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Silver Linings

By Ariella Schiller | April 10, 2019

Yaakov Merdinger transforms lumps of metal into cups of blessing

Photos: Elchanan Kotler

We spied the giant Hazorfim sign already from the highway, looking very intimidating and industrial. But once the taxi pulled onto the silent streets of Kfar Daniel, and we swung into the Hazorfim factory driveway, a different feeling took hold. The moshav-like atmosphere, the grass, flowers, and quiet pulled us in, like we were being let in on a giant, hushed secret.

The old guard at the factory desk looked surprised to see us and kept trying to point us in the direction of the luxurious factory store one door over. But we assured him we wanted to enter the rickety elevator and ride up to the factory floor above.

A gracious secretary led the way into a conference room complete with giant table and office chairs. An older man wearing a purple polo shirt was the room’s sole occupant. We settled into seats and Elchanan, the photographer, took out his camera. Hesitantly, I leaned my elbows on the table but then quickly removed them. Was the man in the purple shirt our liaison? The secretary brought us tea and juice but still no introductions.

Diving right in, I ask the man his name.

He cracks a half smile. “Hazorfim,” he says gruffly. “And you couldn’t have come at a worse time.”

Oh. His name isn’t really Hazorfim, is it?

“What’s your occupation here?” I say, trying again.

“Owner, producer, creator, silversmith.”

Jackpot, this is our guy.

Odds Stacked Against Him

He starts talking, showing us an app on his phone that measures the number of steps he takes every day. “I average 11,000,” he says. “Every day. Around the factory.”

“Do you need to be so involved?” I ask delicately. I mean, I saw workers, secretaries — people, I’m sure, who can do some of the work for him.

He shrugs. “I have ADHD. I must move.” And then he starts to talk about his childhood, growing up as the restless kid, the son of the talented silversmith, and slowly, the Rolex-sporting, purple-shirt wearing, gruff businessman fades, and an earnest and vulnerable young boy begins to peek through, a boy with a million creative dreams in his head.

“Every morning,” he tells me, “the teacher would walk into the room and say ‘Good morning, class. Yaakov, out.’ They understood nothing about ADHD back then. I wasn’t even given a chance.”

I learn two things. One, that this man is Yaakov Merdinger, owner of Hazorfim. And two, that he’s had the odds stacked against him since he was a little boy.

“I started working with silver when I was eight. I didn’t have to, but I wanted to — it kept me busy and I enjoyed it. I would spend vacation days with my father, chiseling and chasing, and created my first original design when I was 13 — the flower-shaped besamim holder that I’m sure you’re familiar with,” Yaakov says, the pride evident in his voice.

“Chasing is used to define or refine surface designs. The silver is worked from the front by hammering it with various tools that raise, depress, or push aside the silver without removing any from the surface. It requires complete consistency. If you hit the chisel harder in one spot than you did on the rest, your creation will be shaky and off-balance. My father taught me it all.”

A Sign from G-d

Yosef Merdinger, Yaakov’s father, was born in Russia and was a soldier in the Russian army during World War II. At the war’s end, Yosef met up with a survivor, a silversmith who taught him the craft. In 1947, they boarded a boat for Palestine with dreams of settling there, but were exiled to Cyprus by the British. Yosef had smuggled a hammer and chisel onto the boat; he and his partner were determined to make silver in the land of their forefathers.

Finally allowed into Israel in 1948, it was time to turn their dream into a reality. They acquired another partner, a man from Romania, and settled in Tel Aviv, making silver out of a home — no store, no factory, just three men doing what they loved.

Yosef was the youngest and owned the smallest portion of the business, but he was a humble man, content with his lot.

“The other partners didn’t like that I came with my father to work. I think they were threatened by me — one had no children, the other had no sons. ‘Yosef,’ one of them told my father, ‘The company was born with us, the company will die with us.’

“Nevertheless, I joined the business, and before long, I was able to buy out the partners’ shares and bestow the entire company to my father as sole owner.

“It was the greatest gift I could have given him. And then, six months later, my father died.

“I understood that as a sign from G-d, the time had come for me to take his place. I had tried to fight it, trying out different ventures, but all roads led me back to silver making. And then, ten years ago, I was chozer b’teshuvah. And I’ve lived my life since then reading the signs from G-d, understanding that I was chosen to do this, to make beautiful things out of silver, the purest substance in the world, and to do it for His people.”

