Jewish museum Anu marks Oct. 7 with art, diaries, music and gripping photos
The Museum of the Jewish People exhibits its reaction to the Hamas attacks from works created in the days and weeks after October 7
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
In the days following the Hamas attacks of October 7, Anu, the Museum of the Jewish People, reacted immediately, inviting evacuees from the north and south into its Tel Aviv location, offering workshops and a space to just hang out.
“First we had 30 people and then 50, and we had to figure out what to do during the [rocket] sirens,” said Orit Shaham-Gover, the museum’s chief curator. “So we all went down to the shelter together, we dealt with it.”
That was step one. When Shaham-Gover was contacted by a relative of then-hostage Raz Ben Ami about her artwork — Ben Ami was released at the end of November while her husband, Ohad, remains a captive — she took a drive to get her works, and along with art by art student Inbar Heiman, killed in captivity, and several others, created an installation in the museum lobby.
Anyone who walked through the doors saw those artists’ works, with the immediacy of the pain and confusion the country found itself in on full display.
But she felt it wasn’t enough, and the museum that seeks to offer a palatable sense of Jewish identity and history has curated its own initial look at the Hamas attacks with its new exhibit titled simply, “October Seventh.”
“It’s maybe the most relevant thing we’ve done in the museum, it touches everyone,” said Shaham-Gover.
The exhibit opened in mid-February and will remain in place at Anu until at least the next October 7, and possibly longer, said co-curator Michal Houminer.
“The exhibit was borne from the personal confusion and sadness in this small country, where everyone knows someone affected by this, or was affected themselves,” said Shaham-Gover. “There’s a snapshot here of how Israelis reacted in real time and we’re still in real time.”
Like many other Israeli museums during the last six months, Anu had to react quickly — rather than the usual two years it can take to curate and assemble an exhibit.
The museum staff found that artists too reacted immediately to the situation, producing works in real-time and often posting them on social media.
The Anu curators were following local artists and their work, but they were also responding to what they were hearing and seeing in their surroundings, said Shaham-Gover.
Her son works in the music industry and was logging intensive hours with fellow musicians performing around the clock for evacuees, the injured, soldiers, and anyone who needed music to lift their spirits. He told her they were doing about a year and a half of work in several months.
“The music was a kind of salve, a way of making them feel better,” she said.
Shaham-Gover’s exposure to the music industry pushed the Anu curators to create a playlist of songs to accompany the exhibit, with works by Matti Caspi, Ester Rada, Micha Sheetrit, Eviatar Banai, Idan Amedi, Shlomo Artzi, Ishai Ribo, Hadag Nachash and many others, tunes that offered a different meaning and form of consolation after the attacks of October 7.
Finally, they added the element of documentation, in the form of a clip of hundreds of photos taken by photojournalists and photographers in the first hours, days and weeks of the attack and its aftermath.
The exhibit opens with pieces by artists experiencing the attacks from both near and far, before and after October 7 and in the days that followed.
There is a work by Haim Maor about Be’eri resident and curator Sophie Berzon Mackie, as she sent out frantic messages about the terrorists in the kibbutz, which he later gathered into a kind of collage that focuses on her stress.
Leeor Shtainer mourns her two nieces killed at the Supernova music festival in two paintings that channel the biblical binding of Isaac. Directly across is the diary of Keren Shpilsher, who drew daily what she was watching on the screens and has filled six diaries so far.
There are drawings by Jonathan Chazor, a young soldier killed in Gaza. Perhaps the most painful is a lifelike picture of a dog that he drew on a school blackboard while fighting in Gaza.
On another wall is one of the now familiar red-stained works by Ziva Jelin, Be’eri resident and artist whose works were torn up by shrapnel during the Hamas onslaught.
The exhibit playlist is heard in the background, throughout the gallery, resonating while viewers mill around the artworks. The inner portion of the gallery offers benches for visitors to sit and look at the visceral collection of 300 photos taken during the last months.
The reel of photos plays silently, showing soldiers fighting in the kibbutzim, the many funerals and burials, the rallies for the hostages, the faces of their family members, and it offers a sense of balance to the art on the walls, said Houminer, as visitors watch people go through the pain and sorrow of the events.
There is also the vivid, striking video work of photographer Roee Idan, killed in one of the horrifying terrorist attacks of that morning near his home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza.
His images were among some of the first that captured the attacks on that morning, as he photographed Hamas attackers flying through the air on motorized paragliders before being killed.
Those terrifying images are countered by his earlier videos of flocks of birds, rising and flying in mass formations across the Negev skies.
“It’s all a window to what happened on October 7,” said Houminer. “We knew we needed to do something, that we had to react, to tell this story of the Jewish world.”
