A crowd estimated at between 400,000 and 500,000 crowded into the grassy area surrounding the orchestral shell in Tel Aviv’s Hayarkon Park Thursday night for an open-air concert to mark the city’s 75th birthday.
Zubin Mehta conducted the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, beefed up by the Tel Aviv Philharmonic Choir and the Israel Defense Force Orchestra for the concert’s finale, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture complete with fireworks.
Birthday greetings to the city were brought by Mayor Shlomo Lahat who had made a special appeal to the political parties not to use the mass affair for electioneering or the distribution of election campaign material. The only literature distributed, despite his appeal, was by Lahat’s own Likud alliance.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
