Eurovision 2025

Some interesting background that I wanted to share:

Israel's contestant this year, 24 year-old Yuval Rafael, is a survivor of the Nova massacre. I saw a video that overlaid her singing at Eurovision with a recording of her phone call to her father on October 7. Chilling. He likely saved her life by telling her to hang up and pretend to be dead (like most of the people around her). For eight hours she lay covered in corpses.....And survived.

And she's no long-term professional: her first on-stage performance was only six months ago.

Eurovision was held in Basel, Switzerland this year. Site of the 1901 Fifth Zionist Congress and Theodor Herzl's famous speech. Yuval recreated Herzl's historic balcony photo:

And the set she sang on during the contest was made to resemble a giant chandelier and balcony. Basically, it was a Herzl homage ;)

And what's this last photo??

It's not my photo, but shows the Eurovision results on the left and the Home front Command incoming missile alerts on the right. As YnetNews said, "Coinciding with Saturday's announcement of the winner, air raid sirens sounded across Israel amid missile fire from Yemen". (Our area, thankfully, was out of the zone)

PS: Israel came in second place, and won the popular vote!