For All Walks of Life
Barbara Sofer
Courtesy of Beautifeel According to tradition, during the 40 years the Israelites wandered in the desert before entering the Promised Land, their sandals never wore out. We have not found Moses or iriam’s sandal collection yet, but recently while excavating a burial cave in the Judean Desert, archaeologists did discover a pair of still-wearable 2,400-year-old cross-strapped leather sandals.
Nonetheless, reputation for sturdiness alone would not have convinced the costume designer of the movie Notting Hill to accouter its star Julia Roberts in Israeli sandals, nor would it convince upscale American shoe emporia like Nordstrom to stock Israeli brands such as Teva-Naot, BeautiFeel and Source.
“Israeli shoes have taken the lead in comfort and style,” says Meir Khalifa, octogenarian shoe merchant, waving at his huge stock of Israeli products in his eponymous store on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem. “Today, customers from abroad like to buy their shoes in Israel and visit our Web site. That’s a pleasant turnabout.”
From sturdy sandals, clogs and sneakers to fashionable flats, wedges and heels, from hiking boots to tots’ rain boots, Israeli footwear is recognized for innovation and quality, offering high-tech comfort and high-class elegance as well as colorful, funky styles.
In the beginning, there was Nimrod (named after the biblical hunter), a company set up in 1944 by the Rozenblit family on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv. They specialized in quality infant and children’s shoes and created Israel’s first sandal, the popular Tanachi, or Biblical Sandal. With the advance of the Nazis, the Rozenblits had been forced to leave behind their home and shoe business in the Netherlands.
Today, Nimrod has a full selection of shoes for men, women and children; its huge variety of Elefanten footwear for children—licensed from the parent German company—are particularly popular in Europe. They come in bright pinks, blues and tangerine and are in the $50 range. For teens, there are fringed and multistrapped flats with closed and open toes, and sandals in black and white, silver and yellow. Sixty Nimrod stores dot the Israeli landscape.
The ingathering of immigrants after 1948 brought thousands of shoemakers from Casablanca and Marrakesh. Hundreds of small factories produced shoes and sandals in Tel Aviv, selling their wares wholesale and retail on Neve Shaanan Street, near the old Central Bus Station. Eventually, a few local companies began to win a following.
The breakthrough in the Israeli shoe industry, however, according to Khalifa, was the decision of Kibbutz Naot Mordechai in the Galilee to take its business, founded in 1942, international. “Then everything [got better]—the designs, the materials and the workmanship,” Khalifa says.
Known for its apple cider and its tenacity in settling across the border from Syria, Kibbutz Naot Mordechai became Israel’s shoe capital by chance. One of Naot Mordechai’s early pioneers, Gideon Scheuer, was the son of a tannery owner in Czechoslovakia. Before leaving for Israel in 1938, he apprenticed at a shoemaking plant for a mere six weeks. Before founding Naot Mordechai, Scheuer’s pioneering group lived in the northern city of Nahariya, working as day laborers. In July 1940, 19-year-old Scheuer set up a table and two stools in the corner of a chicken coop and began to repair shoes for locals. By good fortune, there were three other shoemakers in their group, and others soon learned the trade.
“We got bored with the shoe-repair business, rented a sewing machine and we began making shoes in a tin hut,” recalls Giora Soker, 88, who learned the craft from the late Scheuer. “The idea was to sell the shoes to city folk. We didn’t wear our own shoes.”
An official of the kibbutz movement was hastily dispatched from Tel Aviv to warn them of their enterprise’s probable failure. “We ignored the warning,” says Soker. The first bulk order came from the Palmah; later, the British Army became customers, too.
In 1964, residents of nearby Kibbutz Dafna began making molded rubber boots for milking and mucking out the cowshed. With slight modification, the seamless boots could suit puddle-loving kids and their parents in the city. Dafna Industries began producing a rubber-soled slipper with high cloth sides that was perfect for standing in line in the communal dining room after a day in the field or going to a committee meeting. The Dafna creations became the standard Israeli house shoe. Dafna’s best-selling children’s slipper has the features of a funny sheep with sunglasses.
