Curators: Dr. Alek D. Epstein and Noam Mualem Yosef
Thursday, November 6, 2025 – Thursday, December 25, 2025
Festive opening and catalog launch – Wednesday, November 19, 2025, at 5:00 p.m.
Portrait of Meir Dikstein, the Artist’s Farther. Collection of the artist’s family
Portrait of Nechama, the Artist’s Spouse. Collection of the artist’s family
Portrait of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky. Collection of the artist’s family
Old City of Safed. Collection of Noam Mualem Yosef
At the Synagogue in Safed. Collection of Noam Mualem Yosef
Tomb of Isaac Luria in Safed. Collection of Noam Mualem Yosef
Mount Zion, Jerusalem. Collection of Noam Mualem Yosef
Jerusalem at Sunset. Collection of Yoav Salomon
The Sea of Galilee. Collection of Dan Birenboim
View of Tiberias and the Sea of Galilee. Collection of Dan Birenboim
Flowers in a Vase. Collection of Noam Mualem Yosef
Urban Landscape. Collection of Noam Mualem Yosef
Our Grandfather, Mordechai (Monya) Avniel –
A Man, a Zionist Leader, and an Artist
Illit Shtengel and Yoav Salomon
Today, looking at our Grandfather’s paintings, we seem to see not just landscapes, but also his very life. The contours of the light, the layers of paint, the mountains, the fields, the sea – all are part of the long story of a man who presented a rare combination of determination, broad-mindedness, humility, and love for his fellow human beings.
He was an artist and a fighter, a jurist and a teacher, a pioneer and a builder – and, first and foremost, a person who believed that life has beauty and meaning only when it is put at the service of a greater idea.
Grandfather was born in 1900 in the town of Parychy, Homel Province (in present-day Belarus). His own grandfather was a rabbi and the head of a yeshiva, while his father was a highly knowledgeable man who combined faith with reason. Already as a child, Mordechai evinced a heightened sensitivity to beauty and artistic creation. In his adolescence, he was sent to study at an art academy in Ekaterinburg, Russia – a rare move for a young man from an observant Jewish family in those days.
As a student, he became attracted to Zionist activism, and was arrested for it. After his release, he became the leader of a group of Jewish pioneers who undertook a year-long trek to the Land of Israel. The young people, who sought to build a homeland out of their hearts and souls, had to walk most of the way.
After reaching their destination in 1921, the group began to work in agriculture at the “Goldberg Orchard” (present-day Tel Hashomer).
At an exhibition in Tel Aviv, Mordechai met Prof. Boris Schatz, the founder of the Bezalel School, who recognized the young man’s talent and urged him to join his institution. Grandfather eventually agreed – but not before the pioneer group had been won over by Prof. Schatz’s pleading. Mordechai went on to study and teach at Bezalel, and create miniature sculptures, woodcuts, and sketches. He decided to switch to these artistic media because of his difficulty in adapting to the light of Eretz Israel, which was utterly different from that of Russia. Years afterward, he headed the Miniature Sculpture Department in Jerusalem, combining the precision of an artist with the courage of an educator. Only about a decade later, when his body and eyes had become adjusted to the light of this land, did he resume painting.
Wishing to have a stable source of income, he studied law, and was accredited as a lawyer.
Grandfather was one of the first Revisionist Zionists, a member of Brit HaBirionim, and editor of the Hayarden newspaper. Together with Grandmother Nechama, who always stood by his side, he opened his doors to the fighters for the freedom of Israel and the defendants from the “trial of the assassination of Arlozorov.” He paid a heavy personal price for this, being forced to close his office in Jerusalem and move with his family to Haifa, where he worked at the firm of the lawyer Dr. Winschel.
During World War II, as Rommel’s troops were advancing through North Africa toward the Land of Israel, and the locals were building fortifications and preparing the “Musa Dagh on Mount Carmel,” Grandfather saw what was going on and said: “El Alamein will become their graveyard” [a pun in Hebrew]. After the establishment of the State of Israel, he was elected to the Haifa municipality on behalf of the Herut movement, and went on to cooperate with the mayor, Abba Hushi from the Labor Party, despite their ideological differences. He played a role in the creation of the museums of Haifa, and even headed them for some years – yet another example of his combination of spirit and action.