A True Original

He describes some of the creations he’s come up with to beautify and benefit the lives of Am Yisrael.

“The popular Seder plates with the doors that open to reveal the matzah. They’re beautiful but so impractical. The Seder table is already so full, who needs little doors poking out? So, I built on that idea and created a ke’arah with sliding doors, and every silversmith in the world imitated my design. So today I came up with something new. A ke’arah that turns to reveal the matzos, and then turns again to hide them. It’ll be ready in time for Pesach.”

He’s always creating new items, he says. “I’m the only silversmith in the world who does this. Everyone else sticks with tried and true, but I want to do more, to create more, to bring more beauty, more joy, to Jewish homes. I can create luxurious items, but if they have no kadosh purpose, I feel nothing toward them. When my father died, I churned out new item after new item, so I decided to open a shop. I hated dealing with customers, always haggling over money, prices, how much for this, how much for a gram? It cheapened the whole process, took the art away from it. A woman once bothered my mother so much about the price of a candlestick, that I took the candlestick and broke it in half.”

When asked how he deals with competition, he laughs.

“They try to keep up; I fired a designer recently and they snatched him up before he hit the street. They think there’s a shortcut to get to where I am, but there isn’t. It’s all in my mind and in hard, hands-on work.”

Never too Late for Second Chances

Yaakov Merdinger knows about hard work. After his father died, he juggled two families: his then-wife and two little daughters, and his mother and sisters, bereft of a father figure. “I can’t say I did a great job at either; it was so much pressure and I was so young. But Hashem gave me a second chance. I told Him that if he helps me, I can do everything. If He turns away, I can do nothing. I became religious, remarried, and I now have a three-year-old son, with one more child on the way.”

After wishing him mazel and brachah, I ask, as politely as possible, how old he is. “Sixty-two,” he says proudly.

I guess it really is never too late for second chances.

“Life has been hard, I’ve made some big messes. But at some point, I turned to Hashem and said, ‘I’m grabbing onto a bungee cord, you just tell me when to jump and I will.’ I just needed to listen for my cues, to watch out for the signs, and I did.”

In a Hurry

Elchanan has long disappeared, clutching his camera. I’ve been sitting with Yaakov for an hour in the conference room, and I haven’t even seen the factory yet.

“Ready to see what we do?” he asks. I nod emphatically.

Time to see how the magic happens.

Half-running, half-walking, we begin, his energy contagious. Any time I loiter or engage in conversation with an employee, I find myself alone. Yaakov has moved onto the next room, accumulating those 11,000 steps, I suppose.

We begin in a small office with computers. Two women are working diligently, sketches pinned to the walls. He snatches one to show me. It’s an elaborate jug; the other one is a giant kos shel Eliyahu. The two women are sitting calmly but there’s a buzz in the air, a sense of urgency — Pesach is coming and there are items to be designed, new objects to be created.

We rush from room to room in the huge factory. Most of the workers are happy to see us, some are bemused, some are annoyed, and some wave hi back happily when I greet them. One thing that does capture my attention is how each one of their faces breaks into a smile at the sight of Yaakov. Something about him makes people happy.

The other thing that completely catches me off guard is how every single step of the silver making is performed manually. There is machinery, of course, but somebody is feeding it, tending to it, by hand.

We rush into the next room; a man wearing protective goggles is hunched over a silver base that’s rotating slowly, as he chases diligently. “He came from Portugal 30 years ago,” Yaakov says, clapping him on the back. “He’s part of our team.”

In the next room, we finger plastic models, flowers, and grapes that will be soldered into creations. The models are printed from a 3D printer and then pressed into molds that will create identical shapes in silver. “Everything is tried, time and time again. By the time it reaches the silver stage, there is no room for error.”

We peek into an enormous room stacked floor to ceiling with steel molds, hundreds upon hundreds of products lining shelf after shelf.

We continue into a giant area filled with whirring and the scent of burning metal and fire tools.

A man is feeding sheets of silver into two industrial wheels that thin out the silver so it can be shaped. “Rikuah,” Yaakov says.

Nearby workers sit, thin rods of silver in one hand, small blowtorches in the other, soldering the silver in order to attach limbs onto menorahs, ke’arahs, jugs. My mouth falls open; the men and women are so confident, working with these high-powered tools as if they are pen and paper.

