On Jerusalem Walls, Artist Memorializes Hebrew Israelite Rabbi from HarlemPosted in Articles, Arts, Biography, Judaism, Media Archive, Religion, United States on 2016-04-01 00:56Z by Steven |
On Jerusalem Walls, Artist Memorializes Hebrew Israelite Rabbi from Harlem
The Assimilator: Intermarrying high and low culture
Forward
2016-03-31
Sam Kestenbaum, Staff Writer
Wikicommons / Solomon Souza / YouTube
When Rabbi Mordecai Herman would visit the Lower East Side of the 1920s, then teeming with Jewish immigrants from Europe, he cut an intriguing figure.
He was a wizened black rabbi and former sailor from Harlem who spoke Hebrew, some Yiddish, and was a pioneering spiritual leader of the early black Hebrew Israelite movement.
Now, nearly a century after his life’s work, Herman has been memorialized on the streets of Jerusalem — a Jewish homecoming for a forgotten religious figure.
This is thanks to Solomon Souza, an Israeli artist who has transformed Jerusalem’s central Mehane Yehudah market into a pop-up art gallery, emblazoning the enclosed market’s shuttered metal doors with over 150 graffiti portraits of iconic figures like Albert Einstein, Golda Meir, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and the biblical prophet Moses…
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