Magnificent Chagall windows mark 60 years

When Marc Chagall debuted a series of biblically inspired stained-glass windows at the Louvre in Paris and then at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in 1961, these shows were only stopovers before the windows reached their permanent home on the campus of Hadassah’s new medical centre in Jerusalem.

The Chagall windows captured public imagination across the world. John F. Kennedy, then president of the United States, called them “extraordinary”.

“The inspiration of an ancient and noble history and the inspiration of modern artistic genius are combined in these windows,” Kennedy wrote to Miriam Freund, then national president of the Hadassah Women’s Zionist Organisation of America.

Dedicated in Jerusalem on February 6, 1962, as part of Hadassah’s golden anniversary celebration, the windows have now been in place for 60 years.

“This is my modest gift to the Jewish people who have always dreamt of biblical love, friendship and peace among all peoples,” Chagall noted that day.

The windows came about when Hadassah representatives met with Chagall in Paris in the late 1950s. They came well prepared with a compelling request for stained glass for what is now called the Abbell Synagogue.

The renowned painter reportedly cut short the women mid-sentence. “What took you so long? I’ve been waiting my whole life to serve the Jewish people,” he replied.

Or so the legend goes. In the decades since, the windows’ origin story may have taken on some air of myth.

“We don’t know if it was said exactly that way, but it sounds good,” says Barbara Goldstein, Hadassah deputy executive director and ambassador at large in Israel. Now 80, she has held various Hadassah leadership positions and is widely considered the “holder” of this history.

Whether the quote is fact or fiction, what is indisputable is that Chagall constructed a supersized series of windows. What’s more, he donated them as a gift.

“They were looking for one or two windows,” Goldstein says. “They never expected 12. That was all Chagall.”

The synagogue was still in the planning stages in 1958.

“Chagall wanted complete control,” Goldstein says, and therefore the synagogue “was built for those windows”.

Each of the arched artworks approximately 3m x 2.5m depicts themes relating to the biblical 12 sons of Jacob, progenitors of the 12 Tribes of Israel. Each image reflects Chagall’s immersed study of Bereshit 49 and Devarim 33.

The windows feature brilliant reds, blues, yellows and greens and a visual vocabulary expressing the biblical text and Jewish history, Chagall’s world both real and perceived, his love and profound identification with the history and culture of Jewish people and his early life in the Russian shtetl of Vitebsk.

“All the time I was working, I felt my mother and father looking over my shoulder; and behind them were Jews, millions of other vanished Jews, of yesterday and a thousand years ago,” said Chagall, who was born Moishe Zakharovich Shagal in 1887 and passed away in 1985.

“The windows completely transformed my vision; they gave me a great shock, they made me reflect. I don’t know how I shall paint from now on, but I believe something is taking place.”

While approachable from the exterior of the building, the elaborate beauty of the windows is most dramatic viewed from within the sanctuary, especially when illuminated by the sun.

“It is dramatic,” says Goldstein, who met Chagall at the 1961 MOMA exhibit.  “When you walk in there, everybody says, ‘Wow.’”

Architect Joseph Neufeld (1899-1980), who designed several other prominent synagogues in Jerusalem, gave the sanctuary its clean, mid-century minimalist lines. It nevertheless evokes a medieval house of prayer with a contemporary twist.

Four walls form a square around the main bimah, where the Torah is read. On the wall above the ark, the windows progress from Naftali on the left to Joseph and Benjamin on the right.

On the adjacent right wall are Reuben, Simeon and Levi. On the back wall, Judah, Zebulun and Issachar follow. The left wall features Dan, Gad and Asher.

Each panel is filled with a dance of intricate images, compelling themes and stunning colours. Like a coral reef of magnificent diversity, the longer one observes them, the more one sees.

While developing the concept in 1959, Chagall employed extensive maquettes and final colour sketches that began in pen and ink, collage and gouache. He teamed with a married pair of stained-glass artists, Charles Marq and Brigitte Simon-Marq, with whom he later collaborated on the cathedral at Metz.

Chagall developed five studies through early 1960. After the final study, Charles Marq experimented for many months more to obtain the correct hues, values and thicknesses at the glassworks of Saint-Just-sur-Loire. The team ultimately sent trial panels to Jerusalem for light correction.

Chagall’s dedicated handiwork accounts for the windows’ dramatic vitality.

“Glass is a transparent wall between my heart and the heart of the world,” Chagall said.

According to biblical precepts, no “graven images”, such as complete human figures or likenesses, are realistically represented.

The floating fish and cattle, flowers and trees, all reflect Chagall’s signature style: abstract, folkloric, whimsical. A green bird’s head caps a largely orange and red urn. A blue goat smiles in a cubist depiction. Multicoloured lions represent kingship. Hebrew lettering flows from one section to another.

And Chagall’s signature is evident in Latin letters.

Israel 21C