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Talking to the Wall

By Chananel Shapiro | December 25, 2018

(Photos: Elchanan Kotler)

Who would have thought that a drab building in the middle of a Jerusalem neighborhood would become the canvas for a group of religious graffiti artists, making this counterculture art form into a vehicle for spreading a message of light and hope?

It’s breathtaking massive, eye-catching. And to think, it used to be nothing but a grimy wall. But here in Jerusalem’s Mekor Baruch, across from the Skverer cheder on Yehudah Maccabi Street, the outer wall of the neighborhood’s industrial complex has transformed that drab section of the neighborhood into a trendy display of chareidi modern art.

About two months ago, the residents of the neighborhood noticed something remarkable taking place: Seven chareidi artists had begun working on the wall, using spray paint to produce an assortment of pictures with significant messages. Unlike the graffiti we’re used to — hastily scrawled on walls in the middle of the night, often with aggressive or vulgar themes — this graffiti was actually authorized by the Jerusalem municipality. The wall was even given a name: “Graffidos,” a contraction of the words “graffiti” and “dos” (religious person).

The initiative is the work of the adjacent Art Shelter Gallery located in the street’s public miklat (bomb shelter), a gallery for modern Jewish art that was established about 15 years ago by a community of baalei teshuvah headed by former entertainers Rabbi Ika Yisraeli a”h, Rabbi Mordechai Arnon, and Rabbi Uri Zohar.

“The local residents were stunned,” Reb Yiddy Lebovits relates. “We began working on Isru Chag Succos, which was a vacation day for the children of the neighborhood, and we found ourselves with an audience of about 600 boys and girls, not to mention yeshivah bochurim. But their presence didn’t bother us. On the contrary, we were happy to explain to them what we were doing and to make them feel a part of our project.”

No School for Graffiti

“When we started,” says Lebovits, “the wall wasn’t just dirty and neglected, but also completely unfit for painting. We had to smooth its surface in order to prepare it for our work. Then all us artists had to get to know each other. I had never actually met another graffiti artist, and it was a real eye-opener for me that there were other frum artists who were into the same thing.”

Lebovits, who came on aliyah with his family to Jerusalem three years ago (he already has married children) is a son of the Nikolsburg Rebbe of Monsey. His Hebrew isn’t fluent, but a brush and a can of paint are always a universal language.

Lebovits, who’s been an artist pretty much all his life, says his father, the Rebbe, encouraged him all along. “My father is a big believer in people developing their individual talents. His philosophy is that there isn’t only one way to serve Hashem, and that every person should do his own internal avodas Hashem in the way that is correct for him. In fact, I’ll let you in on a little secret: He happens to be an incredibly talented artist in his own right. When we were young, he used to draw with us.”

There’s no art school that teaches how to produce graffiti, says Lebovits, who in any case never had formal art education, because it’s an art form that is often anti-establishment and illegal. “Graffiti is generally unauthorized, and most graffiti artists do their work in the middle of the night, spray painting their creations on walls when no one can see them. The locals simply get up in the morning and find their walls covered.”

Lebovits says that when he was growing up, if a person in the kehillah wanted to study art, the only way was to take private lessons. “For me though, as the Rebbe’s son, that wasn’t permitted,” he says, but credits his mother with taking him to art museums so he could get a feel for different types of art. He’s been working as a graphic artist for the last 25 years, and today most of his clients are from overseas.

Where Are You?

As we stand beside the Graffidos wall, Lebovits points to his part of the project, on the bottom where the two corners of the building meet. The picture features a huge street map that includes the entire neighborhood of Mekor Baruch. “I wanted to create an image of the neighborhood, and to give a little mussar at the same time. Some people live in a neighborhood for years but are so into their own box that they don’t even know the names of the surrounding streets.”

The edge of the map connects to an image of a taxi transporting an enormous group of passengers from Jerusalem to Bnei Brak. On the roof of the taxi, the driver of which is holding a set of arba minim, is a shtreimel box and a pile of suitcases (one labeled “Uman”). Lebovits’s section of the graffiti wall is directly above the offices of Hamodia, and in tribute to that, he drew an image of a front page, with the headline “Yehi mekoreich baruch,” an allusion to the name of the neighborhood.

“People thought I did it so that the staff at Hamodia wouldn’t protest about the graffiti outside their office,” Lebovits says. “I wasn’t afraid of a protest because the project has municipality approval, but still, I wanted to give those dedicated workers on the other side of the wall a little recognition too.”

All Fired Up

Another artist on the team is a 25-year-old bochur from Baltimore named Eliezer, who goes by the name “Aish Man.” Eliezer first came to Israel to learn in yeshivah when he was 17, but after returning to the US, found himself in a spiritual decline. Five months later, he returned to Israel for a family simchah, but now it was different. He was no longer in yeshivah with all its collateral obligations — in fact, he says he wasn’t even keeping Shabbos.

“It was precisely in that situation, where I had to make my own spiritual commitments, that I decided to start keeping Shabbos again.” Eliezer met up with the right people — one of them was his cousin — who directed him to find an appropriate framework. And so he spent the next two years at Ohr Somayach, and now learns in a yeshivah where the day is split between learning and working.

While Eliezer was navigating his place in the Torah world, he also discovered his affinity for graffiti. “I always loved drawing painting,” he relates. “It’s in my blood. Both my mother and grandmother are artists, and although I never studied professionally, people say I’m pretty good.”