By 1996, Dafna Industries employed more than 200 people and was selling more than $22 million worth of boots (winter, riding and fashion), sandals, slippers and clogs to Europe and North and South America. Dafna exports riding boots to Japan and Korea. It also produces organic shoes made primarily with vegetables in the tanning process and a minimum of glue.
Today, as part of Brill Shoe Industries, it sells only wholesale.
Caligula shoes are on the cutting
edge of fashhion. 
Caligula (Latin for little boot) came on the scene in 1981, joining Nimrod, Dafna and Gali. Designed and manufactured in Israel and abroad, Caligula has specialized in high-fashion footwear. The Tel Aviv-based enterprise works with an Italian design company to keep it on the cutting edge of style.
Khalifa recalls how, as a teenager before World War II, he would hire a taxi to take him to Damascus and Beirut, bringing back colorful slippers from the bazaars and European stiletto heels from French importers. His family opened its shop in 1954 and today has second- and third-generation Khalifas working in the business. Nowadays, most of the shoes Khalifa sells are Israeli-made: dress sandals in antique silver and Cadillac green alongside hiking sandals in champagne beige. Online, you can buy black-strapped sandals from Teva-Naot for $94; Source’s $188 leather boots; and $213 open-backed, open-toed silver pumps from BeautiFeel.
After years of growth, the entire shoe enterprise hit a rough patch during the 1988 recession: Inexpensive imports from the Far East undercut local production and a number of Israeli companies began manufacturing abroad. Many of the Moroccan-born shoemakers in Tel Aviv retired, and even veteran shoemakers at Naot Mordechai considered shutting down. The kibbutz’s situation was so serious that their case was among the failing companies being studied in an economics seminar at Tel Aviv University. As a class exercise, a professor assigned students to be consultants to the troubled companies. That is how Ami Bar-Nahor came to work at Naot Mordechai.
“I didn’t know a thing about shoes,” says Bar-Nahor, who is in his late fifties and today lives in a mansion in Herzliya. “I came up with the idea that both the product and production could be modernized to attract the new health-conscious shoe consumer. I aimed at a sort of Israelization of Birkenstock,” referring to the veteran German company that makes comfortable clogs and sandals.
Bar-Nahor spent four years at Naot Mordechai—and the company emerged an internationally competitive brand. Nimrod’s original, iconic Biblical Sandal had featured inflexible soles that clacked on Israeli stone floors; Naot’s retooled sandals were comfortable and attractive. They offered a flexible “footpad” of cork, natural rubber or leather that supported the heel by conforming to the wearer’s foot, mostly in beige, black and brown. Adjustable leather straps crisscrossed and took into consideration feet that might swell in the heat.
How did Bar-Nahor turn the company around? He hired creative young designers from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and Shenkar College in Tel Aviv to add color and interest to the stolid styles. They incorporated a rainbow of colors from hot orange to patent-leather gray and a variety of heels—including wedges and pumps.
The company became hugely successful, exporting 80 percent of its Teva-Naot sandals to 15 countries, but mostly to the United States. In 2006, Shamrock Holdings, based in Burbank, California, paid $31 million for the purchase of 66 percent of the enterprise. In the United States, the brand name is Naot. The Teva shoes that are mistaken for Israeli sandals are American, named Teva by a one-time volunteer to Israel.
Delighted with his success at Naot Mordechai, in 1994, Bar-Nahor went out on his own.
“I used to look at the classic photos of the woman executive going to work in a stunning suit, wearing sneakers and carrying uncomfortable but stylish shoes…with her,” he says. “I noticed the famous companies were making the sneakers more attractive. I was determined that she could wear shoes that were both comfortable and attractive.”
