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For 5 days, an endangered seal became a celebrity on an Israeli beach. Locals want her back.
JAFFA, Israel (JTA) — For most of the past week, Israel’s latest unlikely celebrity lounged on the Jaffa beach, drawing throngs of onlookers, constant media attention and round-the-clock protection from the government as she sunbathed and slept the day away.
Then early on Tuesday afternoon, the unwitting star named Yulia — a rare 6-foot species of seal weighing hundreds of pounds who has traveled the eastern Mediterranean — waded into the water and swam away. She left no sign of whether she would ever return.
Her departure has left some local residents bereft and others hopeful that she may find a safer home than a bare beach with little shelter, other animals and litter. News of her departure spread quickly through the area’s social media and WhatsApp groups, one of which had even changed its name from “Friends of Jaffa” to “Friends of Yulia.”
“Of course I know she’s not smiling, but her lips are formed in a way that makes her look like she is. She’s so utterly calm — even while a million people are watching her,” said Jaffa resident Aya Zaken, who added that she was “deeply sad” that Yulia had returned to sea.
Seeing the mammal for the first time was a “much more moving” experience than she had expected, Zaken said — partly because of the seal’s size but also because of the effect she had on onlookers.
“When faced with her, I felt an overwhelming sense of calm, like a deep meditation,” Zaken said. “The feeling that this is so much bigger than me or my troubles.”
Yulia, who was given her name by a local boy who first discovered her, arrived on Jaffa’s beach on Friday. She had since been the subject of 24-hour surveillance both by the press and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, which had sent volunteers to keep watch and ensure that the crowds of people who have gathered since her arrival didn’t disturb her.
Yulia is a Mediterranean monk seal, one of roughly 600-700 left in the world, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, though other estimates put the number even lower. The species is classified as endangered.
Yulia was listless and shaking when she first arrived on Israeli shores, and experts were worried that she was ill. But when Turkish researchers at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, received images of Yulia, they recognized her as a monk seal they had already seen, named Tugra, who is known to have a penchant for both swimming great lengths and napping for extraordinarily long stretches of time. She is over 20 years old and has a reputation for traveling, having been spotted as far off as Greece and Turkey.
“On the one hand, I’m on such a high, I haven’t slept in days,” said Mia Elasar, who has been researching monk seals for 30 years. “As a child I heard that there were once far more seals here; and now, to see one in real life, it’s a legend that has come alive.”
Elasar is the founder of the Delphis Association, an Israeli nonprofit for marine mammals that has partnered with the IUCN on a joint project for the protection of monk seals. She said Yulia’s (or Tugra’s) globetrotting isn’t the only reason for her extreme fatigue. When she arrived in Jaffa, she was spotted with large bite marks in two areas of her body. According to Elasar’s Turkish colleagues, those marks were not present at her last sighting in 2019, off the coast of Lebanon. She was also shedding her fur, a process that requires a lot of energy.
“I worry for her here,” Elasar said. “It makes more sense for her to go back.”
Onlookers view Yulia from a distance. (Deborah Danan)
Some Jaffa residents agreed that the beach — with its crowds, dogs and considerable volume of garbage — wasn’t the best place for their beloved guest. Elasar added that Israel lacks the resources to give Yulia the protection she needs. To provide a more permanent home for her and her fellow seals, she said, authorities would need to build caves along the shoreline where the marine animals could rest.
“I think it is for the best,” said Dan, a resident of Jaffa who declined to give his last name. “It was probably a matter of time until someone would potentially harm her or ‘adopt’ her to live in a bath or aquarium, or even try to eat her.”
In the end, Yulia apparently felt the same way. After 48 hours of sleeping following her arrival, she finally went back to sea. Over the ensuing two days, she was in and out of the water, until, on Tuesday, she left for the longest stretch yet. She was spotted swimming opposite the nearby Jaffa port on Wednesday morning, which gives optimists reason to believe that she will yet return.
“I very much want her to come back,” said Arnon Pinchuk, 14, who came with some of his classmates to see Yulia on Wednesday morning, only to learn that she had left.
Pinchuk was one of only 18 students from the Kehila Democratic School in Jaffa to take the trip. Asked why the rest of his 103-student class did not come along for the adventure, Pinchuk answered, “Because they’re losers who prefer being on their phones.”
Jaffa has a diverse population of Jews, Christians and Muslims and, for many of the residents, Yulia’s arrival was a unifying event. That was especially the case amid recent events in the country, which range from civil strife over a proposed overhaul of Israel’s judiciary to the recent five-day conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza. Yulia got to Jaffa near the end of that round of fighting.
