Reflecting Israel

Photographs by Itai Monnickendam; Text by Joanne Palmer

For such a small place, Israel holds a multitude of beauties; stony hills and lush mountain valleys, desert and farmland, Dead Sea and Mediterranean Sea, each unique, each lit by the Middle Eastern sun. As Itai Monnickendam, the young Israeli photographer whose work adorns these pages, grew up, his eye and his interest were piqued by the stark beauty around him. Here, he captures some unexpected visual poetry.

The accompanying text does not describe the photographs directly but is in the same mood; personal reflections and friends’ stories combine with the pictures for a series of snapshots.

Itai Monnickendam’s artwork has been sold privately and to public institutions.

For more information, email him at Monnick@gmail.com or call him in Israel at 972-2-9931547.

Jerusalem Light

The light in Israel isn’t like the light in New York.

It’s not that the light here isn’t beautiful. It is. We move from the butterscotch light of late summer to the apple-plaid of fall; the clear, pale, almost-blue skim-milk light of winter is next, and then the pink-tinged gold of spring.

But the light in Israel is different.

The light in Israel is pure light, essence of light; it is a light in which it is impossible not to see everything – every person, every color, every shape; also every crack, every fissure, every flaw. It is not harsh, but it is merciless.

Perhaps some of the tensions in Jerusalem come from the clarity of the light, the overwhelming desire to live up to it, and the impossibility of ever approaching its lucid perfection.

Looking for Eliyahu

Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg went to the movies in Zion Square his first night in Jerusalem.

It was 1949; the Jewish state was one year old, and Rabbi Hertzberg, who had just taken a sherut from Tel Aviv to the ancient city of harsh gold and chipped stone, was 28. The film, starring Clark Gable and Lana Turner, had been carelessly dubbed into French; Hebrew subtitles undergirded the action and a strip of Arabic ran down one side of the screen.

“Je t’aime!” Gable told Turner. “Je t’aime beaucoup!”

Rabbi Hertzberg had gone to the polyglot, improvised, adrenalinfueled Jewish state “with a sense of hope, of unlimited possibilities,” he said. “And above all, I went with a sense of miracle. We as a people had survived the Holocaust, and three years later we had a state of our own. Everything that Jews wanted to do was going to be possible. You knew that you were at the dawn of a new era in the life of the Jewish people.”

Much as he loved Israel, Rabbi Hertzberg never found what he was looking for – one of the prophets, Isaiah or Eliyahu, a harbinger of redemption.

“Elijah is still somewhere out there,” he said. “The question for God is ‘Where have You hidden him?’ Perhaps one of you, walking around in a business suit, is really Eliyahu.’”

Desert Driving

Israel is a tiny country but it holds almost infinite variety.

One fall day, we imitated our biblical ancestors and turned our backs to the sea although it sparkled and swirled below our Tel Aviv hotel. We drove south, past Jerusalem, past Beersheva, past Dimona, and into the Negev. Then Yaki turned the car off the road and into the wilderness.

When I think of desert I think of sand, but there was no sand there. Instead it was all rock, as if the world had been petrified. Boulders perched precariously on pebbles in the middle of stone heaps, while the occasional pillar loomed. Holes in the rocks signaled caves. Each turn brought us to an entirely new vista, each composed almost entirely of rock, except when the Dead Sea would gleam far below, out of our reach.

I imagined what it would have felt like to be there without the car, without the cell phone, dependent just on the land, having to read it. It would be terrifying – anything could lurk in those caves, around any of those turns, behind any of those rocks. It’s not a land where anything can grow –no, it’s not a soil where anything can grow. But I could see – I could feel – how it was a place where faith and peoplehood could take root.

Snapshot of Jerusalem

During the summer of ’72 most boundaries seemed permeable, especially if you were young.

Rich Moline was one of those hardcore Jewish kids, on Ramah Seminar, about to be elected USY international president.

It was Shabbat in Jerusalem, and the kids were encouraged to daven in one of the city’s exuberance of minyanim. As they passed the president of Israel’s official residence they saw men carrying tallis bags walk through the gates. “I’m going to daven with the president,” Rich said.

Most of the group walked on, but he and two friends went over to the guardhouse, asked about the minyan in what he says now was “teenage broken Hebrew,” and were waved in. The girl in the group was sent off behind a mehitza – some boundaries remained – and the boys were motioned to seats. Then everyone stood, and President Zalman Shazar walked in.

