Topol: in his own words
Chaim Topol hasn’t graced our screens since 1998, and for a good reason. That was the year he started working on plans for the Jordan River Village, Israel’s only free, fully accessible, overnight retreat which hosts -year-round recreational programs for children living with chronic illnesses, life-threatening diseases, disabilities and special needs.
CHAIM Topol hasn’t graced our screens since 1998, and for a good reason. That was the year he started working on plans for the Jordan River Village, Israel’s only free, fully accessible, overnight retreat which hosts year-round recreational programs for children living with chronic illnesses, life-threatening diseases, disabilities and special needs.
The village, which has helped more than 6000 sick children since it opened in 2011, is a member of Paul Newman’s SeriousFun Children’s Network, founded in 1988.
“I’ve been dealing with children for 50 years,” Topol, chairman of the Jordan River Village, tells The AJN. “Children are a part of my life. Paul [Newman] took me to Connecticut to show me the work he was doing, and I was very impressed.
“So I went to the doctors in Israel and I said, ‘What do you think? Should we do such a thing? Should we build one in Israel?’ And the doctors said, ‘We should build four of them.’”
But Topol couldn’t do it alone. In 1999, he enlisted the help of his close friend Professor Yakov Ramon, and together they reached out to Israeli doctors who specialise in helping children with debilitating illnesses.
“It’s not enough to just want to do good,” Topol says. “You need to know how to do good. And the doctors knew how to do good. They directed us, told us what to do and we did what they asked us. Together, we built a village.”
Jordan River Village caters for children aged nine to 18, and has no religious limitations.
“We treat Muslim, Christian, Arab, Jewish, Sikh and Palestinian children together, just as we do in our hospitals,” he says. “This is what we do in Israel.”
The village sits on 86 acres in the Lower Galilee, on land donated by the State of Israel. Built mostly on donations, construction took
$US30 million and 11 years to finish.
Topol couldn’t be prouder of what they have achieved. He personally spends two days a week at the village, interacting with the children, singing and playing with them. When asked how it feels to see the children enjoying themselves he says simply, “I cry.”
And how does it feel to literally see his vision come alive?
“I cry some more.”
The village is run by 120 personnel, 95 of whom are volunteers. Doctors all donate their time and expertise free of charge. But Topol emphasises that all the people at the village are friends of the children, not leaders.
“The children have a wonderful time,” he says. “These are very sick children, suffering from very bad illnesses. They never get to leave home. It’s an opportunity for them to become more independent.
“They meet other children who are suffering from the same illness, so they are not lonely in their misery. They share their experience, and they coexist together unbelievably well.”
In fact, Topol believes that the rest of the Middle East should take a lesson from the Jordan River Village children. One of the diseases that the village caters too is a hereditary blood disorder called Thalassemia, and 80 per cent of the sufferers are Arab children.
“The first time we had a session for these children, we saw on the list that there were lots of Arab children, and the few Jewish children on the list were from ultra-Orthodox families. We thought, maybe we’d made a mistake.
“So we called them and said, ‘Listen, you are welcome to come, but you have to know that you will be with mostly Arab children.’ And the children said to me, ‘Don’t worry, they are good friends of ours. We’ve met them in the hospital and we know who they are. They are our friends.’
“That is life. We deal with human beings. There is no religion, no politics – and your origin doesn’t matter,” he says.
Topol grew up in pre-state Palestine in a Jewish neighbourhood in Jaffa, which at that time was an Arab city. At age 17, he joined Kibbutz Geva so that when he joined the IDF at age 18, he was in an army unit that was “full of kibbutzniks”. As well as being commander of his IDF unit, he started acting and producing sketches that would later become the Oscar-nominated film Sallah Shabati.
After leaving the IDF, Topol started a satirical theatre called the ‘Spring Onion’.
“Anyone who wanted to be in my theatre had to join my kibbutz,” he says. “But then one of my friends was killed in an accident, and we couldn’t continue without him. He was one of us. So I went to Haifa and founded the Haifa Municipal Theatre.”
Topol recalls how he came to play Broadway’s favourite Jewish father more than 4000 times. The US producers of Fiddler on the Roof saw Sallah Shabati and invited him to audition for Tevye in 1967, not knowing that he’d already played the role in Tel Aviv.
“They asked me to sing and I sang If I Were A Rich Man. Usually, after two minutes, they cut you off and say, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ But they asked for more and more songs and then they said, ‘How do you know all the stage positions and all the movements?’ They had no idea that Tevye and I were already old friends.”
In 1968, director Norman Jewison saw Topol on the stage in London’s West End and invited him to be in the 1971 adaptation. Only 34 at the time, Topol sat in the make-up chair for two hours every morning to be ‘aged’. To date, Fiddler has been seen by more than a billion people worldwide, and Topol no longer needs make-up to look Tevye’s age.
During a break from Fiddler, Topol was “incredibly lucky” to star as James Bond’s wingman in the 1981 film For Your Eyes Only. His time on set was “a joy”, he says, because Roger Moore was “so wonderful to work with”.
With more than 30 stage and screen credits to his name, Topol was honoured with an Israel Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. Ever humble, he accepted the award by saying, “Other people deserve it more.” In fact, he is reluctant to talk about himself at all.
“I am here to talk about the Jordan River Village,” he says. “Helping people is what is important. Everything else is shtuyot [nonsense].”
Addressing the audience at the JNF major donor dinner in Sydney last week, Topol sang a rendition of Hannah Szenes’s famous poem Eli, Eli.
“I sang it as a prayer,” he says. “I was praying that the audience will help the village.”
The JNF has been involved with the Jordan River Village since its inception. When the land was first donated, there were 750 olive trees planted there, but the allergens of olive trees can be incredibly detrimental to sick children.
“We had to get rid of the trees, which was a great pity,” Topol recalls, “But the JNF took the trees and replanted them somewhere else, gave us instead some other trees, which made the village so beautiful.”
The JNF has recently launched a project within the village, building a ‘senses garden’ where the children can enjoy sounds, smells, visions and outdoor activities.
As for the future, Topol is too busy with the village to think about taking on any new roles in the next few years.
“I will do Fiddler again when I am 85,” he says. “How could anyone be sick of playing Tevye?”
To learn more about the Jordan River Village, visit www.jrv.org.il.
YAEL BRENDER
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