Mifletzet Park In Jerusalem: A Monstrous Slide In The Israeli Capital

When you think of playgrounds, what comes to mind? Most of you probably see them as inviting, lively places, a paradise for children (and a headache for parents). In the world of horror, special playgrounds interest us more, some of which are scary rides, whether in their visual appearance or in terms of the adrenaline you get while using them. In Israel, a country that doesn’t stand out too much for groundbreaking architecture or overly scary playgrounds, many parks and playgrounds are somewhat ordinary, even dull. But there are a few parks that might show otherwise.

In the Kiryat HaTovel neighborhood in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, lies Rabinovich Park, better known as “Mifletzet Park” (meaning “Monster Park”) or “La Golem.” The reason is that the main element in this park is a monumental sculpture that resembles a black and white monster, with red slides in the shape of tongues.

The unique installation initially attracted criticism, partly due to fears that it would scare children, and has several deeper meanings, such as a reference to strong femininity or the female womb. Later, it became a city symbol, even an icon that starred in several cultural works.

In other words, there is all the basis for a story about a scary and bizarre ride, as we like to review in our website. Here is everything you need to know about the Monster slide park, from its birth in the 1970s, through the renovations and changes over the years, to the current and not-so-optimistic situation.

Meet the Monster in the Garden

As mentioned, the Monster Garden is the common nickname for Rabinovich Garden in Jerusalem, named after the person responsible for financing the garden and the installation for which we have gathered here.

The structure that gave this modest garden its fame is an interesting monumental sculpture, “The Monster” or “The Golem”, which stands on sand in the heart of the garden. This Monster serves as an amusement ride with an interesting twist. The Monster features black and white coloring, strange eyes, horns, and other unique elements. You can climb to its head via a spiralling staircase, and the real fun for the children begins. From the Monster’s mouth descend three red slides, quite steep, to be honest, that resemble tongues. The result is surreal, as if taken from a fantasy film or a dark children’s story, which differs from the traditional character we identify with the Israeli capital.

The cast concrete statue was created in 1971-1972 by a French sculptor, Niki de Saint Phalle, an “outsider artist” known as one of the only female monumental sculptures. Niki de Saint Phalle created some stunning creations, which you can see near Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris, in Zurich train station, and even in the Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem, not far away from Rabinovitch Park.

A few years earlier, in 1965, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem was established. The museum commissioned sculptures in various city areas to mark the occasion. A town-appointed committee met to decide which sculptures to implement. At first, it rejected the statue, which the mythical mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, promoted. According to the committee’s reasoning, the statue was too scary for children, which is inconsistent with its location and the fact that it is part of a garden intended primarily for families.

Kollek did not accept the decision and asked to hold a new discussion, to which he invited de Saint-Pal. The latter changed the image with a quote explaining why every parent should let their children watch horror (age-appropriate, right?) from a relatively young age. She brought up the arguments of the Austrian-born psychologist, scholar, public intellectual, and writer Bruno Bettelheim. In various writings, and especially in “The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales” from 1976, he argued that in the proper context, scary fairy tales can benefit children because they help them conquer their fears (Ahahaha! I told you!). The committee accepted the argument and decided to approve the statute.

The Strong Woman, The Birth Experience, And What’s In Between

You can analyze La Golem in quite a few ways. The most well-known analysis is by Dr. Ronit Steinberg, a visual art historian and lecturer in the Bazelel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem. Dr. Steinberg, who focuses on modern Jewish art, examined the statue in current female contexts. She claimed the Monster represents a fleshy and massive woman who dominates the park, but is still considered relatively pleasant. The artist’s goal was to protest the fragile image of women in the Western environment.

According to the analysis, the inner part ot the Monster represents the woman’s womb, a dark and warm place. The mouth, from which the three slides emerge, symbolizes the transition to the real world, within the framework of the birth experience. If at first birth is frightening and mysterious, as children who enter the statue for the first time may feel, the experience becomes joyful over time. Incidentally, it is said that many potential singers practiced for hours inside the interior of the statue, thanks to its impressive echo.

