Jewish and Palestinian stories intersect within the walls of a historic sukkah | Canada Voices

In 1937, a ship left Nazi Germany for what was then called Mandatory Palestine with a secret cargo. Inside a shipping container marked “lumber” sat a stack of elaborately painted wood panels depicting Jerusalem and Jewish life in a Bavarian town. The painted sides faced each other, artwork concealed. To inspectors ensuring nothing of value was taken by Jews fleeing Germany, they would have looked like a pile of wood.

Those 30-odd panels assembled into a temporary dwelling, a sukkah, that for nearly a century had been an annual fixture outside Naftali and Zili Deller’s homestead in Fischach, Germany. For the seven days of Sukkot, the Jewish harvest festival, it hosted guests and family meals.

Many observant Jews erect sukkahs for Sukkot. The Dellers’ had paintings commissioned from an artist in 1826. Among few to survive the Holocaust intact, it is now in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. A group of Torontonians, though, recently had the chance to interact with it, when a faithful replica created seven years earlier was erected in an east Toronto backyard, at the home of artists Diego Rotman and Lea Mauas. The pair arrived in the city in August from Jerusalem; Rotman is a visiting professor at the University of Toronto’s Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies, and Mauas is studying for a PhD at Queen’s University.

On a late October weekend, a handful of artists, scholars and local Torontonians gathered at their sukkah, which, per custom, has an open roof festooned with branches and leaves. Guests sipped lentil soup or took a seat inside, enjoying the odd array of paintings: Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, a hunting party in Fischach, the Dellers’ house and the Dome of the Rock set in a Bavarian landscape. A short film played inside the couple’s home; a slideshow presentation told the story of the installation’s creation.

Like the historic Deller Sukkah, the Toronto backyard replica was transported by ship, panels numbered for easy assembly. The unauthorized copy, though, was also a sequel to another, less typical sukkah: one they fashioned 10 years earlier in collaboration with an imperilled Bedouin community in the West Bank. The sukkah in their yard didn’t look like that reconstructed Bedouin shelter. But together the two sukkah projects sit at the intersection of history and art, communal gesture and protest, Jewish as well as Arab and Palestinian suffering.

Rotman and Mauas are Jews from Argentina; they met in Israel, where each had moved for school. Rotman is a member of the theatre faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Mauas is a director of Mamuta Art and Research Centre, which they co-founded.

In 2014, the couple, who operate as Sala-manca Artists Group, were invited by Jerusalem’s Hansen House to build a public sukkah. Sukkot marks the Exodus by evoking the desert huts where the Jews dwelt; through those open roofs they looked up at the stars. Struck by the act of erecting temporary dwellings as ritual amidst a sea of makeshift homes in which millions of Palestinian and other refugees live, Sala-manca explored the sukkah as a metaphor for exile and displacement.

They focused on the Jahalin, a nomadic Bedouin tribe from southern Israel exiled in the West Bank since 1951. Working with the Israeli non-profit Bimkom and artists Yeshaiahu Rabinowitz and Itamar Mendes Flohr, the couple travelled to a Jahalin village in the Khan al-Ahmar area, between Jerusalem and Jericho. They met members of the al-Korshan clan, who like other Jahalin live largely outside civic infrastructure, without running water or electricity, surrounded by expanding Israeli settlements and facing threats of evacuation.

With the blessing of a mukhtar, a local religious leader, Sala-manca bought a vacant winter shelter in the village. They paid $2,200, most of their artist’s fee from Hansen House. They dismantled the shanty together after dark, so the family could replace it undetected. (New buildings are not permitted and the authorities are watchful.)

Rebuilt outside Hansen House with the same repurposed tin, wood and plastic sheeting, but with an open roof, The Eternal Sukkah became simultaneously a kosher Jewish symbol signalling Bedouin displacement and a Bedouin refugee tent that told a story of Jewish displacement. Text accompanying the work explained the Jahalin’s situation to visitors.

