From Secular Artist to Rosh Yeshiva

New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman)

The deeds we perform in life can carry far-reaching repercussions. Drawing someone close to Torah, restoring to him his birthright of Sinai, can leave an enormous mark upon the world, bringing hundreds of people to a Torah lifestyle—and those people, in turn, can go on to inspire others still.

My father-in-law zt”l was a quiet man, one who learned through shas in great depth with his chevrusah some eight times over the course of half a century. He also had a stutter. Yet despite that stutter, he was able to be mekarev people. One such person went on to found a Yeshiva in Eretz Yisroel, and I was zocheh to interview that Rav. That very Rav, in turn, was able to influence an artist whose life began in the cafes and rooftop salons of Bohemian Tel Aviv and ended in the beis medrash.

Eeka Israeli (Yitzchok) was born in Tel Aviv in 1931 — in the Machlul neighborhood, to parents who had come up with the Third Aliyah a decade earlier. His father was a weaver and a member of the labor council. The household was steeped in the secular-socialist milieu that built the country. The family later moved to Kiryat Avodah, one of the neighborhoods that eventually became the city of Cholon.

He studied at the workers’ children’s school, joined the Noar HaOved youth movement, and at age of thirteen enlisted with his friends in the Haganah’s youth battalions. He trained in agriculture at Mikveh Yisrael. He was among the chalutzim — the pioneers — who helped found kibbutzim in the Negev. When the regional council needed an emblem, it was young Ika who painted it.

But the impulse to create would not let him remain behind a plow. Drawn irresistibly to art, he left the kibbutz and traveled to Paris, becoming one of the first Israeli students at the Beaux-Arts. He studied the masters in Florence, experimenting with Renaissance fresco. He returned home and apprenticed himself to leading Israeli painters. By his early twenties his work hung in the Tel Aviv Museum. He had arrived.

The King of Dizengoff

The Tel Aviv that Ika returned to was a world unto itself — a glittering, restless bohemia of poets, painters, and provocateurs. He sat in the legendary Cafe Kassit, trading words with the giants of Hebrew letters: Natan Alterman of two hundred shekel bill fame, the brilliant and tormented boxer/poet Alexander Penn whose father had run a Cheder in Russia, the satirist Dan Ben-Amotz whose original last name was Tehillim-Zogger (yes, really), the anti-frum Haaretz columnist Amos Kenan, and the Irgun member turned leftist Uri Avnery. He even helped found an avant-garde artists’ collective. He opened what is remembered as, r”l, the first discotheque in Israel.

He would later recall that era with a biographer’s precision and not a trace of longing. He remembered Alexander Penn, who would down his daily glass of vodka while arguing the finer points of verse and politics. He remembered the silence of the poet Avot Yeshurun and the striking presence of the sculptor Yitzchak Danziger. It was, by every external measure, a life of total freedom.

And yet, looking back, he would render a startling verdict on those years. It was not freedom at all, he insisted — it was slavery. “A person who is a slave to his impulses,” he said in an interview, “is not a free man.” Driven by drink and appetite and the next sensation, he had mistaken the absence of boundaries for liberty. He came to believe the opposite was true. “I am far more a ben chorin — a free man — today,” he would say after his transformation, “than I ever was then.”

The Great Return

But then in 1970 something inside him, the pintele yid, had shifted. Ika moved into Yeshivas HaTefutzos in the Old City of Yerushalayim, on Har Tzion, and for a time was the only secular Israeli in the area. He began to learn and studied Torah under Rav Mordechai Goldstein z”l – whom my father-in-law had been mekarev.

He moved to the neighborhood of Sha’arei Chesed and entered the orbit of giants. He drew close to Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach zt”l, rosh yeshiva of Kol Torah. He sat before the Yerushalmi maggid Rav Shalom Schwadron and before Rav Yitzchok Shlomo Zilberman. He learned in the southern town of Tifrach, where he served as a chavrusa to Rav Yaakov Friedman, and shared a room during the week with, yes, Rav Moshe Shapiro, who would remain a lifelong friend. He became one of the closest talmidim of Rav Chaim Shraga Feivel Frank of the Yerushalayim beis din — so close that after his rebbi’s passing, he inherited his rabbinic mantle.

It was a quarter-century of intensive Torah scholarship. The man who had painted a kibbutz emblem now wore the bearing of a Yerushalmi talmid chacham.