Although Saint Phall was known mainly for her colorful modern sculptures, her choice in The Monster Park is for a relatively colorless appearance, primarily black-and-white (the Monster’s body and face) and red (the tongues). The goal was to allow a proper integration of the sculpture in the environment, with the awareness that she built the sculpture in a relatively poor neighborhood at the time. “Saint Phall created a very surprising, very unexpected, very large-scale sculpture here, which dominates its urban environment but at the same time is intimate, discreet and surrounded by trees, with the gloomy landscape of the housing estates in the background,” said Yona Fischer, who was then the curator of modern art at the Israel Museum, in an interview on Michael Jacobson’s excellent blog (in Hebrew). “It’s a sculpture that upgrades its environment.”

The Mifletzet Park In Israeli Culture

The Monster Garden is a well-known place in Jerusalem. Some would say it is iconic, even if it is clear we cannot mention it in the same breath as the city’s must-see historical sites, which attract countless tourists from all over the world and different religions: the Old City of Jerusalem, the Western Wall, the City of David, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Botanical Garden, Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, the Israeli Museum, and many more.

Michael And The Monster Of Jerusalem

Mifletzet Park has a special place in the Jerusalem experience, and some say it is also in the development of environmental sculpture in Israel. You can see the Monster in souvenirs, advertisements, music videos, movies, theater performances, etc. Some claim that “Michael and the monster of Jerusalem” (1982), the debut book of Meir Shalev – One of Israel’s top writers of Children’s books (and other genres) – was inspired by that concrete Monster. Not necessarily in the physical appearance of the Monster (which looks more like a dinosaur in the book, illustrated fabulously by Moshik Levin), but in the fact that there is a mysterious mystery of a monster in Jerusalem, which manages to be unusual even in a city full of history, to which it seems that everything has already happened.

Shibolet Bakafe 

The Monster has appeared in several movies, such as the short film “Shibolet Bakafe” (2003) by the acclaimed Israeli filmmaker Talya Lavie. Even before Lavie became one of the most promising names in the Israeli film industry, with the massive success of “Zero Tolerance,” for which she received two Ophir Awards (the Israel Film Academy Award) in 2014, she was a student at the Sam Spiegel Film School. “Shibolet Bakafe,” Lavie’s mid-studies project, is a 12-minute film shot in the Monster Garden. The heroine is a clever but unfaithful waitress named Flora (Shiri Ashckenazi), who works in an imaginary cafe with problematic customers. The big challenge in this cafe is to slide out of the kitchen through the tongues/slides, without dropping the food, a complex task given that the slides here are relatively steep.

Despite this unusual description, and perhaps because of it, “Shibolet Bakafe” was a great success. It was screened at several prestigious international festivals, such as the Berlin Film Festival and the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in France, and won awards at the Melbourne Film Festival, the Miami Short Film Festival, and others. It was screened at the MOMA – Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Louvre Museum in France, where Lavie won first place in the short film competition. In her acceptance speech, Lavie declared that the sculpture has been promoting interactivity with the environment and has been delighting children in Jerusalem since the 1970s, adding that the idea for the film was born from the thought of how adults would use this sculpture.

Hamasa El Hakochav

In a sharp transition, we come to “Hamasa El Hakochav” (“Journey to the Star”) – a children’s film created by Yuval Hamevulbal, the stage name of Israeli kids’ Idol and comedian Yuval Shem Tov, following the Second Lebanon War in 2006. The movie, a little over 50 minutes long, was a massive success with about 9 million views, spawned several songs that any child can memorize in their sleep, and became a very successful theater show.

What interests us in the current context is that parts of the film were filmed in Monster’s Garden, including a subplot in which Yuval is afraid of the sculpture but eventually finds his star that makes him stop being scared and believe in himself, or something like that. Although I am a fan of horror films and have seen almost all the provocative and scandalous films without batting an eyelid, there were some parts in “Hamasa El Hakochav” that I had a hard time getting through.

