Meir Ariel (1942-1999)

Meir Ariel (1942-1999)
Meir Ariel was an Israeli singer-songwriter.
As a native born Kibbutznick and as a son of a Bible teacher, Ariel absorbed in his childhood and youth the Kibbutz culture and the knowledge in the Hebrew language and tradition. This combination served Ariel as an endless spring of innovative linguistic and lexical phrases and idioms, which he used to describe in a most precise way, the Israeli crisis as he experienced it at the end of the 1960s. In 1967, after his war experiences (he was one of the first paratroopers who occupied the Western Wall), he responded immediately and directly to the victory messianic rejoice and to the spreading euphoria, and in response to the popular song of Noami Shemer, "Jerusalem of Gold", he wrote and performed a version of his own to the same tune, with the title "Jerusalem of Iron", in which he expressed the dark and bitter sides of the war. Ariel intention wasn’t understood and the press gave him the nickname "the singing paratrooper" which he rejected as a gimmick.
After a long stay in the US, where he was influenced deeply by Bob Dylan, he returned to Israel, and in a series of complex poetic and troubadourian albums he exposed new dimensions of Israeli culture and the Hebrew language.
His first and most successful album, Shirey Chag Umoed Venofel [Songs of holiday and falling commemorative day] from 1978, includes one of the most significant texts of Israeli song writing, "Song of Pain", in which he represented the emotional stress of the occupation. In that song appears one of his most quoted lines: "At the end of every sentence that you utter in Hebrew / sits an Arab with a narghile / even if it begins with Siberia / or with Hollywood, with Hava Nagila."
In the last decade of his life, which came to an end prematurely, he was drawn into Jewish tradition and dwelled into "poetic" Torah studies and even practiced several basic instructions in a "sporty" manner as he defined it. This new religious experiences had explicit impact on his late albums and works, in which he confronted the digital age which he perceived as apocalyptic.
14 photographs of Meir Ariel.
Two portrait photographs of Ariel in Kibbutz Mishmarot (early 1970s); Ariel in IDF uniforms gather firewood in Hebron; in performance with his band, with various artists and with his wife Tirtza.