Already in the late 1950s, Avniel spoke of the need to dig a tunnel beneath Mount Carmel. This idea, which seemed fantastical at the time, would become reality fifty years later. He was also one of the founders of the artists’ quarter in Safed, and stood at its head for years, supporting young artists with the generosity of one who believes that culture is the people’s creative force.
His personal life, like his art, was marked by depth and balance. He and Grandma Nechama were a single entity – “Nechama and Monya” – and one could not think of either of them in isolation. She accompanied him on every journey and each project, while he cherished her calm, her wisdom, and her faith. When she passed away, he was left heartbroken; the part of him that had kept the fire burning died with her – until he, too, passed away.
Today, when we look at his works, we hear his calm voice, see his perceptive eye, and feel his simple faith in a loving dialogue between a person and their land. He taught us that creation is not just an artistic act – it is a way of life.
Between matter and color, between word and action, Mordechai Avniel bequeathed to us a legacy of beauty, of responsibility, and of faith in humanity and in this land. This is our Grandfather’s way: the way of a person who – quietly, persistently, out of pure love – has left a mark that is rooted in the soil, yet shines in the sky.
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From Expressionism to Lyrical Abstraction:
On the Art of Mordechai Avniel
Dr. Alek D. Epstein
Mordechai Dikstein (later Avniel) was born 125 years ago, on July 31, 1900, in the small town of Parychy in Belarus, which had a Jewish majority. Presumably as a result of the battles and pogroms of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the Dikstein family was forced (apparently, in 1917) to relocate to the city of Ekaterinburg in the Urals, more than 2000 km from Parychy. Mordechai Dikstein joined Tze’irei Zion [Youth of Zion] – a popular movement of young Zionist Jews, whose ideology emphasized practical Zionism: moving to the Land of Israel, working it as halutzim [pioneers], and reviving Hebrew culture. Hence, it is hardly surprising that, in 1921, having overcome all the hurdles and obstacles, the young man arrived in the Land of Israel, – where he would remain until his death on October 12, 1989. Other articles in this book recount his fascinating life story, so here I will confine myself to his artistic legacy, which has not yet achieved due recognition.
Avniel started out as a painter of portraits, some of which were more successful than others. It seems that he never painted a still life. His most recognizable works are landscapes, and he remained loyal to this genre throughout his life. Working with both watercolors and oil paints (and his watercolor works bear an uncanny resemblance to oil paintings), he builds up the landscape with tender, nearly transparent colors, which appear to float above the surface of the canvas or paper, and merge softly into a single whole. In the picture, the earth meets the sky – but the point of convergence is blurry, making it hard to tell where the earth ends and the sky begins. Thus, his best works create the feeling of infinite depth. The light in his paintings is, for the most part, not the harsh and white Mediterranean light – but a different, softer light, which can be captured only for a few hours at the beginning and end of the day. Avniel does not typically build his composition around a central point; rather, all the details converge into a single motion, which creates harmony. In the course of his career, the artist moved from figurative art, which can be assigned to the Expressionist school, to painting in the Impressionist style – and, from there, to Lyrical Abstraction. The landscape in his works is not copied “as is,” but transformed into a starting point, or a source of inspiration. As Oren Schatz has astutely observed in his article about the artist, “Avniel paints not the objects in nature, but the air and the light around them. However, even when the painting is nearly abstract, it still bears traces of the landscape out of which it has grown.”
It seems that Safed, more than any other city, has been scrutinized, reworked, idealized, and endowed with a multiplicity of meanings by Israeli artists. This city – of the Kabbalah, the narrow streets, the tombs of the righteous, and the spiritual light – became not only a site of religious or cultural pilgrimage, but also a charged pictorial arena. Isaac Frenel (Frenkel), Moshe Castel, Mordechai Levanon, Jacob Eisenscher, and Milia Laufer are only a few of the artists who turned their attention to this city – and, moreover, each of them had their own, slightly different Safed. The same is true of Mordechai Avniel, although his version of the city occasionally resembles that of Isaac Frenel (1899–1981), who was one year his senior, and who had similarly grown up in a religious Jewish family in the Russian Empire, and arrived in the Land of Israel around the same time (a year before Avniel). Like many of his fellow artists who walked the streets of Safed day by day, Avniel, too, came to this city as a dreamer, an observer, a seeker of myths. His paintings are devoid of theatricality and any protest against time, yet they constitute an emotional form of documentation, suffused with light. He practically “sang the praises” of the stone roofs, or the mountainous background, and lingered on the cracks in the walls, the condensed silence of a Haredi courtyard in the afternoon. He painted with profound modesty and a loving, yet sober, gaze. He did not perceive the city as an alien vision that had to be assimilated into the canon, but as a place that was a part of him, that he carried in his body; this may be the reason why his paintings stick in the memory of the viewer for a long time.
