Israel's ‘palace’ of art and architecture in Ma’aleh Adumim marks 15 years

A 20-minute walk or a seven-minute bus ride from my home in Ma’aleh Adumim takes me to the only museum of fine arts in the West Bank.

The Moshe Castel Museum of Art sits like a white crown atop a ridge affording panoramic views across the Judean Hills toward the landscape surrounding Mount Scopus.

As our city of 42,000 residents celebrates its 50th anniversary, and the Castel Museum marks its 15th, I can barely imagine the desolate windswept spot this was in 1981 when it caught Moshe Castel’s eye while driving to the Dead Sea with his wife, Bilha.

Born in Jerusalem in 1909, the artist was no country bumpkin. He’d lived in Paris and New York. Yet he was so taken by the barren beauty of the location that he submitted a request to the Israel Lands Authority to purchase the six dunams (1.5 acres) beneath his feet that day “to establish a museum and live in the area.”

In a handwritten note to his beloved Bilha, dated December 1982, Castel referred to the future edifice he’d sketched out as “a palace in Ma’aleh Adumim, our Taj Mahal.”

Castel died in 1991, and Bilha spent 25 years bringing his dream to life, in partnership with prizewinning Israeli architect David Resnick (Reznik), whose iconic Hebrew University and Brigham Young Mormon University buildings are visible from the Castel Museum’s immense windows.

Bilha’s house next door, empty since her death in 2016, will be opened to the public for free tours on January 4-8, for the first time.

Inside the magnificent museum, which originally displayed 45 Castel creations, visitors can see 80 pieces accompanied by explanations in Hebrew and English. Its core mission – not its only mission as I’ll explain below – is to make Moshe Castel’s name as prominent among the public as his artwork already is.

“People don’t know Moshe Castel by name, but they know his art because it is everywhere. The minute you turn on your TV to watch the 8 o’clock news, you see Moshe Castel’s creations behind the president in his official residence and behind the prime minister in the Knesset,” said museum director-general Hagai Sasson, referring to the signature Castel basalt reliefs installed on those walls since the 1960s.

“So now we have to make that connection between the man and his art.”

Castel’s works also hang in the Vatican, London’s Tate Gallery, the San Francisco Museum of Art, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Rockefeller Center, among other domestic and international locations. Castel was the only artist ever to have a solo exhibition at the Knesset.

Yet despite his commercial success, Castel never became an Israeli household name. He never received the Israel Prize, never had a one-man show at the Israel Museum, and was last featured in a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1973.

One reason for this apparent discrimination seems to be that Castel wasn’t part of the in crowd. Despite entering the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts at age 13, honing his skills in prewar Paris, helping to put Safed on the artistic map, and launching a new artistic movement, Castel was a Sabra of Sephardi stock, whereas the Tel Aviv elite favored peers of European Ashkenazi extraction. Furthermore, he sowed resentment and jealousy by achieving worldwide sales without the involvement of Israeli middlemen.

Perhaps more significantly, his most celebrated works – which he began creating from indigenous materials in the 1950s – were often considered “too Jewish” in their abstract emphasis on the Torah, the Western Wall, the Temple priests, the shofar, biblical phrases, and other religious images.

“In almost any Israeli museum, you will see art created in the pre-state period by Reuven Rubin, Nahum Gutman, Siona Tagger, or Yohanan Simon... and you will see contemporary artists. There’s almost nothing from the 1950s to 1980s, and this was the golden age of Castel’s creativity,” said Alek D. Epstein, artistic director and curator of the Castel Museum.

When Sasson became director-general two and a half years ago, he recruited Epstein to help broaden the museum’s Castel collection and to highlight the works of other important but unrecognized Israeli artists of Castel’s generation and beyond.

“Castel created works of art dedicated to the great history of the Jewish people in Eretz Yisrael, from the stones of Eretz Yisrael, while sitting in Eretz Yisrael. He was a giant – not a lone giant but a giant among a generation of founding fathers of Israeli art,” said Epstein.

“And now, in the museum that bears his name, we acknowledge other artistic giants of that period who suffered discrimination,” added Sasson.