“She came at a time when people need quiet and solidarity and unity and happiness,” Zaken said. “I hope she gathers her strength and comes back and tells us all how awesome we are.”
Along with locals, Yulia attracted a gaggle of photographers who have spent hours training their lenses on her. Yehiel Lamesh, an amateur photographer, traveled from the southern port city of Ashdod to visit Yulia, and said, “I would go around the world to see such a creature, so of course I would come here.”
To Ziv Binunski, a cameraman for Israel’s Channel 12 News, Yulia’s sojourn was a welcome respite from his other assignments, which include capturing rocket fire over the Gaza border, as well as the anti-government protests roiling the country.
On Wednesday morning, he stood on the beach, hoping to catch her return.
“It’s such a different experience, being connected to the sea and to nature,” he said, “and to be dependent on the whims of animals, and not humans.”
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Senate rejects effort to rein in Trump’s power to fight Iran alongside Israel
(JTA) — The Senate late Wednesday rejected a measure that would have required President Donald Trump to get congressional approval to continue fighting against Iran.
The measure was initiated by Democrats, who have raised questions about the process by which Trump initiated the war alongside Israel on Saturday. The War Powers Act requires U.S. presidents to seek congressional approval for wars in advance or shortly after their start unless there is an imminent threat to the United States. Trump and his administration officials have given mixed signals about whether a threat was considered direct and imminent.
The vote took place along largely partisan lines, with two exceptions. Rand Paul, the Republican from Kentucky, who tends to oppose international intervention, backed the measure. John Fetterman, the pro-Israel Democrat from Pennsylvania, voted no.
The House is expected to vote on a similar measure today. The House also has a slim Republican majority.
The votes come as multiple polls have shown that a majority of Americans, about 60%, oppose U.S. participation in the war.
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Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Broadway opus debuts in the U.S. — nearly 80 years late
In 1954, the Oscar-winning composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold staged a European homecoming with a new operetta. How this came to pass — and how his planned comeback failed to materialize — is even more convoluted than the piece’s farcical plot.
Korngold, a wunderkind and Jewish refugee from Vienna, first came to Hollywood to adapt Felix Mendelssohn’s music for Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Until then Korngold, a piano prodigy who began writing music at age 7 and had his first hit with a ballet he wrote at 11, had mostly composed for concert halls and opera houses. His ensuing career in Hollywood transformed film music by treating motion pictures as if they were “operas without singing.”
Korngold’s work on the swashbuckler Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood and later King’s Row (whose fanfare John Williams lifted for Star Wars) created a template for symphonic scores. But by the late 1940s, chafing under the Hollywood system, he set to work writing an original operetta, The Silent Serenade, that he hoped would premiere on Broadway.
The show collapsed. It’s never had a full staging in the United States or even in English.
As chronicled by the Korngold Society, the composer went through a litany of librettists to refine this tale of a love triangle and its improbable political fallout. After passing through a number of hands in English, Korngold returned it to Raoul Auernheimer, Theodor Herzl’s nephew and the original writer of the story on which the operetta was based, to translate it back to German. Korngold disagreed with the excessive demands of the producers, the Schubert Brothers, and left the project, leading the Broadway impresarios to fruitlessly search for a new composer.
Korngold, who with Reinhardt had previous success on Broadway with arrangements of other composers’ work, decided to resume a career in Europe with the piece. After delays owing to his health — a 1947 heart attack — a German version debuted on radio in 1951 and was followed by a staging in Dortmund in 1954. It bombed.
“We’re not exactly sure who it was for,” said Cris Frisco, music director at the Mannes School of Music at the New School, who is conducting the U.S. debut of The Silent Serenade at Mannes Opera. “It seems like it was given to the wrong public.”
That Germans in the post-war weren’t attuned to the piece’s sensibilities speaks poignantly to Korngold’s journey, which began at the center of Austrian high culture, orbiting names like Mahler and Artur Schnabel. “We thought of ourselves as Viennese,”said Korngold, the son of a music critic father. “Hitler made us Jewish.”
His exile in Hollywood realigned his sonic universe. As much as he changed film music, it — and America — left an impression on him.
“It is obviously influenced by Hollywood. It’s obviously coming out of those ’30s and ’40s musicals,” said director Emma Griffin, Mannes Opera’s managing artistic director. “It is a piece that is living between film and theater and opera and musical theater and operetta. It’s so emblematic of Korngold’s life, of how many different pieces of the 20th century he influenced, and this particular show is a crazy quilt of all of those influences.”
