gelatik
10.03.02, 01:53
Step aside Barbie and Ken.
They already have competition from the Muslim world in the form of the new,
modestly-dressed Iranian doll called Sara.
Sara never goes out without a headscarf or her brother Dara.
The Arab League is also working on its own culturally-sensitive alternative to
Barbie.
Now, meet Shimmy.
He's the first ever exclusively Jewish, truly "kosher" doll.
"We started with a boy, because of the fact that girls have chests," says Budi
Dvir, the marketing director of the Tel Aviv-based company that developed the
doll.
Doll with a difference
In other important respects, Shimmy is also a doll with a difference.
He has unnaturally chubby cheeks, a little red button of a nose, and four
fingers on each hand instead of five - a way of getting round the Ten
Commandments' ban on making "graven images".
Shimmy - who like Sara and Dara - is manufactured in China, also says a prayer
when you squeeze his hand.
"Shimmy is built around Jewish law," says Mr Dvir. "Religious children need a
character they can identify with."
Out of the closet
And he's selling like hotcakes.
"I just can't get enough stocks of it," says Shalom Halpern, who owns a toy
shop in an orthodox neighbourhood of central Jerusalem.
"When I first got it I was sceptical that it would sell. But people just keep
buying."
Mr Halpern says that some ultra-Orthodox parents used to surreptitiously buy
Barbies for their children, making sure they played with them inside their
houses where no-one else could see.
Shimmy brings doll-buying out of the closet.
"Religious children are also children - with the same desire to play with dolls
like anybody else," says Halpern.
"It's a natural thing. Now parents can buy a doll without feeling guilty."
And Shimmy has proved so successful that the manufacturers are now working on a
sister for him.
"She'll be called Rivkele, and she'll be modestly dressed, in a skirt not
trousers," says Mr Dvir.
She'll also have four fingers not five.
One other thing, insists Mr Dvir: "She won't have a chest."
