Once upon a time in Tel Aviv: Quentin Tarantino’s new life in Israel

nypost.com:

marveled viral tweets in Hebrew following Leo’s birth. (A follow-up tweet earlier this month noted that there are now two such little ones in Israel.)Shortly after marrying, the couple bought a six-bedroom, 2,900-square-foot villa on Elkakhi Street in Ramat Aviv Gimmel, a quiet neighborhood in northern Tel Aviv and within spying distance of the Mediterranean. (The director still owns an apartment in New York City along with a Los Angeles home he bought in 1989 where he and Pick were married.)Tarantino settled in after wrapping up production on 2019’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” planning to split time between Tel Aviv and LA.

Then the pandemic hit — and he never left.Since then, the Oscar-winning director has become a regular Tel Aviv dad — the type locals regularly encounter walking down the street or attending a toddler’s birthday party with his kid at a local playground (where he joyfully hummed to “Happy Birthday” in Hebrew).

Within his first few years in Israel, Tarantino experienced an armed conflict between Israel and Hamas in May 2019. “My Israeli friends tell me, ‘After the rockets, now you can officially call yourself an Israeli,’” Tarantino shared with the country’s Yediot Aharonot newspaper in a 2021 interview.His first neighbors knew he was there — the family’s moving boxes had “Tarantino” written all over them, according to Orit Bezalel, who lived two houses away — but the director was, at first, like a ghost.“I never saw him or heard from him,” said Bezalel.

Her son, an aspiring filmmaker, hoped to meet the longtime idol now living within spitting distance of his childhood home — but it never happened.