At the time, 400 small shoe factories in Tel Aviv had closed. Bar-Nahor took over one of them and founded Onyx Footwear Industries, launching the BeautiFeel line. From the start, he offered glamorous shoes, two-inch-heeled sandals in addition to flats, and fire-engine red, open-toed dressy shoes with the same kind of comfortable lasts and latex soles that were available on less elegant shoes. The company motto is “Every woman deserves a pair.”
BeautiFeel came up with solutions for different foot shapes by the smart use of expanding
material such as elastic together with Velcro. A pair of beige evening sandals with two-inch heels features a rose near the toe obscuring the adjustable Velcro beneath. Career sandals have lower heels and cleverly twisted and looped straps that add chic and camouflage foot imperfections. Shoes sell for around $180.
Today, BeautiFeel’s main factories are in Rishon LeZion and Haifa. The company has 240 employees. Bar-Nahor found craftspeople among the million Jews from the former Soviet Union. “We couldn’t have made it without the contribution of Russian immigrants in professionalism and creativity,” he acknowledges. There are flagship stores in Australia, the United States and Israel. BeautiFeel USA—which targets stores that specialize in comfort shoes—is based in Chatsworth, California.
Around the time Bar-Nahor was harmonizing comfort with style, Yoram Gill, then 32, was focused on comfort and durability. Gill and his wife, Daniella, had recently returned from a post-Army trek in South America and the Far East and they wanted to remake hiking footwear.
Many trekkers the couple met all along the way wore hiking boots, but Israelis preferred wearing sandals, yet there was nothing on the market that protected feet and was also light, comfortable and flexible enough for varied terrain. Gill decided to invent such a sandal. For two years, he stayed up nights in his Tel Aviv apartment cutting out sandal shapes, gluing and tying straps made from different materials in dozens of configurations. He was determined to make a sandal that would be a natural extension of the foot. Finally, one evening in 1991, he showed Daniella a sandal with a padded rubber base and three waterproof, adjustable, polypropylene straps that made an “x” below the ankle.
Shoe sellers and distributors, however, scoffed at his shoes, which lacked leather and pizzazz. So there he was: Two weeks before Pesah and his first 500 pairs of shoes were going nowhere. Then Gill got an idea. He sent flyers to 700 tour guides who would be leading hiking tours over the holiday. He offered them his new sandals at a deep discount; 400 sent in orders for Source (Shoresh), the first adventure sandals.
Thousands of Israelis followed these guides on holiday hikes, learning about Golan lava, Nabatean trails and Roman columbaria. But their minds weren’t only on archaeology; they were on their guides’ feet. The day after Pesah ended, shoe stores were besieged by customers who wanted those same sandals. Since then, over 180,000 pairs of Source sandals are sold every year, mostly in Israel. Israeli trekkers around the world can spot a compatriot in the jungle by the x-strap that marks his or her sandals.
In the Israeli section of the proposed KEO time capsule—which may be launched this year or next and will reenter Earth’s atmosphere in 50,000 years—tucked in along with a Bible, seeds for noshing and a handful of shekels, will be a pair of Source sandals, just right for a soft landing.
Shoe Shopping
According to the Talmud, “a person should sell the roof beams of his house to buy shoes for his feet.” Israeli shoes are not so expensive you have to go into hock, but they are usually among the 10 percent of shoes that cost more than $50 a pair. Indeed, many can cost $200. But then again, they might last 40 years.
Many American stores carry Israeli brands. You can order shoes online from American and Israeli Web sites, or shop in Israel where there are also less well-known brands such as Moran and Lady Comfort. Quite a few brands have their own outlets—and the Teva-Naot factory in particular has become a pilgrimage site of sorts for tourists.
BeautiFeel: www.beautifeel.com
Caligula: www.caligula.co.il (Hebrew only)
Gali: www.gali.co.il (Hebrew only)
Khalifa Shoes www.khalifashoes.com
Nimrod: www.nimrod.co.il (Hebrew Only)
Source: http://sourceoutdoor.com
TevaNaot: www.naot.com
Date: 6/14/2010
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