If you want to see evidence, just read some of the graphic verbal descriptions of the film available online, such as “the hole in the monster’s back through which Yuval Hamevulbal entered in the movie” or “Yuval Hamevulbal penetrates the monster in a scene from the movie “Hamasa El Hakochav””. Despite this, it is a charming and colorful children’s tape, with beautiful songs and some important messages.

Real Estate Monsters Devour The Mifletzet Park

Rabinovich Garden has undergone several changes over the years, as befits a facility that has stood for over 50 years. In 2014, the garden surrounding the Monster was renovated, in part to make it more accessible and safer for visitors. In 2022, the statue was repainted, but not for the right reasons. At least if you ask some Jerusalem residents or people who spent hours around it as children.

With all the traditions of Jerusalem, the city has been developing very impressively in recent years. You can also see this in the area surrounding the statue. A few years ago, four “real estate monsters” were built around the statue, at the expense of some green spaces. When these giant buildings swallow up the Monster, and taking a picture without including the modern buildings in the background is challenging, we lose much of the magic.

The nearby light rail line makes it easier to get to the place, but some would say that it further detracts from its nostalgic charm. The same nostalgic charm that causes masses of Jerusalemites (and people who came here especially from other cities) to remember with longing the times they spent here with their parents, grandparents, or friends. Some of those people, by the way, chose to have the Monster tattooed on their bodies.

One positive change was replacing the dirty sand – the nightmare of every parent taking their children to a playground, and a certain potential for dirt or diseases – with a hard rubber surface, much more pleasant to play on. You will find several benches and play facilities near the Rabinovich Garden Monster, although the park’s highlight is still the Monster itself. Since the Monster omits shading, we recommend arriving during the afternoon during the hot summer months, when using it may be unpleasant.

In its current form, the park is far from realizing its potential. Don’t expect a park with facilities where you can spend long hours. The park is not big and quite busy, especially today, and there is a limit to the number of times you can slide down those slides.

The Community Pub That Irritated The Town

It is impossible to talk about Rabinovich Park and ignore the charming entertainment venue 350 meters away, a few minutes’ walk. The residents of Kiryat HaYuvel founded the Monster Pub, since they wanted a meeting and entertainment place where they could come every evening to sit with the guys, drink a beer, and snack on something from the menu – yes, even on Shabbat, a holy day in Israel.

The Mifletzet Pub is a social and cooperative business, that is, a non-profit cooperative business. “The Monster Cooperative Association Ltd” manages it, and its members jointly own it. You can buy an active membership in the club and get discounts on the bar, on tickets to events held there, the possibility of renting the bar for events, and more. There is also the option of active membership for friends for a specific year, without being part of the cooperative, for a slightly higher price.

Apparently, the neighborhood pub in Kiryat HaYuvel pissed off someone in the Jerusalem municipality. In 2017, we heard about the closure of the monster pub: the town’s official reason was that the place was operating without a business license, but the initiators behind the pub are sure that the real reason was that the pub was operating on Shabbat. A few months later, the court ruled that the pub’s closure was unjustified, and it reopened. After that, we saw several more attempts to close the place, but it now operates at full strength.

As long as it is open – and we hope it stays that way, because this is a cool place by all accounts – you can find a menu here that includes draft and bottled beers, cocktails, wines, whiskey, vodka, and others, at a very reasonable price in terms of Israel (which is a pretty expensive country). There are also some snacks and nibbles, but that’s not the point. Beyond the lively atmosphere of different age groups, the place hosts parties, performances, lectures, screenings of significant events (for example, the Eurovision finals), and more.

How To Get To Mifletzet Park?

The Monster Garden – Don’t confuse it with the charming Monster Festival at The Botanical Garden in Jerusalem, a few years ago – sits in the Kiryat HaYuvel neighborhood in southwestern Jerusalem. The construction of the neighborhood began in the early 1950s, two years after the establishment of the State of Israel, and featured a relatively simple modernist construction.

The address of Mifletzet Park is 2 Yaakov Tahun Street in Jerusalem, right on the axis that leads to Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital. Here is the location of the Monster Garden on Google Maps:

There is parking in the area, but it is limited. Consider getting here by public transportation.

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