World newsSpotless star's dark secret shakes Israel
'Isn't it time for the citizens of Israel to relate to Aids asthey do to cancer or dysentery?'They say the bereaved pass through several stages of grief, but in Israel the legions of fans of the singer Ofra Haza have been stuck on anger ever since a newspaper dared to print what had been circulating as rumour for days. The entertainer with a spotless private life, whose rise to stardom from the slums of Tel Aviv chimed so well with Israel's self-image as a land of opportunity, had died of complications from Aids.
In the days since the front-page report in the Haaretz newspaper - which has yet to be confirmed by Haza's ferociously private family -- there has been intense debate on radio and television chat shows on whether the press was right to reveal the cause of the singer's death.
The focus has been not on the attitudes of a still traditional society but on assigning blame. Haza's husband of two years, businessman Doron Ashkenazi, emerged in weekend supplements on Friday as the favourite villain.
'We just could not believe such a thing could happen to Ofra, because Ofra was like a saint,' says Tsedi Tsarfati, a music director who worked with Haza for 15 years. 'The first time I saw her holding hands with a man was at the henna ceremony one week before her marriage. In my mind, she was like a nun, and all Israelis think this way, although they might not say it: she can't be married, she can't be with a man, and there is no way she could have Aids. We have to blame somebody because we just can't understand this.'
If Haza, who was 41, did indeed die of Aids - and the reports have not been denied - she would be Israel's first celebrity known to have done so, and Haza's fame was international. Introducing her soulful version of Yemenite music to European audiences in the Eighties with the much-sampled 'Im Nin Alu' hit, she went on to perform at the Nobel prize ceremony honouring the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and to provide backing music on Hollywood film scores. She sang the role of Moses's mother in the animated film Prince of Egypt .
Israelis loved her because she was a living success story. She began making her escape from the poverty of her Hatikva neighbourhood in south Tel Aviv while still a teenager. The clutter of mean, narrow streets has been home to waves of poor immigrants. In Haza's youth it was a ghetto for Jews from Yemen, Iraq and Morocco who came to Israel after independence only to wind up as second-class citizens in the Zionist state. The European cultural élite called them primitive.
Haza was the youngest in a Yemenite family of nine, who overcame their misgivings about letting a daughter out in an alien world when a local impresario set up a theatre group. Haza began touring kibbutzim and small towns, and went on to entertain the troops in the Sinai and Golan during the October 1973 war.
She was always a trouper, her friends recall. 'Everybody loved her,' says Mikhail Sinuani, another Hatikva resident. 'She was never spoilt. During the war, there were times when we could not shower for a week or two, we were in bunkers, but she never complained.'
But even after she made it big, Haza evidently felt unable to tell her fans about her illness, which is what prompted Haaretz to break a taboo -- and strict privacy laws - to announce she had Aids. In the resulting furore, staff at the hospital, who are furious that they were not told, demanded an inquiry into her stay there.
'We are talking about a human disease which in our eyes is just like any other disease,' Yoel Esteron, the deputy editor of Haaretz, told a talk show last week. 'The more the days passed, and the more this conspiracy of secrecy grew to reach monstrous dimensions, the more we thought we ought to publish. Isn't it time the citizens of Israel relate to Aids as they do to cancer or dysentery?'
Maybe not. Aviram Germanovitch, executive director of the Israel Aids Task Force in Tel Aviv, says the organisation's hotline has 'exploded' from the volume of calls since the story broke, and that the number of clients at its anonymous testing centres has doubled. Testing centres at hospitals report a similar pattern.
He argues it is unrealistic to suppose that Israel can banish the stigma attached to the disease so long as the Health Ministry spends just seven US cents per citizen on Aids awareness -- compared to an average of $1.50 in the European Union. Although Israel officially has 2,500 peo ple with HIV, the United Nations and the local Aids Task Force say the true number is four times that figure.
'The whole hoo-ha about Ofra Haza has brought a microscope on what is happening in this country,' Germanovitch, who is HIV positive, said. 'The majority of people with HIV are living in secrecy, and in fear of being discovered, and having to live with shame. Magic Johnson took the issue and he made a great leap forward in awareness. He said: "This Aids thing, it's a virus, it's not me." But we have not had anyone like that in Israel.'
In hindsight, Haza was a most unlikely emissary for Aids awareness. In the entertainment world, she re-mained a mystery even to her closest collaborators. For 27 years she was the virtual property of her manager, Bezalel Aloni, who, other singers say, kept her aloof from her colleagues. She lived in the second half of a duplex with the Aloni family, breaking free only when she married Ashkenazi.
According to Aloni, that was her undoing, and he was so bitter at the manner of her death that he did not attend her funeral. 'I was everything for her,' he says. 'Then that guy came and took her away.'
In Hatikvah, they will never forgive the press for exposing Haza's fiercely guarded secret. Her parents live there still, in a modest house on Boaz Street that has been embellished with coach lamps and expensive window shutters that are firmly closed despite a sunny day in early spring that has coaxed most of the neighbours outdoors.
'Please don't bother us any more,' said one. 'She kept herself to herself when she was alive. Why should we know all her private details now that she is gone? Let her rest in peace.'
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