A young artist named Raphael Abecassis burst onto the Israeli art scene in 1986 when his design won the prestigious competition among the myriad talented artists in Israel for the Independence Day poster. In 1991 he again won the Independence Day poster competition and had been commissioned by the Ministry of Education and Culture to create the official poster for Sepharad '92, commemorating the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

    A Sephardi himself, Abecassis designed the Sepharad poster after two years of extensive research into the history of Spanish Jewry. The dynamic work in vibrant pastel colors narrates the Jewish Odyssey from the Golden Age in Spain to the expulsion, the Diaspora, and finally, aliyah to Israel. The research for the poster design motivated him to create 24 paintings, which toured North American and Israeli cities during 1992. "I wanted to paint everything in black," he says recalling the impact of his investigation. "But knew that nobody would look at it." Instead, he chose watercolor and gouache in rich pastel and primary tones to attract viewers to study them closely and understand the history.

    Former Israeli President, Yitzhak Navon, opened the exhibit at the Ben Zvi Institute of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Dr. Menahem Ben Sasson of the University's School of History of Jewish Communities in the East discovered "two symbols that express the problematic aspects of Jewish life in Spain." The Hebrew letters for the word Spain written in a square pattern, he explained, can be read as "Sepharad (Spain) or "Sirpad" (nettle, a shrub whose sting is felt long after it has touched the skin). This is a "metaphor for a place that looked hospitable at first but proved to be otherwise later," he continued. "The second symbol is the double-headed Marranos, with their outward ambivalence but inner undivided Jewishness."

    Today, another outcome of this research can be seen on Wilshire Boulevard, a principal thoroughfare in the Los Angeles area's upscale suburbs of Beverly Hills and Westwood. There, at the Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel, a 22-foot-high explosion of brilliant color comprising 6,000 pieces of stained glass, surrounds the four elegant, carved wooden doors at the synagogue's entrance.

    Based on five separate paintings, two for the bottom panels and three for the upper, main panel, the windows reflect Abecassis's characteristic bold colors-red, blue, green, purple, and gold-assembled with imagination and charm running through layers of biblical, historical, and Kabbalistic motifs.

    His first stained-glass project, the Sephardic Heritage windows, trace the route of Sephardic Jews, starting with the expulsion from Jerusalem and leading to the community in Los Angeles.

    Flames of red and orange leap above Jerusalem's Old City walls, and golden rays of sunshine spread towards heaven, framing a blue arch filled with rolling seas, square-masted schooners, floating angels, and fruit-laden pomegranate trees in the panel to the door's right. Jerusalem springs forth from a giant pomegranate in the center of the upper panel, which follows the journey from the Golden Age in Spain, with its proliferation of Jewish scholars, to the 1492 expulsion, wanderings to Greece, Turkey, and America, and settlement of Sephardim in Safed. The panel to the left of the door brings in the present Los Angeles community and the sponsors of the windows. "This is more than art," says Joshua Bittan, Abecassis's representative in Encino, California. "It's an education. It's history."

    Born in Marrakesh, Morocco, in 1952, Abecassis brings an innate understanding of the Sephardic experience to his works. When Raphael was three years old, his family moved to Israel, settling in Netivot, a small town with a predominantly Moroccan and Sephardic population. In this atmosphere, the family retained its traditions, and young Raphael assimilated the vivid colors, delicate filigree, and intricate mosaics characteristic of his heritage, which distinguish his style. Later, influences from Israel, especially Jerusalem motifs, informed his work.

    If any family member influenced his artistic leanings, it was his mother, he muses in retrospect. "She was always doing colorful decorating and changing the furnishings at home, and there were Sephardic and Moroccan artifacts in the house." However, he recalls, his family did not encourage his dreams of an artistic career.

    One of Israel's leading artists today, Abecassis draws primitive figures, with no attempt at realism; yet the faces have expression-smiles, frowns, wide eyes. The bodies move-they float, dance, hunch over, walk in typical Middle Eastern poise with hands behind their backs. The more you look, the more you see. A naïf human figure blends into a dove, whose tail becomes a striped tallit, with edges symbolizing Jerusalem's ramparts. Some or all of these symbols appear in Abecassis's work: Judaic and Kabbalistic symbolism-doves, menorahs, amorphous angels, righteous people, fish, Stars of David, prayer shawls, Jerusalem's ramparts and domes, Sabbath candles, kiddush cups, tefillin, Hebrew calligraphy, and Jacob's ladders. And color, mostly brilliant jewel tones, also characterizes his style.

    While painting is the basis of his creative activities, he has delved into numerous other media. He showed his first sculptures in 1991 at ArtExpo, an annual international art exhibition in New York. "I wanted to give expression to my ideas in a new medium," he says, "to translate my work into something people could feel and touch." His three pieces, the Peace Dove, a Floating Couple, and a Hanukiah, three-dimensional works excerpted from his paintings, embody his charm, wit, and spirituality.

