Yakin

Yakin, Murat / Hakan

The brothers Hakan Yakin and Murat Yakin are football players from Basel, Switzerland. They are considered to be the two best professionals in Switzerland (as of 2003). They currently play for the FC Basel.

Both are members of the World Soccer Team.

Yakin, Abraham

Abraham Yakin was born in 1924 in Jerusalem. During the Second World War he joined the British Navy and served three years in the Mediterranean fleet, thus having a chance to become acquainted with the art treasures in Egypt, Greece, France and Italy. After the war he returned to Jerusalem and became a member of the Haganah Underground Movement. At the same time, he started his artistic training at the Bezalel Academy, where he studied especially with Jacob Steinhardt and Mordecai Ardon.

With Israel's Declaration of Independence, he became a member of the new Israeli Armed Forces. He resumed his studies in 1950, and he had his first exhibition in 1953. In 1957 he married Hannah, an artist who had recently emmigrated from the Netherlands. From that time on the couple divided their time between raising their eight children, teaching art in Jerusalem, and exhibiting extensively in Israel, Europe and the United States.

In 1961 Abraham Yakin won the international Adolphe Neuman Prize in Paris. Works by the Yakins are in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, the Musee d'Art Juif, Paris, and in numerous museums in the Netherlands.

Among those who possess works by Abraham or Hannah Yakin are Isaac Stern, violinist, New York; Yehudi Menuhin, violinist, London; John Lewis, U.S. Congressman, Atlanta, Georgia; etc.

Yakin, Hannah

Hannah was born in Holland in 1933. During World War II, when she couldn't go to school and no paper was available, she used to erase what was written in old copybooks to compose and illustrate poems and stories, or to invent plays for the family to act. After sundown she would sit on the stairs and improvise on a violin while her sisters danced in the dark. Strange as it may appear, these were happy times in which necessity bore creativity.

After the war she went to high school and studied art in Utrecht and in Paris with Paul Colin. In 1956 she immigrated to Israel where she met and married the artist Abraham Yakin. During the first years of her marriage she concentrated chiefly on the themes of pregnancy, birth-giving and motherhood. After 1965 she created two large series of etchings, one about evolution, the other about music and musicians. In 1978 she took up writing, this time in English. Some of her short stories were published in American and Canadian literary magazines. A number of her stories were recently broadcast by the BBC World Service. She has published three illustrated books in small editions, as collectors' items.

Yakin, Boaz

A writer and film director with a gift for dealing with controversial issues on personal, human terms, Boaz Yakin was born in New York City in 1966. Yakin's parents had a creative bent -- they met in Paris while both were studying mime with Marcel Marceau -- and after graduating from high school, Yakin opted to study filmmaking at New York City College. He soon moved on to New York University, and made his first deal for a screenplay at the age of 19. After finishing school, Yakin worked in the film business helping to develop projects for several companies, and saw his first screenplay reach the screen in 1989, when The Punisher, a vehicle for Dolph Lundgren, was released. A year later, Yakin's next screenplay arrived in theaters -- a more distinguished project called The Rookie, starring Clint Eastwood and Charlie Sheen. Wanting to take on more personal material, Yakin drew from his experiences growing up in New York's inner city for his next screenplay, Fresh. Yakin opted to direct his screenplay for Fresh himself, and the film won critical raves, earning the Filmmaker's Trophy at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival. Yakin went back to his youth for inspiration on his next project; while his parents were non-practicing Jews, they enrolled their son in an Orthodox private school when he was five, and his experience with the Chassidic community informed his screenplay for A Price Above Rubies, a more difficult project which did not fare quite as well with critics or audiences as Fresh. Yakin rebounded with his next assignment, which was his first film that he directed but did not write; Remember the Titans was a major box-office success, and moved him to the upper tier of bankable Hollywood talent.

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