“The idea of reconstruction,” Rotman said, “was to give value to a structure that for the Israeli Civil Administration had no value.” The work was an iteration of common histories and a universal desire for citizenship and belonging. Daphna Ben-Shaul, a professor at Tel Aviv University, called it “a civic ‘Hosanna.’” In 2016, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem bought the structure for roughly $22,000, with the fee split equally between the Jahalin community and the art centre. White-gloved movers dismantled the home and transported it to the museum.

Now officially art, it caused a stir. Sala-manca faced criticisms from the right for their “law breaking.” An art critic on the left accused them of perpetuating the occupation while trying to protest it. Abu Suleiman, an al-Korshan community leader and spokesman, recalled that when he heard this, he found it funny. “Of course I knew,” he said. “We discussed it. All of this was done with our total agreement.”

He admitted he was skeptical of the feasibility of their idea, but seeing it in a museum and witnessing the sympathetic responses was “incredible”; a group of 40 Jahalin children travelled to see it. The exhibit brought attention to the Jahalin plight; the money bought a sturdier shelter and helped launch Badawi, a Jahalin ecotourism initiative. Rotman and Mauas have volunteered their help, producing videos and organizing art workshops and theatre performances in the village. “They are like family,” Suleiman said. “I have a lot of Israeli friends – good people. They are like brothers to us.”

Sala-manca had gained a community. But they also felt a loss in selling the work. Mauas said they wanted to smuggle something out of the museum in turn – but not literally steal, Rotman added hastily. That something was the Deller Sukkah.

Their Deller Sukkah surfaces subterranean themes of migration and impermanence inherent in Sukkot. To build the copy required a pilgrimage to Fischach. They worked with a carpenter, Nir Yahalom, and a painter, Ktura Manor, who reproduced the images. They mimicked every detail, down to the splits in the beech – “a geography of cracks,” Yahalom said. That evocative phrase became the title of the film documenting the process that played in their rented Toronto house.

Like Eternal Sukkah, their Deller copy gestures at the capacity of art and faith not merely to transcend but also transform. In Fischach, they met the current occupant of a long-gone synagogue. Dominikus Wunderer’s family bought the building in 1963, and it houses his dental practice. On its facade he had installed a plaque honouring its history, and on its side a Star of David. A Turkish family and a German family now live in the Deller home. Their names and Wunderer’s plaque appear in Manor’s paintings. So does a church they noticed in the distance in the Fischach streetscape. X-rays taken during the 2013 restoration of the Deller paintings revealed it had once been there but erased.

“Ours is a copy,” Mauas said with a smile, “but it is also more original than the original.” Past and present collide. The sukkah was smuggled out of Germany by Bracha Fraenkel, a woman from Munich; Deller and Fraenkel family members travelled to Jerusalem to see the replica.

In Toronto, with its homeless encampments and refugees from many places, the sukkah acquires new resonances of precarity. The Deller installation had never before been displayed outside Israel. It was erected a year ago at Lupine Hill in Jerusalem, part of an exhibit conceived as a monument for peace. Sala-manca dismantled it on Oct. 6. A day later, everything changed.

The war in Gaza has given both projects fresh relevance. Rotman and Mauas were among those in Jerusalem’s streets campaigning against the government’s judicial reforms and the war, and for a deal for the Israeli hostages. The Jahalin community’s plight has since worsened; Haaretz reported last month that occupants of a new settler outpost near Khan al-Ahmar have harassed kids walking to school. Abu Suleiman said the new neighbours play loud music late at night, steal their water and claim their sheep as their own; it’s clear the settlers want the Jahalin to leave, but they have nowhere to go.

A sukkah is, in the end, a container. The sukkahs created by Sala-manca contain personal and collective memory – and their hope for what is possible. Mauas says the sukkah extends ushpizin, the Aramaic word for guest, signifying hospitality to everyone. Sukkot, after all, is simply the plural of sukkah. Plurality is in the word itself, a reminder that home and belonging for the multitude are what makes a community.