Looking at Avniel’s artistic legacy, I think that his uniqueness as an artist is most pronounced in his paintings of Jerusalem, on the one hand, and in his marine landscapes (including those of the Sea of Galilee), on the other.
Almost all the Eretz-Israeli artists have depicted Jerusalem, yet Avniel did it in his own unique way, which became apparent at the exhibition Our Eternal Capital: Jerusalem in Israeli Art, curated by me at the Museum several months ago. The Jerusalem landscapes painted by Avniel reveal an artist who has grown out of the spirit of Impressionism, but who seeks to break out of it, into a region where the light is not just a natural given, but an inner – almost mystical – attribute of cultural memory. Avniel chooses Jerusalem not as a monumental subject, but as a poetic space, penetrable to light, time, and fragility. In his works, we can recognize motifs of French Impressionism – in the texture of the brushwork, the fragmentation of the color, and the desire to capture the fleeting moment; these paintings possess a lyrical-meditative dimension. Avniel never sought to “copy the external appearance” of Jerusalem, but to uncover its “inner movement” – the connection between this city, which is so important to human history, and the feelings that it engenders in the onlooker. His paintings evince a tendency to blur the boundaries – between stone and sky, the skyline and the vegetation, the observer and the object of observation. Jerusalem, for Avniel, is not merely a city, but a state of mind; layers of time that accumulate in unsaturated colors – gentle turquoises, dreamy pinks, serene greens, – and the shapes sometimes fade into each other, as though pushed toward each other, and melting together. On his canvases, the landscape of Jerusalem is less an actual landscape than the memory of one – or a longing for one. These are artworks in which spiritual presence is converted into an almost transparent aesthetic. The style touches the spirit of the abstract and the lyrical, yet it maintains an implicit grip on reality, without fully committing to it.
The key aspect that I would like to emphasize is that Mordechai Avniel grasped the landscape of Eretz-Israel like an observer who seeks, in this landscape, that which lies beyond it. His paintings, which are quite unique in the Israeli art of the Mediterranean Sea and the Sea of Galilee, evince not only a love for the vistas of our land, but also the desire to touch the essence of the visual experiences – in the light, the calm, and the constant changes of the water and air. Thus, when we compare his art to the works of William Turner (1775–1851) and James Whistler (1834–1903), two of the “founding fathers” of the marine landscape in European art, we see a clear commonality: All three use the sea not as an object, but as an emotional space. Turner – with his intensities of light and color, Whistler – with his lyrical restraint and sense of dusk, and Avniel – with his lighting of the scene as a metaphor for quiet, yet charged contemplation. Avniel’s depictions of the Sea of Galilee create the sense of an almost mystical calm. The pale blues, light greens, and whites intermingle, and the horizon becomes blurred – as often happens in Turner’s late pieces, and in Whistler’s series of “Nocturnes” from the 1870s and 1880s. The most apt description of Mordechai Avniel’s art is probably the one given by the artist himself: “The clouds passing over the Sea of Galilee or the Dead Sea – both lying below sea level – result in nearly constant changes of light, color, and atmosphere. The landscape assumes forms, and then loses them again. These clouds have taught me to understand the space. I do not perceive the landscapes optically; they are a combination of colors that intermingle harmoniously – sometimes abstract, at other times expressing my inner emotions. My constant motif is a landscape that is not static, with all its contradictions – the ray of dawn, the silence of the day’s heat, the dusk of the evening, the nocturnal glow, the wind and the rain, the storm of the night.” Avniel – more than any other Eretz-Israeli artist, I would say – has contributed a restrained, perceptive voice, which listens to the silences of the sea.
We are honored to host a retrospective exhibition of this amazing artist at our Museum.
