left off. Nothing has been damaged. We seem to be protected here. The joy is so thick I would like to bottle it and sell it in their kosher food store, take a few bottles home myself for later. Today we're part of the shtetl, the community, in the old-country sense. There's a kosher butcher and a caraway roll baker and a Hasidic shoemaker and today there are also a guitar player and a piano player. Everybody knows and does his job, rain or shine. excerpt from Salon Magazine 11/24/98 Blogs: JewishWeddingInfo.com Jewish Wedding Information - Read this blog & make your party more successful.