The Rebbe of Dizengoff

Ika did not keep his transformation to himself. His apartment in Sha’arei Chesed — and later his Tel Aviv flat, which became a kind of beis medrash — filled with searching young people who came to listen and to learn. Many of them moved to Yerushalayim, took on Torah and mitzvos, and never looked back. Affectionately, they began calling him “the Admor of Rechov Dizengoff.”

And he became a central pillar of the baal teshuva movement in Eretz Yisrael. His home circles for men became the foundation of Yeshivas Ohr Somayach for Israelis, which he led as rosh yeshiva for several years before appointing others and turning his energies to recruitment, conferences, and outreach. His circles for women helped seed Neve Yerushalayim. Together with his close friend Rav Avraham Ravitz, he helped lay groundwork that fed into the founding of Degel HaTorah. His brother-in-law, through marriage, was none other than Rav Uri Zohar — the famed entertainer turned baal teshuva — and the two were bound by both family and mission.

As an artist, a frum one, he drew a sharp line between forbidden avodah zarah and permitted beauty, what he called noy. The Torah’s prohibition, rooted in the Second Commandment and codified in the Shulchan Aruch, targets the fashioning of certain three-dimensional forms and images made for worship. Two-dimensional painting for the sake of beautifying one’s surroundings, he maintained, stands on far firmer ground.
Why, then, did no great tradition of Jewish painting flower in the long exile? Ika offered a moving explanation. For two millennia the Jew lived under the threat of sudden flight. One cannot flee a pogrom carrying an easel and wet canvases — but a violin slips under the arm. So the soul of the people poured itself into music, the portable art. What creative energy remained was funneled into the sacred: the illuminated kesubah, the silver crown of a sefer Torah. The “secular” gallery was a luxury a people in survival mode could not afford.

Only now, he argued — with the Jewish people returned to its land and granted a measure of stability — can the frum community finally reclaim a visual language that had lain dormant for centuries. To that end he built institutions. With his partner Mordechai Arnon he founded an art school for religious Jews, housed quite literally in a bomb shelter, which he wryly named “HaMiklat” — the Shelter — a name that captured both its physical home and the embattled place of art in the frum world. It grew into a gallery that gave a stage to a whole generation of religious painters, photographers, poets, and musicians.

Ika never lost his eye for social criticism; he simply trained it through a new lens. The former Mapai pioneer looked at the country he had helped build and grieved. He saw a society he described as gashmi-istic to the bone, a nation founded on brotherhood that had become, in a stunningly short time, one of the most unequal in the world. The egalitarian fervor of his youth had curdled, in his eyes, into self-absorption and yawning wage gaps.

His most memorable image for what had gone wrong was the “Manufacturer’s Manual.” The One who manufactured the human being, he taught, also supplied an instruction booklet for its operation — the Torah. To toss aside the manual and try to run the machine on guesswork is to invite the breakdown. A society that ignores its Maker’s instructions, he believed, was the very root of the decay he saw around him.
He could be provocative. He noted the irony that the state grants “professional” military deferments and special arrangements to basketball players and members of army orchestras — yet bristles at extending similar recognition to anyone who learns Torah. If the state were truly a Jewish state, he argued, it would honor Torah study as a vital national service in its own right.

Even his art carried his message. One of his works, the “Straw King,” depicted leadership as a scarecrow — a hollow figure of authority so drained of real power that the very birds it was meant to frighten no longer feared it. It was his biting verdict on a politics he saw as spiritually empty.

Reb Yitzchok Israeli passed away on the tenth of Elul, 5770 — August 30, 2009 — a day after his seventy-eighth birthday, and was buried on Har HaMenuchos. He had lived, by then, nearly four decades as a ben Torah, married to his wife Snunit, surrounded by children and eineklach, his home a fixture of warmth and learning.
It is tempting for secularists tell his story as a tale of loss — the brilliant young painter who gave it all up. But that is precisely the reading Ika spent his life refuting. He had not abandoned beauty; he had liberated it, placing the act of creation inside a frame of kedushah. He had not lost his freedom; he had found it. The match he struck over that barrel in Yerushalayim did not destroy an artist. It freed one.

“A person who is a slave to his impulses is not a free man,” he said, echoing the first Pesach maamar in the Alter’s Ohr HaTzafun. “I am much more a ben chorin — a free man — today than I was then.” May his memory be a blessing, and may his life remain a beacon to every soul that yearns to claim the birthright of Sinai – like he did.

The author can be reached at [email protected]