Two seeking Jews find a mission capturing the Holy Land’s beauty

Photos: Elchanan Kotler

I’ll admit it: What drew me to meet with Yehoshua Aryeh Stauber and his wife Jordyn at their new fine art photo gallery in Jerusalem wasn’t the breathtaking photographs I saw on their website, nor even the interesting life story they outlined in their email and promised to share in more detail. It was the fact that they are so young. They were married in 2018, after his first year of college, and now they have their very own art gallery in a choice location right behind the Mamilla Hotel!

Yehoshua Aryeh and Jordyn greet me in their gallery, together with their nine-month-old baby daughter Eliana Ruth (although she is sleeping for most of the interview). The gallery, which opened this past Succos, is a beautifully designed room, with sleek, modern décor in shades of black and white. The space was completely empty when they took it over last summer and designed the gallery from scratch: the lighting, the room arrangement, including a floating wall, and the back office. Displayed along the walls, mounted on plexiglass, are large prints of landscape photography — it’s a relatively new art form, and their gallery is unique in Israel.

All the photos show scenes of Eretz Yisrael, but they aren’t your typical Israeli postcard scenes, nor is it your typical photography. These are portraits that are as much art as photography, and the choice of subject — nature scenes that don’t necessarily have that instantly recognizable this-is-from-Israel feel — is quite intentional.

“Because of our location, we have people coming in here from all over the world, and from all nationalities — Jews and non-Jews, from Europe, South Asia, all over,” says Yehoshua Aryeh. “Our goal is to show the world a different face of Israel.”

“Even native Israelis tell me, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize our land is so beautiful!’ ” adds Jordyn.

Back to Basics

For Jordyn, who didn’t grow up religious, her passion for the land is something she inherited from her ancestors.

“My great-grandparents, Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff, were big philanthropists and very involved in building the State of Israel, and although we weren’t observant, I grew up with a lot of Jewish pride and pride in the State of Israel,” she says as she takes out a book about them and points to pictures of her grandparents with some of modern-day Israel’s most notable leaders, including prime ministers David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir.

That Jewish pride led her to join a March of the Living tour at the end of her senior year of high school, in 2015, which was popular for the Jewish students in her high school in Davie, Florida. Not far away, in Hollywood, Florida, Yehoshua Aryeh, at the time known as Jordan (“Yes, we have the same English name,” says Jordyn) was also nearing the end of his senior year in his Modern Orthodox high school, and also joined a March of the Living tour. Since the trips were organized by county, Yehoshua Aryeh and Jordyn ended up in the same group and kept in contact after they returned.

But come September, they parted ways: Yehoshua Aryeh was heading to Israel, to learn in Yeshivat Orayta for a year, while Jordyn was off to the University of Pennsylvania.

“He promised me he wouldn’t change and become all religious,” Jordyn says, “but four months later, he called me up and said, ‘Listen, I really love this way of life.’ ”

Jordyn was terrified that he’d never talk to her again, but she decided she wasn’t ready to give up so easily. So she called him back and said, “Tell me why you love it.”

Thus began their religious journey — simultaneous but separate.