Juliano Mer-Khamis

Juliano Mer-Khamis, who was shot dead on April 4 aged 52, was a Palestinian Jew and ran a theatre in the West Bank that provides a creative outlet in the harshest corner of the embattled Holy Land; despite these efforts the theatre's alumni have included gunmen and suicide-attackers 

Juliano Mer-Khamis working with Palestinian children at the Freedom Theatre Photo: AFP

 

The Freedom Theatre was initially set up by Mer-Khamis's mother, Arna, a Jew who had served as an officer with the Zionist Haganah militia before the creation of Israel in 1948. Established in the 1980s, the theatre provided drama courses for young men in the northern West Bank town of Jenin. Many came from the camp that continues to house Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled from their homes near the city of Haifa during the war that accompanied Israel's birth.

Juliano Mer-Khamis was an established actor by the time his mother decided to start the theatre, but she frequently called on him to help out before, in 1997, she died. Drama then became impossible as the second Palestinian intifada plunged the region into a new and devastating round of violence. From 2000 Jenin became the principal town from which suicide bombers were sent into Israel, and in 2002 Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield to crush militants across the West Bank.

The fighting in Jenin refugee camp was particularly fierce, with dozens dying on both sides. After the battle ended, Mer-Khamis returned to find the theatre that he and his mother had established razed to the ground. The fate of many of its former drama students was equally grim.

One young man had become a militant leader and been shot by Israeli soldiers; another budding actor who joined Islamic Jihad had also been killed; his brother, meanwhile, had carried out a suicide mission in Israel. Mer-Khamis documented their stories in a well-received film, Arna's Children (2004).

As the violence of the intifada ebbed, he returned to Jenin to resurrect the Freedom Theatre. He was joined there by Zakaria Zubeidi, the former military leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade who vowed to give up fighting, but whose formidable reputation none the less offered Mer-Khamis, seen by some as a interloper, much-needed protection.
Soon the theatre began to stage innovative productions that again drew on local participants (including some girls, who were recruited after negotiations with their families). But while audiences were enthusiastic, sections of increasingly-conservative Palestinian society were not. An adaptation in 2009 of Orwell's Animal Farm caused an outcry with what appeared to be its pointed satire of local politics. Others strongly objected to men and women appearing on stage together. Two arson attacks on the theatre followed, though it remained unclear if they were ordered by disgruntled officials or offended Islamists.
Either way, it was clear that Mer-Khamis was upsetting powerful figures in Jenin. But by then he had burned his bridges in Israel, where many regard anyone who helps Palestinians as a traitor. The result was that Mer-Khamis, who tried to be accepted by both Israelis and Palestinians, ended up accepted by neither.
Such a fate was perhaps implicit in his parentage. He was born on May 29 1958 in Nazareth to his Jewish mother Arna, and Saliba Khamis, a Christian Palestinian. It was Saliba Khamis who introduced Arna to the Communist Party, and together they espoused the idea of a bi-national state in which Jews and Palestinians would live side by side.
Juliano's early life was a struggle against the discrimination he felt for not having a Jewish father. He even claimed that doctors had refused to treat his mother after she gave birth to him because she was not married to an Israeli. As a result he signed up to carry out his compulsory military service with the elite Israeli paratroop brigade "to prove that I was more Jewish than the Jews". But his service ended in disgrace when he got into a fight with another officer and was jailed.
His professional acting career got under way in 1984 when he featured with Diane Keaton in the adaptation of John le Carré's The Little Drummer Girl. Afterwards he appeared frequently in Israeli films and television series.
But his mother's work in Jenin also drew him to explore his Palestinian identity for the first time, and far from rejecting his Arab heritage, he began to embrace it.
Amid the mutual suspicion of the post-intifada period, however, such apparently split loyalties were not wholly welcome on either side, and Mer-Khamis was often under pressure to declare for one or the other. He refused. "I can't choose," he said. "I'm 100 per cent Jewish and I'm 100 per cent Arab."
He tried instead to foster the idea of a peaceful "cultural" intifada to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. "My understanding of the struggle was totally different when I held a rifle," said Rabia Turkman, a former fighter with the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade who joined the first drama students when the Freedom Theatre reopened in 2006. "I consider myself a freedom fighter when I am on the stage. Juliano is the one who taught me how to resist through culture."
Mer-Khamis knew his work put his life in danger. A leaflet distributed in 2009 made threats against his life. "I do not pretend to be a hero," he said afterwards. "Of course I am scared."
He was driving home from the theatre when the assassin struck. His baby son was on his lap and a nanny in the passenger seat as five bullets were fired. Mer-Khamis died but the others in the car survived. The killing provoked the usual round of mutual accusations, with Palestinian factions blaming each other, as well as Israel. An alleged member of the Islamist group Hamas was subsequently arrested; Hamas denied the man was affiliated to it.
Juliano Mer-Khamis is survived by his wife, Jenny, who is pregnant with twins, and by a son and a daughter. His dual identity marked the day of his funeral, when the coffin was brought from Israel, through an Israeli checkpoint, into the West Bank, where it was draped with a Palestinian flag. His body was then taken back into Israel and buried next to his mother, in the kibbutz Ramot-Menashe.

