Contemporary art forms that take a critical look at the world and the strict religiosity of the haredim (ultra-Orthodox) are seemingly incompatible. But in an underground bomb shelter in Jerusalem, in which Noa Lea Cohn runs the Art Shelter Gallery, the two come together.
The curator sits in a bomb shelter sporting a white fur hat and red glasses, located directly under a children’s playground in Mekor Baruch, an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem. Between the solid concrete walls of the underground bunker, Cohn has run the Art Shelter Gallery, a space for contemporary art, since 2017.
Not everyone in the neighborhood welcomes Cohn’s project. “It’s not easy,” she explains, “but my aim is to provide a kind of art education for the community here.”
In the windowless room hang the works of various haredi artists. Wings made of concrete are hung on the walls. Too weighty to fly, there is something oppressive about them. In another work, cardboard houses are propped up with glass feet, as if the “home” were a fragile concept that could be uprooted at any time.
Bunkers and cellars reappear in some of the artworks, rooms in which Israelis have had to seek shelter time and again since October 7, 2023, whenever rockets are fired from Gaza, Yemen, Iran, or Lebanon. The gallery itself is also still an active bomb shelter. “It’s a big headache,” says Cohn, who dreams of a proper art museum. “We can’t be in a bunker any longer. I need a proper, above-ground location.”
A visual arts space for the haredi community
The Art Shelter Gallery is the first, and currently only, visual arts space for the haredi community. It was founded in 2003 by a group of artists, including Uri Zohar, Mordechai Arnon, and Ika Yisraeli. “They were prominent figures from the world of art and culture who began asking questions and looking for answers after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a traumatic experience for Israel,” explains Cohn.
The once secular Zohar, Arnon, and Yisraeli, known in part for their wild public appearances, found what they were looking for in the yeshivot, the traditional religious schools. “They became very religious, and that was a shock in the Israeli cultural scene.”
Cohn’s Art Shelter Gallery is said to have been the inspiration for the award-winning cult series Shtisel. The protagonist is haredi artist Akiva Shtisel, who dreams of quitting his job as a teacher in a heder (ultra-Orthodox primary school) to pursue a life as an artist, and in doing so, repeatedly comes up against the limits of ultra-Orthodox society. “The screenwriter studied art here; he captured the mood, which flowed into various scenes,” says Cohn.
The bridge that Noa Lea Cohn wants to build with her art project connects two worlds, and not just socially. The notorious, even stricter Mea She’arim begins on one side of the gallery. Here, tourists are warned by banners that their smartphones will be confiscated if they use them on the street. On the other side of the gallery, the Midtown Jerusalem real estate project is spawning shiny glass towers with luxury apartments.
“While Israeli society is becoming increasingly digital, modern, and secular, the haredi community is responding by becoming more and more entrenched in its identity,” says Cohn. “This dynamic is increasingly leading to tensions between these two worlds.” And it is precisely between these two worlds that Cohn sees herself.
The art historian describes herself as “modern-haredi” and compares herself to the Chabad movement, which tries to bring a traditional theology into mainstream Jewish society. Her dissertation, which she wrote on ba’alei teshuva (Jews from secular backgrounds who become religiously observant) in the art scene, like the founding members of the Art Shelter Gallery, was published in 2022.
With the gallery, Cohn wants to give ultra-Orthodox artists a space. “Because there are simply no role models, they really are pioneers.” In the strictly religious community, art is seen by some as a distraction from the study of Torah. Additionally, there are very few studios and galleries that respect their customs and rules.
Cohn wants to promote women, in particular, organizes workshops where agents and curators can get to know each other, and regularly exhibits their works.
There are many challenges: According to the Israel Democracy Institute, ultra-Orthodox women give birth to an average of 6.4 children; Cohn herself is a mother of five. And while women are often busy with the household, men generally earn very little. “It’s hard; there’s not much time left over,” she says.
Cohn also supports art forms that would previously have been unthinkable in haredi society. On a walk around the neighborhood in Mekor Baruch, she points out graffiti. One, which was created during the coronavirus pandemic, shows haredi men donning health masks, singing, and playing the keyboard.
“At that time, haredim were even more excluded because they were wrongly perceived by the rest of society as virus spreaders,” she says. Other graffiti can even be seen as a provocation from a haredi point of view: “Ahavat chinam,” reads one lettering – “free love”.
The Art Shelter Gallery has been organizing a comic book convention for five years. Cohn speaks of a comic boom within haredi society. Even in Mea She’arim, some bookshops have a comic shelf. But instead of Superman or Spider-Man, there are leading figures such as the Fearful Heroes, who fight against the Nazis. Cohn is currently researching these haredi heroes at Brandeis University near Boston.
The impact of October 7 on the gallery
One theme has a profound impact on the Art Shelter Gallery: October 7. Shortly after the Hamas massacre, the gallery was due to celebrate its 20th anniversary, but that day turned everything upside down, says Cohn. “We couldn’t just carry on.”
Immediately after the attack, the gallery had all the names of the 250 or so Hamas hostages called out in a performance and written on a black canvas. This list still stands at the entrance to the bunker today.
An exhibition by Yechiel Offner was hosted at the gallery at the end of 2024. The artist, a follower of the Chabad movement, serves in a religious army unit, where he identifies corpses. He was on duty on October 7 and the days that followed.
When he discovered the remains of a family in Kibbutz Kissufim, he began to paint two soldiers protecting a child on the soot-blackened wall of the burnt-out house. “It was an emotional release at that moment,” Offner said in an interview. He later traced the image in chalk on the black-painted walls of the Art Shelter Gallery.
The drawing in Kissufim was only discovered when the kibbutzniks returned to their destroyed community months after the attack. “They didn’t expect to find a haredi soldier behind it,” says Cohn.
The original piece of wall was removed before the destroyed family home was demolished and is now kept in the Israeli state archives. Even if the occasion is deeply sad, for Cohn, the two separate worlds between which the Art Shelter stands have come a little closer together.