Menu
Location: Center of the city.
On the centrally located Herzl St., there is a courtyard with colorful sculpture on the fence. Here too, a restaurant has been opened as part of the growing number of culinary attractions from restaurants to bars and other food joints, but this place is much more than a restaurant. From the establishment of the city and until the 1970s, this is where the first café in the city was located – Mamatia’s Café. This is where Haim Oliel was born and raised. He is one of the greatest Mizrahi musicians of all times, the founder of the band, Sfatayim, and in a certain sense, he is considered the one who revived Mizrahi music in Israel.
In the 1980s, after his military service, Oliel, together with a bunch of Sderot friends established Sderoshir. As he puts it, “This was the initial basis for all of the music that subsequently came from Sderot – Kobi Oz and Teapacks, Yoram Hazan and Knesiyat Hasechel, Micha Biton, and others. Oliel said,
I remember Kobi. He was different as a child, thinking differently, he laughed differently, from a young age he knew what he wanted to do – and above all, how to do it. When he was 15, I took him to play with me in the Sfatayim band that I established in 1985.
Sfatayim was established – simultaneously with Sderoshir, after the army – and it is the band that is most identified with Oliel. As he said,
When we established Sfatayim, it made as much noise as the Kassams. You heard about it everywhere, about the band from Sderot, and those that followed it. You heard everywhere, ‘What’s happening in this Sderot?’ Sderot really produced a lot of artists relative to its size. There is no such thing elsewhere. In the 80s and the 90s, there were maybe 1o,ooo residents and so many bands came from here, like Tamara, Sultana, Renaissance, and in the 2000s, Julietta, and so did Zafrir Ifrach, Hagit Yaso, and others. This is not a given. I am not at all certain that this could have happened to the same degree in Ofakim or Kiryat Malachi, despite the fact that they have the same kind of population, with the same socioeconomic status. I think it has a lot to do with the mutual support here which is something unusual. It’s unnatural, that in a certain place there is such a number of very successful talents. It wouldn’t have happened in another city, even if the composition of its population is identical to Sderot.
As Oliel concluded,
It’s important to me that people will not see Sderot as a city struck by Kassams, but as a city blessed with talents. People go to Liverpool for tours in the footsteps of the Beatles, so we are not that big, but in the end, this is a small city with tremendous success, and the time has come to give it the credit it deserves.