Five years ago, when Eliezer arrived in Israel for the second time, he discovered an interesting phenomenon. “There is a tremendous amount of street art in Israel — you can see it almost everywhere. I searched out the identities of these artists, and what I found was a lot of talented people who want to give over certain messages. But didn’t any of these artists want to give over Jewish messages, messages of encouragement and emunah? Why does all the graffiti have to either be about the ‘parasites’ not joining the army or how to resist the ‘occupation’ IDF, to vote for Gimmel or Shas, or for Bibi to resign?

“I felt that if graffiti is really a tool to convey ideas, this could be my opportunity to spread some light.” And so, Eliezer began painting the same trademark image — a chassid with a candle on his head — on various graffiti walls around the country, always signing his work with the pseudonym “Aish Man.”

Candles around the Country

Eliezer says that although graffiti is illegal only in certain circumstances, graffiti artists have their own unwritten rules that they strictly observe. “For instance, in Jerusalem it’s automatically understood that no one paints on Jerusalem stone, or copies pictures that other artists have already painted.”

When the Graffidos project was launched, the organizers tried to find out who this “Aish Man” was — the guy leaving those chassidim with their candles around the country. “I don’t actually know how they found me,” Eliezer confesses, “but when they asked me if I was the one who had been painting those images on street poles and electric boxes in the middle of the night, I had to admit it was me.”

Aish Man invested a tremendous amount of creativity, love, and joy into the images that he painted on the wall in Mekor Baruch. But this time, instead of painting a single chassid, he painted a group of seven chassidim, whom he calls the “seven shepherds.” (“I worked on it after Succos, so I was still under the influence of the ushpizin,” he explains.)

Each of the chassidim has one sheep standing beside him and another one that has gotten away and appears further along the wall. Eliezer also painted a bird wearing a crown, along with other images that appear to be whimsical; however, when he is asked about the pictures, he reveals that a tremendous amount of thought went into every element of his paintings.

And the fringe benefit was that he no longer had to paint his graffiti in secret. “Now I could paint in the middle of the day, while passersby stopped to watch and bombarded me with questions. At first I thought it would be a distraction, but all that interest actually infused me with more strength and creativity.”

The Eyes Have It

Eliezer’s images of the seven chassidim blend into the work of another artist, a French immigrant named Ilan Atlan. Atlan had a particular challenge — to create his artwork on the part of the wall where several air conditioning units are mounted. No problem — he painted tzitzis strings seeming to emerge from the units as they connect to Aish Man’s seven shepherds.

Atlan relates that when he lived in Paris, his artwork was always accompanied by the image of eyes. “I used to paint eyes everywhere — many different types of eyes,” he explains. “That was before I was religious. It was connected to something driving my soul.”

Atlan also painted a huge magnifying glass with what looks like a fingerprint inside. “Look again closely,” he says. Moving closer to the image, you can see that it’s no regular fingerprint. Those tiny lines and swirls actually make up the first section of Kriyas Shema (without shem Hashem) written in tiny, perfectly shaped letters.

Atlan is another one of those self-taught artists who never studied professionally, although professional art is part of his family. His brother is an artist, his father was a fashion designer in Paris, and his mother taught in an art school.

Back in France, Atlan created his own special artistic niche. “I used to paint on mirrors and leave portions of the glass empty, so that when people looked at the mirrors, they were able to see their own reflections with certain differences. For instance, I would add an interesting article of clothing, a pair of eyeglasses, or all sorts of other creative things. After I became religious, I began connecting my artwork to Judaism, adding Hebrew letters and other Jewish symbols.”

Atlan says it was his father that led him back to embrace his Jewish roots. “My father a”h became religious about 15 years ago, and he brought my two brothers and me along with him.” Two years ago, he moved to Israel and married, leaving behind the prestige that goes with being an artist of stature. Today, he’s moved that talent into the field of safrus. “At the moment,” he says, “there’s nothing that gives me greater satisfaction that producing tefillin and mezuzahs.”

And the magnifying glass on the Graffidos wall? Ilan says it’s all about inspection. “I don’t do eyes anymore, but inspection is a big part of our lives. We inspect clothing for shatnez, we inspect fruits and vegetables for insects, and we inspect our mezuzahs and tefillin to make sure they’re kosher. I added the fingerprint to indicate that this is part of our Jewish DNA. I don’t know if all these ideas can be understood from a glance at the pictures, but I wanted to convey the message that our tzelem Elokim is intertwined with the meticulous care we give to the mitzvos we perform.”

Topping it Off

The artist who really “capped off” the Graffidos project is Reb Solomon Souza, a Chabad chassid who lives in London. His work is also displayed in the Machaneh Yehudah market, where he took the initiative to decorate parts of the marketplace with images of various characters depicting ordinary life in chareidi society.

Souza, who has worked with heights, was assigned to decorate a section of the wall 12 meters above the ground, atop the other artists’ work. “It’s not so simple to work at such a height,” he says. “The biggest problem is the paralyzing fear that tends to set in when you are so far above the ground. Also, from that angle it means adopting a different sense of proportion.”

Souza painted a set of high, arched windows that are identical to those on the Talmud Torah building facing the wall — and from far away, they look virtually three-dimensional.

Another trademark element of Souza’s work is the word “ahavas,” which appears in large letters on the uppermost portion of the wall. He spent three days working on this word alone, as passersby on the street below tried to guess at what word would follow. Before the onlookers could begin placing their bets, with some favoring “ahavas Torah” while others assumed that he would write “ahavas chessed,” Souza completed the phrase by adding the word “chinam.” That, he says, encompasses everything.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 741)

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