    He subsequently designed a ceramic seder set, a seder plate, matzo dish, and Elijah's cup, using his appealing art naïf symbols. Meanwhile, he created four Haggadot over the years, most recently one based on his paintings for the traveling exhibit honoring Jerusalem 3000 last year. Besides his Haggadot, he has produced several Megillot Esther for private collections. Incidentally, he is a master of Hebrew calligraphy and a certified scribe qualified to write the parchments for tefillin or mezuzot or even a Torah.

    Working in sterling silver, he created a line of Judaica, mezuzah covers, dreidels, Shabbat and Yom Tov match boxes. And he has also designed embroideries, including parochot (Torah ark curtains) for two Los Angeles synagogues, challah covers, and sets of tallit and tefillin bags.

    He has also created a group of decoupages, paper cuts in multiple layers depicting Jewish scenes-wedding, bar mitzvah, the home-featuring his customary figures and symbols. He assembles the several layers-usually six-of cut-outs, which, when framed, appear three dimensional. Smaller than his paintings, they are popular for homes with limited wall space.

    "Something within pushes me to creation," Abecassis says.

    Drawn to visual images, he frequented the movies as a youngster and imagined himself a motion picture director. "I wanted to go to a theatrical school, and I kept diaries with ideas for movies when I was in high school," he said. When his parents objected, he set the idea aside. In school he doodled, and during his military service in 1974, he sketched pictures of soldiers.

    He was working as an electrician after his military service when he saw an ad for the art school at the College of Education in Beersheva. He applied for admission only to be asked to bring his portfolio. "I didn't know how to hold a pen," he said, "but I wanted to learn. I told them, 'my works are very big, they're hard to carry, I'll show you later.'" While this ingenuity is typical of his quick wit, basic integrity is also an Abecassis trait. He made good on his promise when he invited the art school director to an exhibit of his work at the Beersheva Central Library in 1986.

    His work appeared in the Hervé Art Gallery in Paris in 1980, then in galleries and museums throughout Israel and in the United States and Canada. Among the private collections holding his work are those of former US Vice President Dan Quayle (a gift from the previous Israeli Prime Minister Shamir) and Prime Minister Philipe Gonzales of Spain.

    How did Abecassis select a religious direction for his art? "I was about to get married," he recalls, "and when I saw the rabbinate's official ketuba, I couldn't give it to my bride, so I made one for her. Then I got orders from other people for similar ketubot. That was the turning point-when I decided to concentrate on Judaica instead of the abstract art I learned in school." Since then he has created personalized ketubot on commission and a standard fill-in form, which he will complete with a bride and groom's specific information. "Everything I do has to have some connection to tradition or religion," he says.

    In the spring of 1990, Yeshiva University Museum in New York City mounted an Abecassis exhibition featuring selections from his illuminated parchment manuscripts for the Psalms of David and a suite of eight original serigraphs depicting the Song of Songs, which have been described as images that evoke music. "If you look and listen, you can almost hear the sounds of joy and religious fervor emanating from his paintings," says Linda Shamah, of Adine Fine Arts, his representative in New York.

    "He has a kind of innocence," says Miriam Schlam of Amli Gallery in Jamaica Estates, New York. "It's sophisticated folk art, uniquely his own style," she continued. "He's very creative and whimsical, but, above all, he is spiritual."

    At the Haifa Museum opening exhibit of Song of Songs, Professor M. L. Mendelson of Bar Ilan University commented on the symbols: "the ladders, angels and doves connecting the upper and lower worlds; the sun, crescent moon and stars representing the cosmos; Menorot, Hebrew letters and Kabbalistic trees and geometrical patterns-the tradition: pomegranates, palm trees and the stalk of barley-the natural world. The colors, too, are symbolic: white for purity, gold for holiness, blue for the upper spaces of sky and cosmos connecting the supernatural and natural world, green for the world of plants and red for strong human emotions."

    As the inner push continues, Abecassis has completed another stained glass project, the "Twelve Tribes of Israel" for Zvi LaZadeek Synagogue in Deal, New Jersey. It consists of twelve arched, vertical windows and a horizontal archway over the door. Unfortunately for the public, these windows are inside the synagogue. There, with back lighting, they serve to inspire the congregation.

    Raphael Abecassis smiles a lot. He smiles as he works, delighted with his art as an expression of his spirituality. He also takes great pleasure in his family-his wife, two sons, a daughter, his new grandchild, parents and siblings. Watching his twelve-year-old son sketching, he remembers his own childhood, and he has more to smile about. The smiles of Abecassis flow through his work and into the hearts of those who see it and join in his joyful celebration of Judaism.

Judith Broder Sellner, a free-lance writer living in New York, writes frequently about Israeli arts and culture for internationally circulated publications.