Well below the heads of the roaming stilt walkers and the average-sized traveling magicians, the talking socks will be shticking, singing and dancing during puppeteer Diana Shmiana’s vaudevillian-style music and magic show for kids, called “Yay For Yisrael.”
Clearly, Sunday, June 2 will not be a typical day at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens.
From noon until 5 p.m., “Israel in the Gardens” will host a bundle of programs geared for children, from face painting to hamsa making to clay-oil-lamp shaping, as kids from all around the Bay Area participate in Israel’s 54th birthday party. The annual free celebration is coordinated by the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation’s Israel Center and the Jewish Community Relations Council and co-sponsored and funded by a variety of organizations.
Shmiana’s innovative Jewish educational performance, blending storytelling, clowning, song leading, puppets and magic, is one of more than a dozen children’s programs that will be incorporating the history and culture of Israel.
“For me there is nothing more rewarding than being in front of children, acting wacky with them and teaching them something,” said the self-described Jewish edu-tainer. “I’m able to teach them through a program that touches on the Hebrew language, on Israeli geography, Israeli cultures and the quest for peace. It’s an all-encompassing experience for them.”
Along with festival standards, such as jugglers, musicians and dancers, kids will have the chance to make hamsa hands out of wire and beads, paint their faces in blue and white, and decorate their arms and legs in intricate twirls of Middle Eastern henna tattoos.
While simultaneously cornering the market on air-inflated animals, with Starko the Clown twisting balloons in one corner and kids bouncing on the back of an air-filled trampoline dragon in another, the festival will also feature exhibits from the Israel Antiquities Authority, coming all the way from the Holy Land.
Interactive exhibits will give kids a chance to touch ancient artifacts dug up from the earth, as well as make their own, albeit, more modern versions.
The antiquities program is slated to be one of the most interactive children’s events scheduled for the celebration. Kids will be given all the necessary tools to craft their own clay oil lamps, tile mosaics and versions of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the style of these ancient relics.
It’s a thinly veiled guise to educate kids about a place embedded within their Jewish identities, admitted Varda Rabin, chair of the event, whose own grown children discovered the joy of Israel’s culture and history through past Israel Independence Day events.
“Our children are learning by watching adults participating in ‘Israel in the Gardens,'” she said. “Israel becomes a part of their consciousness.”
As for the grown-ups, apparently there’s going to be a height limit for the trampoline dragon, but everything else is fair game.