A Visual Tour of the Painted Sukkah - Chag Sameach!

Sukkah, Fishach, Southern Germany. Second half 19th c. Oil on wood, H: 200; W: 290; L: 290 cm, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Accession number: B05.0006 196/001

In the 19th century, Naftali and Zili Deller commissioned a local painter to paint the walls of their sukkah. Their son Abraham Deller and his wife Sofie erected the sukkah in the courtyard of their home in Germany every year until the Nazis came to power. In 1937 the sukkah was smuggled out of Germany and delivered to the Bezalel Museum in Jerusalem.

The central wall features a painting of Jerusalem with the Western Wall at its hub. This painting was copied from a lithograph by 19th-century Jerusalem artist Yehosef Schwartz. The other walls contain pictures of the village of Fischach and people from that period: on the right is Zili Deller waiting at the entrance to her home; on the back wall is the local baron, the patron of the village Jews, setting out to hunt. Painted within small frames in the background of the central and right-hand walls are depictions of Jewish holidays copied from prayer books printed in Sulzbach, Germany, in 1826.

Painted sukkah with a view of Jerusalem, late 19th century, Austria. Jewish Museum, Paris, France.

In his poem “The Jews,” Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000) bestows on us a full typology of the Jewish people—from the standpoints of both Jews themselves and outsiders. Some of those images remain with us: the Jew wearing a Turkish turban in a Rembrandt painting, the Chagall Jew holding a violin as he flies over rooftops, and other vivid images. In the middle of the poem, Amichai mentions a sukkah—his grandfather’s sukkah, in particular. Amichai turns the memory of the Israelites’ wanderings in the desert that the sukkah usually evokes on its head, and describes the sukkah as an object that itself remembers and reflects back to us the history of the Jews.

A Jewish man remembers the sukkah in his grandfather’s home

And the sukkah remembers for him

The wandering in the desert that remembers

The grace of youth and the tablets of the Ten Commandments

And the Golden Calf and the thirst and the hunger

That remembers Egypt.

The sukkah helps the Jews remember their history and their covenant with God. The image of the 19th century sukkah from the collection of the Paris Jewish Museum expresses this notion with its elaborate panels depicting not only images of an Austrian village, the dwelling of the owner of the sukkah, but also a view of Jerusalem, the walls of the old city, and the Decalogue.

I hope that this year you invite into your sukkah not only your friends and family but also those who are no longer with us yet remain part of our memories of the past. 

Szeged, Hungary, late 19th century - early 20th c. Oil on fabric, later glued on board. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. B09.0683-92; 177/037-177/045.

Seven of the nine boards feature the figures of the Ushpizin in contexts with which they are associated. The others depict Temple implements: the seven-branched candelabrum and the Levites’ washing basin. These two boards may have been added to the series in the belief that the Ushpizin will be present at the advent of the Messiah and the construction of the Third Temple.

Yerushalayim HaBnuya. Sukkah mural, private collection, Chicago, IL.