Grapevine: A chip off the old block

• Author: GREER FAY CASHMAN
• Published date: 07 January 2021
• Date: 07 January 2021

Some of the people who have been evicted come from families who did business on the site for some 40 years. Others came more recently, only within the last two or three years, but invested in new modern shopfronts and redesign of the interior.

Parts of the block date back to the Ottoman period, and have been ear-marked for preservation. But if previous experience is an indication of anything, Levy does not have too much respect for history or for city ordinances. When he bought up property in what is now known as the Music Center, Levy, in creating what he considers to be a cultural square, replete with private museum and restaurants serving French cuisine, broke through some historic construction, but once he had done so, it was too late to do anything about it, other than to slap him with a fine. As he has so much money, he does what he likes – because he can.

Levy owns a large number of real estate holdings in Jerusalem, including one near the Prime Minister's Residence, where he is building an apartment complex, regardless of the fact that the area is constantly troubled by traffic congestion. For Levy's opponents, the one consolation is that if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains in office, Levy will have trouble selling or even leasing out the apartments, because potential buyers and occupants will be deterred by the anti-Netanyahu demonstrations.

Among the other properties that Levy owns is the building at the Ben Yehuda-Jaffa intersection that previously housed Bank Leumi.

■ DIVERSITY APPEARS to be the secret of doing well in business. In other words, follow the old maxim of not putting all your eggs in the one basket.

A prime example is Rami Levy, who has come a long way from a poverty-stricken childhood in a one-room shack with shared kitchen and bathroom in Nahlaot, close to the Mahaneh Yehuda market where he started out selling goods at wholesale prices from a storefront in the market's Hashikma Street. To ensure that he would not forget his origins, Levy named his enterprise Hashikma Marketing, which is now the third largest supermarket chain in the country.

He opened his first supermarket in 1992 and quickly built up a clientele by offering discount prices. His supermarket chain now has 44 stores. In addition, he distributes wholesale to 450 other stores, owns 20 cellular communication stores, owns a shopping mall, has invested in residential real estate – and most recently entered the aviation and tourism industry.

His NIS 75 million...