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Pietro Ferrero

Pietro Ferrero

His grandfather, also Pietro, started the company in 1942, supplying products for a small coffee bar and pastry shop run by his wife, Piera, in the Piedmontese town of Alba, northern Italy. Because it was hard to obtain cocoa during the war he decided to exploit locally-abundant hazelnuts and invented a sweet butter-like paste that combined the nuts with cocoa butter and vegetable oil. He called it Pasta Gianduja.

The recipe for the new paste remained a secret, but it proved so popular that the family was soon supplying confectionery shops throughout the region. The pastry shop soon transformed into a sweet factory.

In 1949 Pietro died, leaving his company in the hands of his son, Michele, who expanded into foreign markets, opening subsidiaries and factories across Europe. The company shunned acquisitions, and instead developed new markets by introducing new products suited to local tastes. Pasta Gianduja was renamed Nutella in 1964, but was initially marketed in France as La Tartinoise. In North America, meanwhile, Ferrero eluded stiff competition from peanut-butter manufacturers by carving out a niche with Tic Tac breath-freshener mints.

In 1982 the company launched Ferrero Rocher hazelnut chocolates — in Britain with the much-parodied television advertisements featuring an ambassador’s reception and the line: “Monsieur, with these Rocher you’re really spoiling us.”

Kinder Surprise, hollow chocolate eggs containing toy figurines, were introduced in Europe in 1989. The strategy made Michele Ferraro the richest man in Italy.
His eldest son, Pietro, was born in Turin on September 11 1963 and began working for Ferrero Germany in 1985 after studying Biology at Turin University. He then moved to company headquarters in Alba, and in 1992 took on the responsibility of managing operations in the European division of the Ferrero group. In the late 1990s he and his brother Giovanni took over from their father as joint-chief executives, though it was Pietro who was regarded as the company’s leading manager.
There was some speculation that the generational shift might lead to some moderation of the company’s reputation for excessive secrecy. Under Michele’s leadership Ferrero was a fully-paid up member of Italy’s “salotto buono” — the nexus of backroom dealmakers whose cross-holdings in each other’s companies for years managed to keep foreigners out of Italy. Pietro, for example, was a former director of Ifil SpA, a holding company for the Agnellis, founding family of Fiat. He also served as a director of Mediobanca, Italy’s biggest publicly traded investment bank.
In recent years recession in western Europe, which accounted for 74 per cent of sales in 2009, exposed the company’s bias towards core markets and there were suggestions in the financial press that Ferraro’s lack of size might make it hard for the company to maintain its competitive edge. In 2009, facing pressure to expand, Pietro was rumoured to have challenged his father’s acquisition-averse approach by pushing the company to bid for the British chocolate maker Cadbury.
Pietro eventually dropped the idea, apparently reluctant to open up Ferrero to the inevitable market scrutiny that a cross-border takeover would involve. More recently, the family was said to be considering joining a consortium of Italian companies, backed by the government, to take over the Italian dairy giant Parmalat, in order to forestall its takeover by the French company Groupe Lactalis.
Pietro Ferrero died in South Africa, where his company runs several charitable projects. A keen cyclist, he was riding the spectacular coastal road south of Cape Town when he collapsed. He is survived by his wife, Luisa, and their daughter and two sons.

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Don Kirshner

Don Kirshner, who has died aged 76, was a rock promoter who earned the sobriquet “the man with the golden ear”, for making stars of singers such as Carole King, Neil Diamond and Neil Sedaka; he was also behind the hits written for the Monkees, the group manufactured for American television as the answer to the Beatles. 

Don Kirshner Photo: AP

 

Kirshner was one of the principal architects of the so-called “Brill Building” genre which dominated the American charts in the period between Elvis Presley being enlisted in the US Army in 1958 and the onset of the British invasion, spearheaded by the Beatles, in 1964.

At that time the American pop music industry was centred around the Brill Building on Broadway. In a nearby office Kirshner’s teams of songwriters worked day and night in a rabbit warren of cubicles, each furnished with a piano and a desk, fashioning hits for the pop market — a process which Kirshner described as “fun servitude”.

He described his writers as “normal Jewish kids”, many of them barely out of their teens, whose songs both shaped and reflected the conservative dreams of most American teenagers, with their time-honoured themes of infatuation and heartbreak, summer romances, first kisses, and living happily ever after.

