2018

Neve Tzedek is a neighborhood located in southwestern Tel Aviv, Israel. Literally, Neve Tzedek means Abode of Justice, but it is also one of the names for God (Jeremiah 50:7). Neve Tzedek was the first Jewish neighborhood to be built outside the old city of the ancient port of Jaffa. Originally a Mizrahi Jewish and Yemenite Jewish neighbourhood, for years, the neighborhood prospered as Tel Aviv, the first modern Hebrew city, grew up around it. At the beginning of the 1900s, some artists and writers made Neve Tzedek their residence. Most notably, future Nobel prize laureate Shmuel Yosef Agnon, as well as Hebrew artist Nachum Gutman, used Neve Tzedek as both a home and a sanctuary for art. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook was the first Rabbi of Neve Tzedek; he even maintained a Yeshiva there. During his time in Neve Tzedek he became very close friends with many of the writers, especially Agnon. Years of neglect and disrepair followed, but since the early 1980s, Neve Tzedek has become one of Tel Aviv’s latest fashionable and expensive districts, with a village-like atmosphere.

Completed in 1993, one of Tel Aviv’s most famous buildings is the 23-story Opera Tower. The Tower is situated at the corner of Allenby, Herbert Samuel and HaYarkon Streets. The building houses residential apartments, a shopping mall, a cinema, a fitness centre, a restaurant and a private swimming pool for the tower’s residents at the base of the building. The Opera Tower is built on the same place that the old Tel Aviv Opera House stood on and the exterior shape of the base building is identical to the one of the old Opera House.

Zadok Ben-David (born 1949) is an Israeli artist working in London. Born in Beihan, Yemen, his family immigrated to Israel when he was an infant. He studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design from 1971 to 1973. He continued his studies at University of Reading and the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. He graduated in advanced sculpture from St. Martin’s School of Art and taught at the same institution from 1977-1982. His iconic sculpture "Beyond the Limit" is made of concrete, metal and pigment. It dates from 1989.

Tel Aviv University Prof. Tzvi Harel, the good-natured architect who designed this post-modernist gravity-defying seaside apartment house, says that he is "proud of being insulted about it. I believe humor and criticism in architecture is very important." The four-story building was never meant to be more than imaginary. Harel sketched it for a 1980s newspaper column on the renaissance of Tel Aviv culture and art. Local entrepreneur Avraham Piltz loved the oddball design and brought it to life, though he died before the house was completed in the mid-1990s. "The idea was that since it was on the shore of Tel Aviv, which in those days was quite neglected, you could be an exhibitionist and expose yourself playfully in front of the sea," Harel says, pointing out that every room in each of the seven apartments has a sea view.

Tel Aviv University Prof. Tzvi Harel, the good-natured architect who designed this post-modernist gravity-defying seaside apartment house, says that he is "proud of being insulted about it. I believe humor and criticism in architecture is very important." The four-story building was never meant to be more than imaginary. Harel sketched it for a 1980s newspaper column on the renaissance of Tel Aviv culture and art. Local entrepreneur Avraham Piltz loved the oddball design and brought it to life, though he died before the house was completed in the mid-1990s. "The idea was that since it was on the shore of Tel Aviv, which in those days was quite neglected, you could be an exhibitionist and expose yourself playfully in front of the sea," Harel says, pointing out that every room in each of the seven apartments has a sea view.

Thanks to their city’s Museum of Art, legions of Tel Aviv’s sunseekers and volleyball players can also enjoy high culture. The Museum – home to one of the Middle East’s leading collections of 20th Century art – has allowed reproductions of its most famous paintings to feature as part of a pop-up gallery featuring works of such well known artists as Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Kandinsky, Van Gogh as well as paintings by lesser known artists. Many of the paintings depict scenes that evoke beaches or the sea – for example, "Sunset" an oil colour painted in 1921-22 by the German-born expressionist, Max Pechstein. Pechstein was a prolific printmaker, producing 421 lithographs, 315 woodcuts and linocuts, and 165 intaglio prints, mostly etchings. Pechstein was a professor at the Berlin Academy for ten years before his dismissal by the Nazis in 1933. Thereafter, he was vilified by the Nazis because of his art. A total of 326 of his paintings were removed from German museums. Sixteen of his works were displayed in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition of 1937. During this time, Pechstein went into seclusion in rural Pomerania. He eventually sought refuge in Mandatory Palestine. He was reinstated into the Berlin Academy in 1945, and subsequently won numerous titles and awards for his work. He died in West Berlin and is buried in that city's Evangelischer Friedhof Alt-Schmargendorf.

Thanks to their city’s Museum of Art, legions of Tel Aviv’s sunseekers and volleyball players can also enjoy high culture. The Museum – home to one of the Middle East’s leading collections of 20th Century art – has allowed reproductions of its most famous paintings to feature as part of a pop-up gallery featuring works of such well known artists as Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Kandinsky, Van Gogh as well as paintings by lesser known Israeli artists – for example, "The Zeppelin Over Tel Aviv" an oil colour painted in 1926 by the Israeli artist Reuven Rubin. Rubin painted this image on Purim 1929, when the airship – flying over the country on a journey around the world – became the focal point of holiday festivities. Rubin depicts the special atmosphere by means of miniature figures that are seen from a distance, standing on the roofs of houses decorated with blue-and-white Star of David flags and waving their arms at the passing airship. The ship, the boats, and the pink curtain whose edges are decorated with white lace intensify the carnivalesque atmosphere. It seems like neither the dark clouds hanging over the horizon nor the rain pouring down on the zeppelin can do anything to ruin the scene or to overshadow the joy of the celebrants.