Metal Israel is officially closing up shop – except on Facebook. If you’re an Israeli music blog who’d like to become Israel’s representative on the Music Alliance Pact, please contact me. The archives will remain online.

Sweden and Finland, move over. For the second time in three years, Israeli band Hammercult has defeated almost 30 bands from across the globe to win the Wacken Metal Battle. Hammercult is relatively new to the Israeli metal scene, though its members are all alumna of other established bands. Elad Manor and Arie Aranovich also play in The Fading, the Wacken Metal Battle winners of 2008.

Check out Hammercult’s Facebook page.

And check out their awesome photos of the show by clicking on the pic below…

Check out these photos of Grave Digger touring the Old City of Jerusalem today taken by friend and awesome photographer of Metal Israel, Oleg Hmelnits. Click on the photo above to see.

From Arutz 7 and Virtual Jerusalem… Gene Simmons cries at his father’s grave. Just goes to show, a Jew is a Jew, no matter high up on the food chain he gets.

It still hurts to see his personal pain splashed up all over here like this, though, even if he did it himself for his own TV show… Hashem yishmor.

Check it out….

If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, here’s about seven minutes of Kobi Farhi preaching his gospel of world peace through music (which happens to be in this instance through a song called Norra El Norra honoring G-d and the Torah as well as other funky music) posted by Century Media.

Here are the lyrics in case you’re interested