A brash, opinionated man, Kirshner had no musical training, but enjoyed a reputation for his unerring understanding of popular taste. “That man could sit and listen to somebody play eight bars of a song and tell you whether it was a hit or not, and he was right so often it was frightening,” the producer Stu Phillips recalled. “I don’t have the talent myself,” Kirshner admitted. “But, you know, I’m the man with the golden ear.”

Donald Kirshner was born in the Bronx on April 17 1934, the son of a tailor. After a year at City College, he went to Upsala College, New Jersey, where he read Business Administration and captained the basketball team. After graduating in 1956 he met a young singer named Robert Walden Cassotto at a sweetshop in Washington Heights. They became partners, working on advertising jingles and pop ditties (their first was called Bubblegum Pop). But their collaboration ended after Cassotto — under his new stage name, Bobby Darin — had a hit in 1958 with Splish Splash, which he wrote without Kirshner’s help.

Kirshner then went into music publishing with Al Nevins, who had produced several successful albums for a group called The Three Suns. Fusing their first names, they came up with the company name, Aldon music, and had a first hit with Stupid Cupid, sung by Connie Francis and written by a young Neil Sedaka and his songwriting partner Howard Greenfield. Aldon signed a long-term contract with the songwriting duo and had another hit with The Diary, sung by Sedaka, which charted at No 14 in America in February 1959. When Kirshner pressed Sedaka for a follow-up hit, the result was Oh! Carol.
Sedaka described his song as “an ode to my old high school girlfriend, Carol Klein”. She was starting in the music business as Carole King, and she and her husband, Gerry Goffin, also signed with Aldon. The couple’s song Will You Love Me Tomorrow? went to No 1 for the Shirelles in January 1961. Kirshner and Carole King took a limousine to the chemical plant where Goffin laboured at his day job and told him he would never have to work again.
Two years later, in 1963, Kirshner made his own fortune when Aldon was sold to Columbia-Screen Gems, making him a millionaire at the age of 29. With the coming of the Beatles, and the growing practice of performing artists writing their own material, the demand for “song factories” such as Kirshner’s began to decline. But he found a lucrative new outlet in the Monkees, the group which had been assembled in 1966 by American television executives desperate to cash in on the Beatles phenomenon, and which was widely derided as “the Pre-Fabs”.
Kirshner became musical producer, providing such songs as I’m A Believer, written by Neil Diamond, and Pleasant Valley Sunday, written by Goffin and King, which made the group a huge sensation on both sides of the Atlantic.
When tensions arose within the Monkees, Kirshner moved on to help create the Archies, an animated version of an American cartoon strip. He made no bones about his reasons for doing so, saying: “I want a band that won’t talk back.” The Archies’ music, performed by uncredited studio session musicians, is widely regarded as the quintessence of bubblegum music; their irritatingly catchy Sugar, Sugar became the bestselling song of 1969.
Kirshner was also one of the first music moguls to bring live rock and roll to American television. For 10 years from 1972 he presented Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, which featured musicians such as Billy Joel and the Police.
Kirshner was honoured by the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame in 2007.
Don Kirshner, who died on January 17, is survived by his wife, Sheila, and by their son and daughter.

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Professor Edward Ullendorff

 Professor Edward Ullendorff who died on March 6 aged 91, was an authority on Ethiopia and the Bible and held the chair of Semitic Languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) in London from 1979 to 1982. 

Edward Ullendorff was born on January 25 1920 in Berlin and educated at the city's Gymnasium Graues Kloster. He taught himself Hebrew and Arabic and, from the age of 15, attended university classes in Arabic.

In 1938 he went to Palestine to study Semitic languages at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, living in the North Talpiot neighbourhood of Jerusalem, a city which, as he recalled, was still relatively empty and stunningly beautiful.

He soon, however, became aware of the huge gulf between the Arab and Jewish residents. His own days were filled with studies, visits to bookshops, music and amateur theatre, and evenings spent with neighbours debating everything from Palestinian politics to Henry VIII's wives and fluid mechanics.

By contrast he recalled seeing an Arab woman giving birth by the side of the road, her husband standing by her side, idle and seemingly unconcerned. Ullendorff, horrified, ran to get medical help, but the doctor just shrugged his shoulders and smiled. When Ullendorff returned to the spot the woman, her husband and new baby were gone.

Ullendorff's studies covered the full range of Semitic languages – Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic-Syriac, Akkadian and the Ethiopic languages, which he studied under the great Egyptologist and Semitic language expert HJ Polotsky. They got on extremely well and would correspond regularly until Polotsky's death in 1991. But Ullendorff recalled that when he eventually left Jerusalem in 1948, he was advised to ask the great man for a testimonial, to which Polotsky readily agreed. The finished reference read: "Mr E Ullendorff was my pupil. I have no complaints against him."

