If there was justice in the world, Ahuva Ozeri would live like a queen

Neve Tzedek neighborhood, Tel Aviv, 1998. Not yet a coveted real estate hit. In a small house with painted floors, monastic furniture, an old refrigerator in a tiny kitchen and a pair of parrots in the small yard sits one of the greatest and streaked singers in the history of Hebrew music To questions in front of Ofer Pinchasov’s camera. “Rings of Bells”, his beautiful film, which is now competing at the Jerusalem Film Festival and can be watched by Bis Doku, came out following the legend – and tragedy – that it is my assistant. She gave everything she had until she could no longer. Every time Ozeri succeeded, something made her stop. Because of her mother’s death. For the second time, 23 years later, she had to do it again after the album “Bells”, from the big comeback records that came out here, and this after gaining renewed recognition and for the first time a warm embrace from the media and brass, due to cancerous growth in her throat.

If there was justice in the world, my assistant would have lived like a queen (“I’m not an artist of money,” she says honestly in one of the most beautiful and sad moments in the film and immediately continues: “I want the audience to love me and I can touch his soul”). She has not won justice in most of her years. Not for luck either. For the talent and love of the audience, yes. She was born in 1948 as Aviva Ozeri (the affectionate name her father gave her, her lover, at the end) to the Keshet Yom family in the Kerem Hatyemanim neighborhood of Tel Aviv, between the White City and the Blue Sea. By air from the heart of the country’s entertainment and cultural capital it’s barely three kilometers, but to the residents of the neighborhood it felt like a million. “What did we have to look for in a ham?” Asks one of Ozeri’s childhood friends in the film, “the maximum we got was Allenby.” Despite the discrimination she felt then, Ozeri did not complain. “Anyone who says there is no discrimination is a liar,” she shoots Pinchasov’s camera, but immediately emphasizes that “we should have gotten out of this discrimination a long time ago.” Despite all the troubles and hardships of life, Ozeri was a strong woman and a tremendous singer. Not a victim.

Her father died when she was young. The financial situation at home, which was not particularly easy anyway, then became even more difficult, and the youngest daughter enlisted to help. Every day right after school, she ran to the nearby Carmel Market to sell bundles of parsley and bring a few more pounds to Mom. Because of the distress at home, she moved to Kibbutz Metzar and stayed there for three years as a foreign child. She discovered the lawn, the pool, the dining room and also the barn and coop. When she met a friend from a neighborhood kibbutz, she tried to teach her to dance a twist. In the film the company recalls that Ozeri told her to make a movement with her foot as if she were putting out a cigarette on the floor. After three years her mother brought her home.

The music was there from the first moment. The mother was lamenting, and the young assistants loved to shut themselves in the room and sing. A few years later, her daughter became the state’s lament, or at least only part of it, when she released in 1975 the album “Where is the Soldier” which echoed the pain of Easterners about the fall of the boys in the Yom Kippur War. Although Ozeri wrote the theme song from his heartbreak because of another war, the songs on the album were a complementary soundtrack to the national trauma for those who did not find solace in the deaths of their loved ones in the memorial songs that did not stop playing on the radio at the time. My aides were not played there, nor were they shown on TV or even considered invited to the Mizrahi Singer Festival. “He did not send letters / Dash at all he did not deliver / Please help, help me my friend”, she sings there in pain and continues: “Why is everyone silent? / Why not talk? Is it not, we are not alive? “It was a spoken language, not Hebrew of poets, but words that could not be escaped. Despite the media disregard, one headline in the newspaper crowned it, along with the neighborhood bands, Sounds of the Vineyard and Sounds of Oud as” Israel’s Last Shout The second one. “This shout had a huge echo.” Where is the soldier? ” 1999, when “Bells Ring” came out, and more on the Mint Disc label – the home of alternative rock, she was already crowned their queen, she and her Bulbul Trang, the Indian musical instrument that was so identified with her.

