Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Emotion

Yesterday I saw someone wearing a Christian Cross necklace and I thought that here in Jerusalem it is quite rare to identify Christians; they look the same as everybody else… I looked at him with a special interest. This is what symbols are all about. It's true that they have a certain shape, a certain meaning, and a certain history - but above all they make one FEEL that he belongs to a certain group and that he doesn't belong to other groups.

Bezalel

Dalia Manor wrote in her book Art In Zion: The Genesis of Modern National Art in Jewish Palestine (2005, Page 43) that the aspirations of the founders of Bezalel School of art were to create "the original Hebrew style" and for that purpose they used recurrent Jewish symbols such as the Menorah, the Star of David, the Tablets of the Law, the Ark of the Covenant and lions. Dalia Manor noted that the menorah was much more popular than the Star of David.
Dr Haya Friedberg, wrote an article (in Hebrew) about Bezalel School where she told that about two decades after it was founded (in 1906) an anonymous writer protested in a letter to the editor of an Israeli newspaper against the exaggerated use in "Star of Davids, Yemenites and lions" that do not testify about the presence of Hebrew art in Bezalel.
The school's name, Bezalel, is taken from the name of the artist of the Tabernacle after the Exodus, Bezalel Ben Uri Ben Chur of the tribe of Judea who didn't succeed in the making of the first Menorah so that eventually it was made by the Lord. I believe that if the founder of this school, Boris Schatz, knew the theory of Uri Ofir, that the first Star of David was made as a candle holder in this first Menorah – he would have influenced his pupils to make more Stars of David than menorahs...