On the architecture of the ephemeral: The Eternal Sukkah of the Jahalin tribe

ABSTRACT

Leading up to the 2014 festival of Sukkot, the Sala-Manca Artists’ Group, directors of the Mamuta Art and Media Centre at Hansen House, decided to create a public sukkah on the Hansen grounds as a temporary dwelling for its activities during the holiday. Rather than constructing an extravagant or innovatively designed sukkah, Sala-Manca, together with Itamar Mendes-Flohr and Yeshayahu Rabinowitz, chose to delve into the sukkah’s charged meaning in the Israeli context and to highlight the temporary nature of the structure and its associations with exile, thus evoking connotations related not only to Jewish history but also to the current Israeli context and proposing a contemporary reading of the sukkah, both as a concrete object and as a symbol. A structure from the Jahalin Bedouin community, refugees from the Negev (Israel) on the Jerusalem-Jericho Road, is therefore purchased, dismantled, and reassembled on the grounds of the Hansen House. This article discusses The Eternal Sukkah project in its historic, political, and cultural context, and in the context of the history of Israeli art. I deal with the relations between the Jewish festival of Sukkot, Bedouin architecture, and Israeli ethno-politics, as expressed in this project in which I was also involved as artist.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Diego Rotman is a lecturer at the Arts School, Theatre Studies Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and at the Bezalel Art Academy. His current research deals with narratives of reconstruction and deconstruction of the Jewish house in Eastern Europe as reflected in post-Holocaust Yiddish Theatre and in Israeli Contemporary Art. Rotman is also an interdisciplinary artist, and a curator and member of the Sala-manca artists group in Jerusalem and co-director of the Mamuta Art and Research Center at the Hansen House. His publications include papers in Studies in Contemporary Jewry (2017), Yerushalaymer almanakh (2008), Zmanim – rivon lehistoria (2007) and in the books Bridges of Knowledge: Campus-Community Partnerships in Israel, edited by Daphna Golan, Jona Rosenfeld, Zvika Orr; Do Not Banish Me. A New Study of The Dybbuk, edited by Dorit Yerushalmy and Shimon Levy (2009, Hebrew). He co-edited with Lea Mauas The Ethnography Department of the Museum of the Contemporary (2017). He has co-edited with Ronen Eidelman and Lea Mauas Heara – Independent Art in Jerusalem at the Beginning of the 21st Century (2014). His book The Stage as a Temporary Home: On Dzigan and Shumacher Theater (1921–1980) will be published in 2017 in Hebrew by Magnes University Press.

Notes

1. Note that because Jews, most of them artists, came to live in the Palestinian Houses of Ein Hod, the former Palestinian inhabitants of Ein Hod relocated to a new village named Ein Chud on a nearby mountaintop from which their former village and homes are visible. See: Yacobi (2008) and Jabareen (2008).

2. From the text published for the exhibition. See Sala-Manca (2015).

3. Yishuv means “settlement” and the term refers to the body of Jewish residents in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel.

4. Rachel Yana’it was a very active figure in the Labour Movement, an educator, a writer and the wife of the second President of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. See Zerubavel (2008, 321).

5. There were few exceptions, such as Jakob Steinhardt, who through his work identified with the Arab refugees problem probably as early as 1948, and Mordechai Ardon, who also dealt with the issue.

6.

The Interim Agreements between Israel and the PLO divided the West Bank into three categories: Area A, currently comprising about 18 percent of the land in the West Bank … ; the Palestinian Authority (PA) is endowed with most governmental powers in this area. Area B comprises approximately 22 percent of the West Bank and encompasses large rural areas; Israel retained security control of the area and transferred control of civil matters to the PA. Area C covers 60 percent of the West Bank … Israel has retained almost complete control of this area, including security matters and all land-related civil matters, including land allocation, planning, construction and infrastructure. The PA is responsible for providing education and medical services to the Palestinian population in Area C … Civil matters remained under Israeli control in Area C and are the responsibility of the Civil Administration. (http://www.btselem.org/area_c/what_is_area_c, Accessed July 15, 2015)

7. About the inversion of roles or power relations between researcher and informant see Bilu (1998).

8. NIS 6000. The rest of the original budget (NIS 4000) was used for transportation, the constructor/engineer permit needed to allow public to enter this public sukkah and symbolic fees for the participant artists, and for the future storage of the sukkah.

9. “Jerusalem Development Authority”. Accessed July 13, 2015, http://www.jda.gov.il/template/default_e.aspx?Cid=21.

10. Abu Suleiman offered to dismantle the booth, but the artists refused, arguing that they wanted to do it themselves, and that they had to make marks in the house in order to reconstruct it correctly.

11. Jeremy Milgrom's Facebook page, posted October 8, 2014, https://www.facebook.com/jeremy.milgrom.

12. Here and Now is a group composed of 40 members, supporters of the museum. They do not need to have any specific knowledge of art but have to be willing to donate an annual amount of $5,000 to be part of this group.

13. Most of those reactions were expressed in the opening panel of The Eternal Sukkah project as reactions to the artists’ expression of their desire to sell the sukkah to a museum. The entire session was videotaped and is part of the artists’ archive.

14. Since the acquisition of the sukkah, the Sala-Manca Group, in the context of the Mamuta Art Center, has organized a screening of a film for children and a performance of the clown duo Yuval and Tal as part of the Puppet's Van Theater project, in addition to the screening of the documentary about the sukkah.

15. Critical, political and engaged art has indeed been created and performed in Israel through different independent platforms, art collectives, artists, and art centres, such as the collective Artists Without Walls, the Digital Art Centre in Holon, He`arat shulayim Art Journal and He`arat Art Events, and through the works of artists like Yael Bartana and Public Movement. See Eilat et al. (2009); Eidelman, Mauas, and Rotman (2014).

16. Online version: http://www.haaretz.co.il/gallery/art/.premium-1.2682035.

17. Eldad (2015).

18. “The complex spatio-temporalities encoded in the sukkah resemble what […] Foucault has termed a heterotopia,” argues Hasan-Rokem,

an inverted reflection of a social situation replete with condensed meanings […] Thus, for a week every year, this object […] is constructed carrying within it the cultural associations of both a utopian religious center in Jerusalem as the goal of pilgrimage and the heterotopian huts of the wanderers in the desert. (Hasan-Rokem 2012, 164)

19. Sala-manca Group's Facebook page, posted July 13, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/salamancagroup.