In 1976, a year after “Where the Soldier” was full of grief, she marked another big V – this time from the happy side when she wrote the song “Jerusalem of Betar” on the occasion of the team winning the state cup. The song was written on the way to a performance in the capital Uri Melmillian, the boy from Mamilla, and Ozeri, the girl from the vineyard, were the cultural heroes of that second Israel that was still painted in black and white, and not just on the TV screen. She continued to appear non-stop, Sometimes even with the entertainer Avner discusses as a warm-up show.

In the same year, Ozeri began giving voice development classes to a guy named Zohar Urakbi, who became the king of the genre as Zohar Argov, the year Ozeri announced his retirement. Meanwhile, the shows ran and the albums kept coming out, but my assistants started to get tired. She no longer enjoyed fame and she did not really make money either, but mostly it was the unconsciousness of the establishment that hurt her. One of the greatest and most striped singers in the history of the country decided to leave music and return to the field of food, but not as a Slavic chef starring in the gossip columns, but as a kitchen worker at the mythical Gamliel restaurant in the vineyard. A lover of the early eighties is a legend that was and is lost. Not sure all the people in that restaurant – who also starred in the sketches of the pale tracker – even knew who made them the plates of chickpeas and installed the steaks.

Ozeri disappeared from consciousness, but one man tried to figure out why. Avner Bernheimer, a magazine reporter for Yedioth Ahronoth in the 1990s, recounts in the film how he set out in search of my assistant for an in-depth article about her. He did not believe she would agree to be interviewed, nor did she really believe that anyone at all would be interested in writing about her or reading what she had to say. But he asked and she answered and did not miss anything – why she disappeared and also about the rumors about her relationship with women. Shortly after that, as part of the work on the cover project “Hebrew Work” on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the state, producer Nitzan Zeira came to Ozeri’s house to get approval from her for her song that Olarchik wanted to renew. She agreed, and on the way played him the “ringing of bells.” In the tiny film he tells that he was in shock, and informed her that it must be recorded. He recruited music producer Moshe Debol and the two started working. Unlike the hawkish cassettes they produced for her in the 70s (“I would finish an album in two hours,” she recalls with a smile in the film), here they invested in every character and took their time. At 51, she returned to enjoying music.

“Bell Rings” came out in 1999 and won praise from the floor. At that time, Mediterranean pop was already at the beginning of the mainstream conquest, but the mother queen of oriental music had little connection to the bouncy and light-hearted wedding hits that began to accumulate more and more hours on the radio. Suddenly she became the darling of the brass. As part of the inconceivable comeback, she also returned to the stage after 17 years – and more to the Shantifi Festival, from all over the world, where she was received with a wide embrace by those wearing the sleeves. After the show, which also featured Berry Sakharof and Mosh Ben-Ari (then still in the band Sheva), she tells the camera that she is excited as a child. Even 21 years after it was shot, this scene is one of the most beautiful and powerful moments in the film.

The throat – its trademark – betrayed her. Although the tumor was removed, her voice was damaged. The music did not stop, she continued to play and write – alone and with others. The Snake Fish was hosted by her, Shai Tsabari, Yehudit Ravitz, Hava Alberstein, Berry Sakharof, Ehud Banai and others sang her songs, and she finally gained the recognition she had been waiting for all these years. In 2008, the official seal arrived with the award of the ACUM Award for Special Contribution to Hebrew Singing. This week, four years ago, she died at Tel Hashomer Hospital from complications of cancer, which again attacked her.

The film “Ringing Bells” ranges from the footage taken ahead of Ozeri’s comeback about 20 years ago to conversations with her friends and some of her traveling companions after her death. Everyone is talking about her with love and sadness and directing a spotlight on one of the greatest singers who have been here, who could and should have been even bigger. Throughout the film, Ozeri – who specializes in songs of grief and pain – laughs a lot. Despite the troubles, and perhaps precisely because of them.

In the beautiful ending whip of this important and sad film, the camera gives a look at the Neve Tzedek neighborhood, where Ozeri lived. She looks down on the gleaming red roofs of the coveted real estate gem. Perhaps in one of these ornate houses now listening to the “bells” of their former neighbor Sarah.