Snow falls nine months of the year in Magadan, the eastern Russian city where Lada Lapidus was raised. Joseph Stalin sent Jews to this Siberian port city in the 1930s as part of his failed plan to create an autonomous Jewish zone in the Birobidzhan region.
After Lapidus graduated from a high school of arts and music, her future in this frigid outpost looked no less bleak than the landscape.
“The situation in my country was dire – economic collapse, uncertainty, and rising antisemitism. In 1990, my family decided to leave everything behind and make aliyah, when I was 19 years old,” says Lapidus.
“The greatest challenge for me in Israel was overcoming the language barrier, adapting to a different mentality, and adjusting to a completely new way of life,” she relates.
“I came from a radically different country – a dictatorship with strict discipline and rigid laws, and an intensive educational system focused on the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels rather than, for instance, the Bible. Stores were nearly empty, and day-to-day life was a struggle for survival.”
Today, Lapidus lives happily with her three children (ages 22, 18, and 15) in sunny Rishon Lezion, which she describes as “a stunning city full of parks, schools, and businesses. It’s a city for young people and families, and there are lots of new neighborhoods.”
Studying alternative medicine 'with great passion'
In the early years of her aliyah, however, Lapidus had to work because the family’s financial situation was difficult and she needed to support herself.
“I looked for a respectable job with fair pay. I eventually found a position in the raw materials department of the Diamond Exchange, where I was responsible for managing inventory in the computer system,” she says.
“While working there, I also studied at a computer programming school. After a few years, I succeeded in joining a hi-tech company, where I worked as a programmer for five years. The job was intense – from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. – until I became pregnant with my first child. At that point, I realized it was time for a change.”
Lapidus decided to study alternative medicine. She continues to work in this field “with great passion,” offering medical massage and acupuncture treatments.
HER OTHER great passion, painting, also has a place in her daily routine. She is gaining recognition in Israel and abroad for her vivid and detailed surrealistic oil works on canvas, many of them with biblical or Jewish-themes. They are sold at various art galleries, as well as online.
Her upcoming solo exhibition will run from May 26 to June 28 at Global Art, Tel Aviv.
“My love for art has always been a part of me,” Lapidus says. “As a child, painting was a central focus of my life, and I studied at an art school for seven years. As an adult, I felt a strong urge to return to it. I bought paints, canvases, and brushes, and began learning art history on my own – reading biographies of great painters and visiting every museum and gallery I could in order to understand techniques and learn the language of the brush.”
Her favorite painter is Salvador Dalí. She visited many galleries showcasing his works, delved into his biography, and explored the unique way he lived and created.
“Now that my children are grown, I can dedicate more time to painting and dreaming,” she says. “I paint every day – it’s my breath of life. My style is precise and requires great effort, but I do it with love and devotion.”
Mostly self-taught, Lapidus says she draws inspiration from “everything – nature, people, history. Anything can become the seed of a painting.”
In her artworks, the worlds of fantasy and imagination merge in “a fusion of illogicality” as she puts it. “I want to shock the viewer and cross mental boundaries.”
In addition to alternative medicine and oil painting, Lapidus has developed an avid interest in pole sports.
This aggressive athletic discipline includes elements of dance and acrobatics. Using a combination of agility, strength, balance, endurance, and flexibility, pole athletes climb up, spin from, hang off, flip onto, jump off, and invert themselves on a vertical metal pole.
“At one point, I met a friend who was training in professional pole sports. I was intrigued, gave it a try – and fell in love,” Lapidus explains. “For the past seven years, I’ve been training twice a week, and each session is pure joy for me. It builds and strengthens the entire body. It’s not easy at all, but it’s extraordinarily fun.”
Lapidus feels that Israel could be enriched by offering more cultural activities – more art, classical music, and ballet – but emphasizes that she deeply loves her country and its people.
Israelis, she says, are “warm and always ready to help in times of need.”■
Lada Lapidus, 54From Magadan, Russia, to Rishon Lezion, 1990