Evie Rote has an eye for the eye.
By day, she works with blind Jewish and Arab children in Haifa, Israel. Helping those kids thrive is a job Rote feels passionately about. But her other passion is photography, an art form one might think inaccessible to the visually impaired.
Rote doesn’t see it that way. Not only has she become a fine art photographer, she regularly brings the digital camera into her classroom, helping vision-impaired elementary- and preschool-age kids make discoveries about the world around them.
Over the years Rote has shown her work throughout Israel. Bay Area photography connoisseurs now have a chance to sample her art with a new exhibit, “Openings and Openness,” now on display at the Elizabeth S. and Alvin I. Fine Museum of San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El. The pictures will remain up through the summer.
Her photographs almost invariably depict the multicultural parade that is modern Israel. Rote loves contrasts, as in her image of a young Orthodox Jewish boy and old Arab Muslim man sitting side by side.
“That shot was taken in the Old City of Jerusalem on a trip with teachers,” she says by phone from her Haifa home. “We had no idea that a few meters away an uprising was happening.”
She’s referring to the second intifada, which broke out in 2000 around the time former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount. Rote was there, camera in hand.
She takes her camera everywhere because she never knows who or what she might run into — like the iconoclastic Jewish college grad traveling the length of Israel on camelback dressed like Lawrence of Arabia (she found him and took his picture).
“I feel like I’m in the center of the world here,” she says of her adopted homeland. “It’s been a love affair with Israel from the start.”
She got that start shortly after the end of the Six-Day War in 1967, when the San Francisco native made her first visit to the Jewish state.
Rote grew up attending the Hebrew school at Emanu-El and Camp Saratoga (now Camp Swig). An Israeli friend she met at camp convinced her to come to Israel, and at age 18, Rote made the trek for the first time, living on a kibbutz.
It wasn’t just any kibbutz, but Kibbutz Sde Boker, the Negev home of Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion. “I had dinner with Ben-Gurion one night,” she recalls, “and [his wife] Paula told me to be quiet so he could eat peacefully.”
She is also quick to add that while working in the kibbutz laundry, she ironed Ben-Gurion’s underwear.
Rote returned to the Bay Area to earn a master’s in special education, but she returned to Israel often, eventually marrying and settling in Haifa. She’s been working with the blind since 1982.
Between work and family (Rote has two grown children) she had plenty to do, but photography began to shift from casual hobby to serious avocation when her kids were young.
“I was taking pictures of family and nature,” she says. “Haifa has an art college, and I took two or three years of photography classes. That was fun. I totally neglected my family.”
Not only did she love taking pictures for herself, she found a way to introduce photography to vision-impaired children.
“With the coming of the digital camera, I’ve used photography a lot,” she says. “The kids range from low vision to totally blind. With kids who have some vision, photography becomes a way of stimulating and improving their vision. They really love looking at pictures of themselves.”
She brags about one 5-year-old child, blind in one eye and with only partial vision in the other eye. “He knows everything,” she says. “He can zoom. He knows how to push the button to get the last few pictures.”
Living in Haifa, Israel’s most integrated city, Rote believes strongly that Arabs and Jews can work and live together. She’s been living that ideal for years, not only working with Arab kids, but spending time in Gaza to work with blind children there.
She even worked out an exchange between the Gaza school for the blind and her own institution. That was before political conditions worsened, though she keeps in touch with the principal of the school in Gaza.
“I’ve always worked with Jews and Arabs,” she says, “Through my work I do my little bit of bringing people together, especially here.”
Rote will come home to San Francisco for an artist reception in July. She comes back to visit every summer, and even stayed for a while when things got ugly back in Israel. But eventually, she felt the lure of her adopted homeland.
“I needed a break from the intifada,” she says. “A break from the pessimism. But I feel much more optimistic again. I just live in my world, and hope.”
“Openings and Openness: Photography by Evie Rote” is on display at the Elizabeth S. and Alvin I. Fine Museum of Congregation Emanu-El, 2 Lake Street, S.F. Information: (415) 751-2535.