The president sat next to the hazzan, who always made sure he was finished before moving on, and it was Shazar who distributed the honors. When it was time for hagba President Shazar pointed to Rich, who managed not to drop the Torah.

At the kiddush the president talked to everyone in the room, playing Jewish geography with the Ramahniks. (“You’re from Chicago? Do you know my friend Rabbi Hecht?”)

It was late when the kids left – no one could leave until after Shazar was ready to go – but they left with a story and a sense of infinite possibilities.

Portrait of an Israeli

Our friend Jacob asked, “Would you like to see the house where my mother grew up?”

Jacob is in his mid-40s, a handsome third-generation Hungarian Israeli, a research scientist. He has the look of a European émigré, one of those sad-eyed men Isaac Bashevis Singer put on the benches in the middle of Broadway.

He drove us to downtown Tel Aviv, to rich, bustling Rothschild Boulevard. Despite everything, Israel’s economy is booming visibly. Cranes loom over every street, traffic is choking, new products chase new money and generally find it. Brains, another friend tells us, are Israel’s biggest natural resource, and the country’s overflowing with them.

Jacob parked across the street from Max Brenner, the bustling, aromatic chocolate chain that began in Israel. We crossed the street to the brightly colored, eccentrically shaped turn-of-the-20th-century Tuscan-style villa on the corner. Skyscrapers loom above it, huge new buildings surround it, a massive office building grows out of it. It now houses Sotheby’s Israeli outpost; before that it had been the Russian embassy. Before that, it had been home to Jacob’s family, which had made and lost banking fortunes. He has never been inside it; he looks at it wistfully from the outside and imagines his mother’s long-ago childhood.

But then he had to rush back to his car. Tel Aviv’s not a city for the sentimental, and the traffic cops were just about to boot it.

Snapshot of Jerusalem

In 1971, when hope was in the air and Israel still felt young, Paul Drazen, now a rabbi, was in Jerusalem for his junior year abroad. “It was a very heady time,” he says. “People were getting along famously. Jerusalem had just been reunited, Teddy Kollek was mayor, and people felt free to wander wherever they wanted; Jews, Muslims, Christians. The residents of Jerusalem were still feeling that this could work.”

Paul was with a group of friends walking by the YMCA when a policeman came over to them and said, “English? English?” They told him in Hebrew that yes, they spoke English, and he brought them across the street, to the King David Hotel, to a middle-aged woman who was standing outside.

“She said, ‘Take me someplace,’” he recalls. “She told us that she was with a group from Cleveland that was sitting in the hotel lobby. ‘And if I wanted to sit in a hotel lobby, I didn’t have to leave Cleveland.’”

So they took her to the Café Atara, one of those prototypical pre-World War II places, where for the cost of a piece of cake and cup of coffee you could sit all day, where elegant European refugees and burly sabras, wreathed in cigarette smoke, could sit for hours and debate politics; where no matter what language you spoke eventually you’d hear it. (It’s now elsewhere, no longer itself, and its original site is now home to Pizza Hut.)

They all got cake and coffee – they were impoverished students, so she paid – and they sat for a few hours watching and listening to the life around them. And then, feeling that she’d actually been in Israel and it was not Cleveland, the woman took a cab back to the King David and the boys continued to explore Jerusalem.

Desert and Sea

The ancient Israelites turned their backs on the sea.

Even after they finished their wanderings in the desert, they seemed always to face east. But they were not necessarily facing Jerusalem, as we do when we pray. Their natural orientation seemed to be toward the windblown sands of the desert and the rock-strewn hills that jut out from them.

The Mediterranean was just behind them, lapping at their feet, dark blue and green and foamy white on top, smelling sweetly of salt and ever so slightly of dead fish, but it seems that of all of them only Jonah, that joke of a prophet, that failure of a man, took notice of it.

Tel Aviv borders the sea. Its stucco, new just decades ago, has cracked and peeled; the moist sea air is not kind to it. Even new things look old in Tel Aviv.

Our hotel was on the sea; when the nightclubs closed for the night we could hear it whisper. When we greeted the new year we stood on the beach; when we were silent the sea sang.

Old, new, desert, sea, stone, stucco, decay, resilience, radiance – Israel is such a small place, but so much is true there all at once.