The plot of the show is, in Griffin’s words “daffy,” focusing on a Neapolitan actress, her would-be dress designer lover and her fiancé, the prime minister. Singing shopgirls, a tabloid journalist and a media circus round out the cast who perform tuneful numbers imbued with an MGM je ne sais quoi, while remaining rooted in Korngold’s post-romantic, classical mode. While Korngold’s symphonic stylings beefed up adventure films, the orchestration here is sparer, hinting at the Broadway pit for which the piece was devised.
The Mannes staging is part of a resurgence of interest in Korngold in the classical world, following decades of dismissal for his contributions to Hollywood.
It’s ironic that Korngold, who died at the age of 60 in 1957, had in Silent Serenade a profound professional frustration, given how buoyant and frothy the work is.
“It’s heartbreaking to think that he did not fully perceive the massive impact of his artistry,” said Griffin. Though he lived through hard times, Griffin says, his music has been a balm for the performers.
“The students have talked about it several times,” Griffin said, “how happy they are to be working on something where the source is joy.”
Mannes Opera’s production of The Silent Serenade debuts March 13 and 14 with an on-demand recording to follow. Tickets and information can be found here.
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Shower, shelter, swipe: Israel’s ‘startup nation’ meets Iran war with a wave of apps
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — Smartphones have become as essential as shelters for Israelis riding out Iran’s missile attacks, with internet traffic up 25% since the war began on Saturday. From the screaming alerts of the military’s official app that, as one comedian put it, sound like a “baby dragon giving birth,” to bomb-shelter Tinder to multiple apps that tell you when it’s safe to shower, the startup nation is trying to digitize the panic into something more manageable.
At the serious end of the wartime app stack is Home Front Command, the Israeli army’s app available in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and English. It uses GPS to figure out where you are and only pings you when your area is at risk, with separate alerts for rockets, missiles and terror incidents. In this war, Iran’s long-range fire has come with an extra layer of notice, a warning-before-the-warning that can buy people a few more minutes. The shorter-range threats from Hezbollah, which joined the fray on Tuesday, do not come with that same courtesy.
Bomb Shelter Locator turns shelter-seeking into a map exercise, listing around 20,000 official sites, offering offline city maps and walking routes, and estimating the time it will take to reach the nearest protected space.
For anyone who cannot sprint, Purple Vest tries to close the gap. People with disabilities or older residents can register in advance and request help during alerts, with volunteers using the app to locate them and assist with shelter access or urgent supplies.
For others, shelters are turning into accidental social spaces where people can meet-cute on a mattress. The Hooked app, originally built for speed-dating at events, now doubles as a bomb-shelter icebreaker. Shelter-goers post a QR code at the entrance, and singles who scan it can see who else in the same bunker has the same relationship status. US Ambassador Mike Huckabee — who has not been single since high school — shared it on X alongside the caption: “Someday they will tell their kids ‘we met on a dating app in a shelter while dodging ballastic [sic] missiles.’”
But for some, even showering has become its own risk calculation. Martine Berkowitz was one of many who vented after her attempts to scrub up were interrupted by missiles no less than five times on the second day of the war.
For software developer Ben Greenberg, a father of teenagers, Berkowitz’s complaint was familiar, so he built an app called Best Shower Time that spits out a percentage risk score on whether a shower is likely to be interrupted by an alert.
Posts about it spread on social media and what began as a tool for his family is now drawing about 5,000 visitors a day. Greenberg, a California native who immigrated to Israel from New York in 2018, insists it’s “not a joke app.”
“Sirens are just the ultimate example of lack of control in one’s life,” he said, describing the app as a way to “restore some level of control and predictability … in a time when that feels most vulnerable and most taken away from us.”
The app uses real-time alert data from the Home Front Command, and the score is based on four inputs: how long it has been since the last alert, the average gap between alerts over a six-hour window, whether the frequency is trending up or down, and the total alert count over the past 24 hours. Those are weighted into a single score that appears when you open the app.
Users can then set their own parameters, including how long a shower typically takes and how much buffer time they want afterward to dry off and reach shelter.
And for those who have a penchant for extended bathroom breaks, Greenberg added a separate option that relies on the same logic.
It’s not the only app homing on issues of basic cleanliness to emerge this week. Another app, Can I Shower Now?, has developed a following of its own.
Berkowitz said she was “grateful” for apps to help her navigate the question of whether to jump in the shower. After checking and seeing a 13% chance of a missile alert on Wednesday afternoon, she decided to risk it.
“I took a full 20-minute hot shower and washed my hair. It was lovely. And the next warning only came when I was finished and getting dressed,” she said.
Greenberg is piloting a new app, called Best Walking Time, based on the same principle and prompted by his wife, who regularly walks around the neighborhood during work calls but has been afraid to stray from home lest a missile head their way.
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