The Castel Museum recently hosted the first solo exhibition of Yitzhak (Isaac) Frenel, with whom Castel studied in the 1920s and established the first artists’ quarter in Safed; and an exhibition of Mordechai Avniel, who studied at Bezalel around the same time as Castel and whose previous exhibition in Israel took place in 1971. Shmuel Bonneh (1930-1999), a prizewinning but little-known artist of biblical landscapes, whose work was last exhibited at the Haifa Museum of Art in 1971, is another artist who got a posthumous chance to shine this year at the Castel Museum.

Sasson and Epstein also give space to noteworthy contemporary artists ignored by mainstream museums ostensibly because of their political views or their domicile over the Green Line.

Through January 21, for example, the museum is displaying paintings of Mordechai Lipkin of Gush Etzion, killed by a terrorist in 1993 at age 38. His widow and children attended the opening of this first-ever exhibition of his works in Israel.

In 2023, the museum debuted the Moshe Castel Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Israeli Art. Each of the six laureates thus far – Zeev Kun, Yehuda Armoni, Dan Livni, Jacob Gildor, Oded Feingersh, and Valery Kurov – developed their own styles within the genre of figurative art.

“The aim of this prize is to build an alternative to contemporary trends, which are quite hostile to figurative painters, especially those deeply rooted in Jewish and Israeli topics,” Epstein explained.

“This is not only an art museum; it has a civic and national mission,” he emphasized.

Every exhibition at the museum has some connection to Castel’s life story and national identity.

In homage to his Jerusalem roots, last spring there was an exhibition dedicated to Jerusalem in Israeli art, which included 58 works in commemoration of 58 years of the reunification of Jerusalem. On the 76th anniversary of Israeli independence, the museum presented 76 self-portraits of Israeli artists.

Last April, the museum mounted works of 18 Holocaust survivor artists, drawing attention to the fact that Castel managed to return to Israel from Paris in 1940.

“Some of these survivor artists are still alive, and it was of special importance for the museum team to put their names and their art at the front line of the Israeli artistic landscape,” Epstein said.

Among the upcoming temporary exhibitions, a collection of paintings by 20 present-day female artists from Ma’aleh Adumim and other Judean settlements will be displayed throughout January.

“I always ask myself, ‘If Castel were still alive, would he thank me for what we are doing? Would he be satisfied with the artwork we are bringing?’” Epstein said.

Walking through the magnificent two-story museum with Sasson, Epstein, and retired former director Eli Raz, now its chief guide, I felt sure Castel would be proud that the building he sketched on paper has become a hub where underappreciated fine artists are given an opportunity to receive the recognition they deserve.

As for Bilha Castel, she’d no doubt be happy to see her labor of love attracting increasing numbers of visitors from across Israel, including, most recently, national figures such as President Isaac and First Lady Michal Herzog and MK Yuli Edelstein.

Raz described Bilha as a savvy businesswoman who shrewdly managed the sales of her husband’s works and tirelessly developed the architectural project in Ma’aleh Adumim.

“It took 25 years. She put all her energy, money, and creativity into it. She wanted the public to know Moshe Castel,” Raz said. “She could have put this museum in Tel Aviv or in Jerusalem, but she wanted it here, in the Judean Hills overlooking Jerusalem,” where her husband had stated his wish to see it built.

Though he began his career as a painter, often depicting the lives of Sephardi Jews in the Holy Land, the unique style most closely associated with Moshe Castel took decades to develop.

Inspired by the engraved basalt relief stones he saw in the 1st-century ruins of a Galilean synagogue, he began to mold images of ground basalt rock mixed with sand and glue, overlaid with rich reds, blues, and bronzes, and embellished with proto-Hebrew and Sumerian letters and symbols. The museum’s entry hall is dominated by a prime example of his massive basalt canvases, Priests at the Western Wall (1990).

“He was a trailblazer in the use of domestic materials,” said Raz. “It was important to him that the ‘new art’ of Israel would be made from the land itself.”

In the same spirit, it is important to the visionaries of the Moshe Castel Museum of Art to provide a public platform for the unsung men and women behind the history of Israeli art. To that end, Epstein welcomes relevant loaned pieces from private collectors.