Oh God! behind the stage…

Secrets from backstage – and special reduced price for readers De Vrijdagavond

Wow, what a couple of years we’ve had! What a challenge the Corona years were for cultural events…

Luckily, we’re now free to go out and enjoy high quality cultural fun from Israel.

We, at Stichting Rainbow, have been juggling restrictions and opportunities, ever since the first lockdown was announced, negotiating and re-negotiating with artists, venues, foundations and funders… As you can imagine, our cultural events aren’t commercially viable, and we only manage to bring Israeli culture to the Netherlands, with the help of foundations, such as Maror, AFK, PBC, and more. And those funding depend on the number of tickets we sell.

So, a few good things did arise from the Corona crisis. It forced – and inspired – us to assemble the cultural projects that we planned for 2020 and for 2021 into one big festival staged in summer and autumn 2021. We called it Israeli Stage Festival, and we hoped that the powers that be, would let us realize our plans.

Talented team

We did it! with an enthusiastic and talented team that included Elad Baadany, who created for us a gorgeous, animated, and interactive website. Ohad Arama shared his production talents (alongside his professionalism in sound technic), Odelia Appel helped fantastically with PR, and many friends helped by spreading the Word. All in all, it was a great fun. It almost worked out as we planned it.

Comedy by Anat Gov

The festival opened with the original production of ‘Oh, God!’ a comedy by Anat Gov. In this comedy, a desperate God comes to a psychologist, because He wants to commit suicide. God hopes that the psychiatrist will change His mind. It works – but in a surprising way.

We decided to bring more surprises to our production, first and foremost – our God was a woman. I had the honor and challenge of playing God, and under the precise and attentive direction of Iftach Ophir (who played the psychiatrist), I had the greatest challenging fun.

There’s so much to tell about this project!

Therefore, we’re holding a special event ‘Oh, God! Behind and In Front of the Wings’.

It will take place on Thursday, June 23^rd, 20:00 in LJG, with the inspirational participation of Rabbi Joram Rookmaaker, and the trauma therapist (and stand-up comedian) Tamar Robin-Star.

The team of ‘Oh, God!’ will also be there, to answer any question you might have. We’ll screen select clips for our production – and from other productions of ‘Oh, God!’ worldwide. (there were a number of Polish, Italian, and American productions, as well as Argentinian and of course, Israeli).

You’re welcome to join this inspirational fun!

As readers of De Vrijdagavond, you’re entitled for a special reduced price: instead of €12,50, you may get your tickets for €7,50 only by clicking on this link

See you there!

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Stichting Rainbow is celebrating this year its 25^th anniversary, 25 years of social and cultural activities.

As part of the celebrations, I’m happy to share with you all the unknown stories about our projects – and the impact they created on people’s lives.

I’m Erga Netz, the initiator and director of Stichting Rainbow. In our early projects, I was the producer and editor and later became the director, too. Thank you for participating in our celebrations and if you have any questions – I’ll be happy to answer them and tell you more!

You can enjoy watching our past productions, via this link: https://www.stichting-rainbow.org/futur

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Stichting Rainbow is now headed by a board of 3 Israelis who live in the Netherlands:

Nir Geva, Gilad Nezer, and Yankale Bader, and our activities in the past years focused on Israeli cultural and societal activities for the Israeli, Dutch Jews, and the general Dutch public. In the coming weeks, I will reveal more background stories of our projects, here.

And in the meantime, you can read all about the foundation, its mission, and projects.

cover: from Oh God! with Iftach Ophir and Erga Netz, photo courtesy ISF