"There were not many occasions when I needed to have recourse to this fulsome assessment of my qualifications," Ullendorff recalled – though when he showed the document to an old colleague of Polotsky's "he at once recognised the authentic Polotsky manner and thought no one could wish for a greater tribute, considering its provenance".
As Ullendorff explained in his memoir The Two Zions (1988), it was the Second World War that cemented his fascination with the culture and languages of Ethiopia (Ethiopians traditionally refer to their country as "the Second Zion"). When war broke out Ullendorff was writing an MA thesis on the use of the definite article in Semitic languages. But he soon volunteered to serve in the British Army under the Mandate and, because of his knowledge of Ethiopic languages, was posted to Eritrea and Ethiopia.
He served as the chief examiner in the British Censorship in Eritrea, based in Asmara, in 1942-43 and as assistant political secretary in 1945-46. During this time he founded and edited the first Tigrinya-language newspaper, the Eritrean Weekly News, and produced an illustrated magazine in Amharic. In 1943, at the municipal offices in Asmara, he married Dina Noack, who had been a neighbour in Jerusalem.
Ullendorff travelled as much as he could, falling in love with the "stark and overpowering" beauty of the Ethiopian highlands and with the people – "a handsome race, elegant, subtle and nervous" but also "exceptionally intelligent, mentally agile and extraordinarily eager to learn". He was greatly impressed by Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie, "whose slight figure was in marked contrast to the overpowering impact of his personality".
Ullendorff would later translate Selassie's autobiography, written in Amharic, into English, and in 1972, two years before he was deposed in a revolution, the emperor conferred on him the Haile Selassie International Prize for Ethiopian Studies. In 1988 Ullendorff noted, sadly, that of the 11 people featured in the photograph of the presentation ceremony, at least six had been murdered.
After the war Ullendorff returned to Jerusalem, where he worked briefly as an administrator at the Hebrew University. There his duties included looking after an influx of foreign students (mainly former American servicemen) and the drafting of letters to referees abroad on the promotion of members of staff.
When one elderly lecturer in history was put forward for promotion, one of the referees was the Oxford Reader in Jewish Studies, Cecil Roth, who sent a cryptic quotation in Hebrew which, in translation, read: "He is like a peg that is not to be removed from its place." The ensuing debate over the precise provenance and meaning of this text, Ullendorff felt, was excellent training for his later academic career.
But the febrile Jerusalem of the postwar years was very different from the relatively peaceful city of the 1930s and was characterised by hostilities between the Irgun movement and the British administration, followed by a renewal of Arab-Jewish hostilities, with barbed wire barriers, body-searches, bombs, machine-gun fire and, at the university, bitter confrontations between supporters and opponents of the fighting.
In 1947 Ullendorff accepted a junior position in the British Mandate administration and worked in an office in the King David Hotel dealing with financial compensation for the victims of terrorist attacks until the surrender of the Mandate in 1948. As relationships between Arabs and Jews deteriorated further, it was with some relief that Ullendorff accepted an invitation to join the Oxford Institute of Colonial Studies and moved to Britain.
At Oxford, Ullendorff resumed his interrupted studies with a doctoral thesis on "The Relationship of Modern Ethiopian Languages to Ge'ez" (an ancient Semitic language which is no longer spoken but continues in use as a liturgical language). In 1950 he was appointed lecturer in Semitic Languages at St Andrews University, later advanced to Reader.
In 1959 he was appointed to a chair in Semitic Languages and Literatures at Manchester and, five years later, moved to Soas, which created a chair of Ethiopian Studies especially for him (the chair was renamed Semitic Languages in 1979). In 1982 he retired to Oxford to concentrate on his researches.
The Semitic Languages of Ethiopia (1955), based on his doctoral thesis, was followed by works on the various Ethiopian languages and on the history and culture of Ethiopia, such as The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People (1960), Ethiopia and the Bible (1968) and The Ethiopic Book of Enoch (1978, with MA Knibb). He edited catalogues of Ethiopian manuscript collections in the Bodleian and Cambridge University Libraries and published widely on other Semitic languages.
One of his more popular publications was an essay entitled The Bawdy Bible (1977), in which he explored the Hebrew Bible's "unabashed outspokenness" on sexual matters.
Ullendorff played an active role in many academic bodies, serving as chairman of the Association of British Orientalists (1963-64), president of the Society for Old Testament Study (1971) and vice-president of the Royal Asiatic Society (1975-79 and 1981-85). From 1975 to 1983 he sat on the Advisory Board of the British Library.
During his time at Manchester he was joint editor of the Journal of Semitic Studies, and in London he was chairman of the editorial board of the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies between 1968 and 1978.
Among other honours, he was awarded the Imperial Ethiopian Gold Medallion in 1960 and elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1965, serving as its vice-president from 1980 to 1982.
His wife survives him.

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