He shows me a limb for a close-up look, tapping it first to make sure it’s not too hot to touch.

Men with drills and hammers are noisily building a giant lacquer machine. “It will coat the silver so that it doesn’t need polishing,” Yaakov explains.

“This creation is from our Renaissance collection,” Yaakov says. “I come up with the names.”

That’s a job I can get behind, naming beautiful products. Renaissance products are gorgeous, almost Victorian, with intricate, minute detailed design.

“And that’s a Merdinger.”

Oh, that’s fun, getting to name things after yourself.

“Where do all these ideas come from?” I ask, fingering a set of monogrammed, gold-plated cutlery, before Yaakov can whisk us on.

He winks. “From here,” he says, pointing at his kippah. He shows me the candlesticks he created, two upside-down trumpets with a matching tray. “I designed these for my wife. This is all the silver that I have at home, these candlesticks and a menorah that my father left me.”

I blink. I’d imagined his entire home dipped in silver.

We lean forward as he shows us a small bowl and jug. “Can you guess what this is?”

I squint at it. “Mayim achronim!” I say triumphantly. He looks appreciative that I guessed correctly. A jug-shaped cup sits atop a small globe, but when you lift the cup, the upper half of the globe rotates its bottom half to form a bowl for washing into. It’s genius, really.

Yaakov then gets called into a seudas preidah. Shimmy is leaving the company, and there are cake and pretzels set out in the conference room. Yaakov gives a little speech, everyone hugs, and we’re moving on.

The next room has two sections. At the row of desks, several women sit, tiny paintbrushes in their hands, diligently painting the silver. They are covering certain areas of the items so that the rest can be dipped in gold. It’s incredible, how precise they are. I ooh and ahh gently, watching the tiny brushstrokes.

A few feet away, an assembly line of giant tubs of boiling water is emitting a cloud of steam. A woman is pulling a lever, dipping a giant silver jug into the water, pulling it out, dipping it again, and then hanging it to dry, ensuring it is completely clean and flawless.

“They then dip each item into pure silver — 999. It doesn’t glow properly when it is just 925, and 999 is too soft to use by itself,” Yaakov explains.

“Is this a new technique?” I ask.

He scoffs. “They’ve been doing it the same way for the past hundred years.”

Oh.

“Your Mazel Should Shine”

“Have you seen the store yet?”

We leave behind the scent of fire and metal and reenter the rickety elevator.

The hallway leading into the storefront is lined with pictures. I admire photos of Yosef Merdinger, of Yaakov’s brother, of George Bush Sr. with the Merdingers.

The store is the exact opposite of the adrenaline-driven factory.

It has a feel of luxurious calm; the scent is reminiscent of an expensive boutique spa, and I feel at once very relaxed and also a great need to buy silver (which I immediately quash).

We greet the saleswomen. They seem only mildly stressed that Yaakov is entertaining company instead of working on the many orders waiting for his attention. He heads to the backroom with Elchanan for a quick l’chayim; I admire the showcases. Everything is exquisite. I’m particularly drawn to a candelabra in the shape of a flute. They soon gather around it and Yaakov tells the story. A man wanted a 40-branch candelabra to surprise his wife with on their 40th wedding anniversary, and he wanted the branches to be layered, like bleachers. He was turned away by others, told it was impossible. But Yaakov Merdinger doesn’t believe in impossible, and he created the candelabra in just two weeks. It’s extendable — it can pull out to display all the branches — and it truly is genius work. We admire Kiddush fountains, matzah boxes, silver-dipped decorative clowns, and giant, beautiful Sephardic sifrei Torah cases.

Yaakov looks at his watch. “Goodbye, people, thank you,” he says, with the abruptness of someone whose mind is always churning. We blink, say our goodbyes, but somehow, he’s still by our side as we walk back out. I stop to admire the pictures once more.

He points to a photo I’d missed before — him and the Lubavitcher Rebbe. “I made him a menorah and he gave me four dollars and a special brachah. He told me, ‘Your mazel should shine in every Jewish home.’ ”

I think of the Shabbos tables, the Jewish doorposts, the Seder tables that Yaakov’s work has adorned.

The Rebbe’s brachah has certainly come true.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 756)

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