QUIET IMPACT Avisar’s paintings are rich with Jewish motifs. A Jewish man alone in the forest communing with his Creator in solitude. A group of Jews praying in Uman. Landscapes of the Holy Land. “Many of my paintings are hung up in homes of nonreligious families” Avisar continues. “And who can fathom the impact that a painting of Jews dancing on Simchas Torah for example could have on an innocent Jewish child who had never been exposed to a shul on Yom Tov?” (Photos: Yaakov Lederman)

I t took 33 years and one night for artist David Avisar to find Hashem.

It happened quite suddenly one Shabbos in the home of a kind and friendly Jew in the heart of Los Angeles where he experienced for the first time in his life a genuine Shabbos meal. “And then it simply happened” Avisar recalls. “I knew nothing about G-d hadn’t had Him in my life at all was a totally ignorant Jew but right there and then I knew that He was there all along waiting for me to connect with Him and expecting me to do something worthwhile with my life.”

If art reflects a person’s inner world it’s obvious from the richness and variety of David Avisar’s creations that his own life has been a series of twists and turns. A meeting with Avisar in his Beit Shemesh studio — after first clearing out a place to sit amid hundreds of paintings and stunning masterpieces — is an opportunity to view his life through the different styles he incorporates. “Whatever my soul produces — that’s what you’ll find here ” he says.

Avisar’s complex journey through life started in 1955 in Tel Aviv. As his father Yaakov Avisar an Israeli fighter pilot and national hero held his newborn son he had dreams that baby David would follow in his footsteps — never imagining that he alone would fall from public grace and drag his family down too.

The year before Yaakov was appointed commander of the transport and bombing unit of the Israeli Air Force and in 1956 during the Sinai Campaign — the young country’s second war — he was promoted to commander of the squadron that attacked the eastern opening of the Mitlah Pass about seventy kilometers east of the Suez Canal.

Many young warriors emerged as heroes at the end of that short war. But Yaakov Avisar wasn’t one of them. In fact he was booted out of the Air Force over an authority dispute with the El Al pilots who were recruited to battle. And so instead of little David looking up to his hero dad he lived with a father who sat idly at home rejected and dejected.

When David started elementary school in Tel Aviv’s Tzahala neighborhood his classmates were Gur Sharon (Arik Sharon’s late son) Yuval Rabin (son of Yitzchak Rabin) Gideon Tzur (son of Tzvi Tzur the sixth Israeli Chief of Staff) and many other children of Israel’s top brass.