Imagine trying to create a work of art that complements Marc Chagall’s stained-glass windows.
I frequently visit Chagall’s glorious 12 windows – one for each of the sons of Jacob – in the synagogue at Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem. Sometimes I give the tour.
Like Jacob, I have my favorites among the brothers’ windows. Visitors always ask about the unusual bima, the table on which the Torah scrolls are opened. Not only is it lower than the seats – Marc Chagall’s idea to illustrate the opening of Psalm 130, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord,” – but also the unusual table cover, itself a soft sculpture.
Today, I have the rare opportunity to visit with Aviva Green, the artist who, 45 years ago as a young and new American Israeli, was given the unique commission to create the parochet – the cover of the ark that holds the Torah scrolls – and the table cover.
Green was born in Washington, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi and rebbetzin. “I grew up in the courtyard of Ohev Sholom Synagogue,” she said. “There was a single stained-glass window in the synagogue.” Years later, she visited the old synagogue, now a church. The window had been modified to reflect its religious shift, but the six-pointed stars in the wooden pews remained.
Green studied at the Avni and Bezalel Art Schools in Israel before returning to the US to earn her degrees at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1979. Since then, she has lived back and forth between Israel and America. Green had a well-known studio in Manhattan and for several years headed the art program at Harvard University. Today, she’s back in Israel, living in the Old City of Jerusalem.
Hadassah’s Mount Scopus Hospital, which opened in 1939, was moved into temporary quarters in downtown Jerusalem after the terror massacre of 78 patients, staff, and students on April 13, 1948. It took 13 years to complete the replacement hospital in Ein Kerem.
The leadership of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionists Organization of America, decided to approach the world’s leading Jewish artist, Marc Chagall, to ask him to create a stained-glass window for the synagogue in the new medical center.
THE STORY goes that Chagall agreed immediately. “I’ve been waiting my whole life to be asked to do something for my people,” he said. Instead of one window, Chagall would create 12 – but he insisted on being involved in the synagogue planning and the displaying of the art. He frequently visited the Abbell Synagogue, where in 1962 the windows were installed.
According to Green, Chagall had ordered silk, probably to paint the cloth covers of the ark and the table. Decades went by before it was used. Chagall (1887-1985) was in his nineties. A committee of local curators was looking elsewhere for the perfect Jewish artist to complete the synagogue, which was already a popular tourist attraction and a working synagogue for patients and staff.
Green said that one of the Jerusalem curators was traveling in Massachusetts and, in a synagogue on Shabbat at the Young Israel of Brookline, fell in love with the embroidered kaporet – the cover above the ark. When the curator inquired about the artist, he was delighted to learn that the artist’s name was Aviva Green, and she was living in Jerusalem.
The committee members contacted Green and asked if she’d be interested in doing another piece of Judaica. Green said definitely not. She was preoccupied with her first solo exhibition, which was about to open in Mexico. But they persisted.
“I got a little testy. I was going away for two months, and I couldn’t think of doing a Torah mantle or a project in, say, a kibbutz synagogue now. Only if they were offering me something like a project under the Chagall windows in Hadassah Hospital would I be interested.”
A chuckle came from the other side of the phone. “Could you be at the hospital in the next hour?”
And so began a project that would take up the two years after Green returned from Mexico. She was unsure about what to do. All she knew at the start was that she would never use a color that would try to compete with Chagall’s multi-hued masterpieces. Whatever she created shouldn’t be just covers but significant Jewish art. And because she knew the Bible, she realized that specific directions were given to the artist Bezalel in creating textiles.
Still, as long as she stood in the synagogue, she could not come up with an image. She informed the synagogue guards that she was going to spend the night in the synagogue to watch how the light diminished at night and how it increased at dawn. She would bring her own sleeping bag.
“I found myself climbing up on the table and reaching up to the windows,” she said. She would need to make the cover three-dimensional.
After more study and thought, she hired a tour guide to take her to a Bedouin village. A sheep was shorn; Green came home with yarn. On her Old City roof, she set up two plastic buckets filled with steaming water. Into one, she put tea; in the other, coffee. She divided the yarn and let it soak in the buckets. Then she spread the long strands on sheets on her roof.
“They dried quickly, of course, but I wanted to see the gradations of off-white that we’d get from the bleaching.” When she was satisfied, and after consulting with a weaver, she brought the materials to the Abbell Synagogue and started to work. To sew pieces together, she created large needles from twigs into which she drilled holes.
For more than two years, she worked in the synagogue. The abstract table top looks most like the topography of Jerusalem. Knotted long fringes remind the viewer of the ritual fringes of prayer shawls.
With her wool, plus cotton, silk, hemp, and metallic thread, Green worked to extend the Jewish symbolism and motifs of the windows, which are both traditional and modern. She says she was always aware of the duality of the Abbell Synagogue being both a repository of great art and a synagogue in a hospital.
The only downside of the soft sculpture culture was the inability to keep guests from caressing them. The whites got darker. At last, the table cover was cleaned and placed under glass. The ark cover is now in the hospital’s rabbi’s office.
'Spirits lifted upwards'
Decades have passed. I asked Green how she feels walking into the sanctuary in a hospital where so many have prayed for the health of their loved ones and offered thanks for babies born, limbs healed, and diseases banished.
“When I walk into this room, my eyes and my spirit are lifted upwards,” she said. “I’m very proud of the covers, but my greatest satisfaction is leaving a piece of myself in this synagogue, in Hadassah.” ■
The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is "A Daughter of Many Mothers."