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Michael Gallery
Tamar Wisemon
Artists Quarter (opposite General Artists Exhibition Hall), Safed Web: www.artists.co.il/michael Open Sun.-Thurs.: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.Fri.: 9 a.m.-1 p.m.
A vibrant, golden crown, surrounded by a delicately intricate wreath of curlicues and flowers, shines forth from the illuminated 2.4-meter-long scroll. Across the room, quill in hand, French scribe Michael Chouraqui painstakingly restores a 200-year-old Megillat Esther. Upon completion of the inscription, his wife Danielle will spend two months applying 24-carat gold leaf, and her artistic skills, to the weathered parchment.
The Chouraquis opened their gallery three years ago with just three manuscripts; a week later the first was sold. Michael calls their steady success since then nothing short of miraculous, given the present hard-hit tourist climate. Though most of their manuscripts (priced from $200 for the Doctor's Prayer, a short blessing commonly attributed to Maimonides, to $15,000 for a gilded megillah) are purchased for their artistic beauty, rather than for ceremonial use, Michael enthusiastically demonstrates his use of four types of halakhically accepted script (Sephardi, Ashkenazi, Lubatvitch, and Arizal, used by hasidim), offering visitors a stylus and inviting them to participate in the mitzvah of restoring a worn letter of the antique scroll.
Aside from their own work (megillot, ketubot, blessings and a micrography series of the Torah), the Michael Gallery also exhibits other artists. Only "Shomer Shabbat" art is on view - a carefully phrased distinction intended to include non-religious artists who agree to give them pieces that were not created on the Sabbath, so that the Chouraquis won't profit from work done on Shabbat. The emphasis is on all forms of Hebrew calligraphy, including micrography, papercuts and kabbalistic configurations, but the gallery also exhibits local folk art, photography and portraiture.
Good Taste
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