Zoya Cherkassky’s Aachen Passover Haggadah: A Subversive Illuminated Manuscript

1 Joshua Simon and Ori Dessau, “Ruti and Zoya Built a House,” in A Doll’s House [catalogue, Israel Museum], curator Sarit Shapira (Jerusalem, 2000), 62–64. Zoya Cherkassky’s Aachen Passover Haggadah is a contemporary manuscript that continues the centuriesold tradition of Jewish artists illustrating this text. However, whereas the work reproduces the original text, the graphics constitute a determined, albeit subtle, act of rebellion. The manuscript consists of fifty unbound pages with most of the handwritten text in black ink and the key words in red. The illustrations are in red and black, with occasional highlights of gold and brown, rendered in ink, watercolors, and gouache. The sheets (each measuring 28 × 41 cm) are encased in a black velvet box. Zoya Cherkassky was born in 1976 in Kiev, Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union, and immigrated to Israel in 1991. She studied at the School of Visual Theater in Jerusalem and at the Hamidrashah School of Art, Bet Berl College, near Kfar Saba, from 1996 to 1999. She then collaborated with her former fellow student, Ruti Nemet (b. 1977). As Ruti & Zoya, they were featured in an exhibition, A Doll’s House, in 2000 at the Israel Museum,1 for which they constructed a domestic environment inhabited by dolls representing themselves and others. During 2001–2003 Cherkassky worked on a project entitled Collectio Judaica, featuring objects with visual images adopted from Jewish tradition, but also shaped by anti-Semitic conventions,2 which was sponsored by the Rosenfeld Gallery in Tel Aviv, where it was first exhibited. The artifacts included a gold ornament based on the Nazi yellow star, a pillow decorated with an image of the Wandering Jew, and a series of grotesque “Jewish” dolls.3 Similarly, she created Passover plates with images recalling a blood libel: the plates contain a deceptively restrained design showing a bound child, with hints of blood appearing as red spots in the background. In these works, which are exquisitely designed and produced, the negative becomes aesthetic and the iconic becomes an object of sarcasm. The Aachen Passover Haggadah, the last and most complex part of Collectio Judaica, is now held in the Israel Museum (fig. 1). Cherkassky began working on the Haggadah during a stay in Aachen, Germany, as a participant in an artist exchange program between Germany and Israel. The Israeli artists stayed in North Rhine-Westphalia in October–November 2001.4 In contrast to the other artists, who avoided dealing with the painful history of Jews and the Germans, Cherkassky related to the issue of anti-Semitism, albeit in a complex and multilayered way. The most evident visual source for the Aachen Haggadah is the Birds’ Head Haggadah, an illuminated