Jessica Steinberg covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center.
The Hotel Montefiore in Tel Aviv turned its parking lot into an outdoor dining space during the coronavirus summer season, July 2020 (Jessica Steinberg/Times of Israel)
With Israel set to open its doors to tourists in May, local hotels are finally getting all their rooms ready after a year that has devastated the travel industry. But many are wondering, will anybody actually come?
“We hope our clientele will return, because we’ve always been about our regular visitors,” said Oren Schnabel of Tel Aviv’s Montefiore Hotel, part of the R2M hospitality group, which includes restaurants, bakeries, delicatessens and a cafe performance space. “This is their home in Tel Aviv and those people haven’t been here for a long time.”
Jessica Steinberg covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center.
Acro Ninja athlete Tami Jeffay and her team of Mighty Girls, in August 2020. (Courtesy Tami Jeffay)
Tami Jeffay has flipped somersaults inside empty pools, performed the infamously difficult core exercise called an L-sit upon the tines of a tractor’s rake, and routinely vaults herself off the sides of ramps at local skate parks.
It’s all in a day’s work for the 39-year-old Acro Ninja trainer, a British-born high school English teacher and married mother of four who also happens to be an official tester for the “Ninja Israel” reality show. (Her husband, Nathan Jeffay, is the Times of Israel health and science correspondent.)