Saturday, September 29, 2012

A moveable feast, oil on wood

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Sukkot ("the Feast of Tabernacles") begins Sunday evening.
Here is a sukkah very different from the one I showed you yesterday.
It is so unique, in fact, that it is a museum piece, on display inside the Israel Museum


Here is the story the museum gives:

In the 19th century, Naftali and Zili Deller commissioned a local painter to paint [in oil paint]  the walls of their sukkah.
Their son Abraham Deller and his wife Sofie erected the sukkah in the courtyard of their home in Germany every year until the Nazis came to power. In 1937 the sukkah was smuggled out of Germany and delivered to the Bezalel Museum in Jerusalem.

The central wall features a painting of Jerusalem with the Western Wall at its hub. This painting was copied from a lithograph by 19th-century Jerusalem artist Yehosef Schwartz.
 The other walls contain pictures of the village of Fischach and people from that period: on the right is Zili Deller waiting at the entrance to her home; on the back wall is the local baron, the patron of the village Jews, setting out to hunt.
 Painted within small frames in the background of the central and right-hand walls are depictions of Jewish holidays copied from prayer books printed in Sulzbach, Germany, in 1826.

Quite a history, eh?
You can click the photos to enlarge and study the details.
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8 comments:

  1. A real work of art with an amazing history!

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  2. A very moving mean to measure time and life. So very glad it was saved and brought 'home'.


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  3. Quite a history indeed. Can't imagine trying to smuggle something of that size, even broken down into its various parts!

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  4. This is certainly different from the ones I'm seeing in the neighborhood. How incredibly beautiful this is!

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  5. I hope that this piece of art will be kept in your museum. It's so beautiful!

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  6. This is lovely! Definitely different from the ones we see here. Tif.

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