Both horror and hope infuse Sarit Khen’s fused-glass sculpture “The Flowers Will Bloom Again.” On its left side, two colorless, windowless homes line a dirt path dotted with blood. On its right, a tree forms a canopy over bright blue, orange, purple and yellow dwellings with windows overlooking lush grass and vibrant red anemones.
Since Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel’s border communities on Oct. 7, massacring 1,200 people and taking an estimated 240 hostages, the Sunnyvale artist has felt so overwhelmed with emotion that she’s found it hard to create new work.
“I couldn’t breathe deep for weeks,” said Khen, who is from Israel. “My heart was heavy and hurting and full of worries and sadness and anger.”
Khen experienced a renewed sense of creative purpose, however, when she learned that artists were being asked to donate pieces for an exhibit and online auction to benefit Kibbutz Kissufim, one of the communities devastated on that black Shabbat. The exhibit, titled “Yearning for Home,” opened Monday at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto and will be on display through Feb. 4. More than 75 pieces will be available for online bidding on through Feb. 8. (Donations can also be made directly to the kibbutz.)
The artwork includes paintings, sculptures, pottery, embroidery and beadwork by mostly Bay Area artists. Also for sale are pieces by two members of Kibbutz Kissufim, the farm collective founded in 1951 near the Gaza border that will receive all auction proceeds.
At least eight of Kissufim’s approximately 300 members and six Thai laborers were murdered at the kibbutz on Oct. 7, according to the exhibit website. More than 15 soldiers died in battles there with terrorists.
The fate of 86-year-old Shlomo Mansour, who was kidnapped from his home and taken to Gaza, remains unclear. Kibbutz buildings suffered heavy damage, and survivors have been evacuated to a hotel in the Dead Sea for an unknown length of time after losing everything.
The organizers of “Yearning for Home” — UnXeptable, the Palo Alto JCC and its Israeli Cultural Connection group — chose to fundraise for Kissufim (which means “yearning” in Hebrew) because of its bond with the Bay Area. The kibbutz has long supported youth from the Bay Area serving in the Israel Defense Forces as “lone soldiers,” offering them a home away from home.
Sunnyvale artist and art teacher Taly Shemy came up with the idea for the fundraiser with Neri Choma, one of her adult students and a co-founder of UnXeptable, the Bay Area-based grassroots group of Israeli expatriates.
“The willingness to participate was amazing,” said Shemy, who teaches art at South Peninsula Hebrew Day School. “Many of the artists did work that portrayed some kind of hope, of life that can be rebuilt. All these kibbutzim that were so brutally attacked were places you can think of like sanctuaries. They are very peaceful, and the destruction that affected them so badly is just heartbreaking.”
Many of the artists did work that portrayed some kind of hope, of life that can be rebuilt.
Shemy has several pieces in the exhibit, including a new mixed media one. She based “Lazy Afternoon” on a photograph taken of Kibbutz Kissufim before Oct. 7. The artwork shows a house with a bicycle parked outside, a familiar and idyllic kibbutz scene. But the image echoes with foreboding: Gray fills parts of the sky, while swaths of red stretch across a tangled tree and smear parts of the building’s exterior.
“I wanted to give it a little bit of a feeling of the destruction without doing it too obviously and too hard,” said Shemy, who grew up on a kibbutz in central Israel and feels strongly connected to kibbutz life and to restoring the parts of it destroyed by terrorists.
Orit Gliksman, a Kissufim resident, donated 10 pieces to the auction. One of her acrylics on canvas, simply titled “Joy,” depicts a fragmented face created from dozens of multicolored shapes. Gliksman’s description of the art reads, “Happy for the opportunity to be alive.”
Khen, the glass artist, pondered her sculpture for more than a month. Once she started cutting pieces of glass and assembling them, she said, “I couldn’t stop. I didn’t stop for a minute, I was so into it.”
“The Flowers Will Bloom Again” is meant to resemble an undulating ocean wave, with the part of the freestanding work that represents pain rolling into the section that signifies hope. “Everything came right from my heart,” she said. “It was a very healing process to create it.”