Leon Fenster’s giant mural outside the JW3 Centre became an instant landmark when it was unveiled nearly two years ago, a proclamation of the vibrancy of Anglo-Jewry in one of the capital’s main thoroughfares. Now he brings his distinctive Jew-de-vivre to a new project that took seven years to complete – his illustrated Haggadah, titled A Living Tapestry.
“Every year, when Pesach was on the horizon, I would think, ‘Am I ready to release it?’ And I’d think ‘No, there is more I want to add – keep going for another year.’”
Its 144 pages teem with colourful scenes and vignettes that span Jewish history and cultures. Its often playful style – which he calls “kaleidoscopic” – masks the amount of thought that has gone into its imagery. “I try to pack every artwork with as much detail as I can so that every time you go back to it you will find something new,” he says.
“One of the reasons I love it so much is that there is this great approach to storytelling. The Haggadah almost never tells the Pesach story from beginning to end except for one small part. It keeps attacking the story we know from different angles.
“There is a great possibility for the Haggadah and the Seder to be an adventure because it is so fast-paced, every page is totally different. In a way the artwork is trying to do the same thing. Every time you turn a page, there is something new and surprising,” he says.
He actually began in the middle, first illustrating the festive meal that traditionally divides the two halves of the Haggadah recitation. His pictorial spread is a “magical landscape”, a collage of Jews from different eras and different parts of the globe all sitting at their tables, a representation of collective connection that transcends time and space. There’s a group of astronauts at their floating extra-terrestrial table in one corner, a party of comic-book Jewish superheroes celebrating in another. Another table assembles Union soldiers from the American Civil War, elsewhere the participants are figures from the Bird’s Head Haggadah, one of the most famous illuminated medieval manuscripts.
And on a table perched on the roof of one of the world’s oldest synagogues, the Altneu, the reputed creator of the Golem, the Maharal of Prague, dines with his creation. “He is teaching the Golem to be human, how to hold a knife and fork.” In his commentary over the page, Fenster explains the idea behind the choice of images.
By retelling the story of Pesach we are meant to become part of it. Fenster joyfully collapses the distance of the past as he brings characters together. In his depiction of the Crossing of the Red Sea, a kind of national pageant made up of famous Jews throughout history passes through the gap in the waves.
It was, he says, “like a Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover moment – they have all those cut-outs of famous people throughout history. This is the Pesach version”. Amid the typically eclectic cast , you’ll spot Marc Chagall and Lucian Freud, drawn from their self-portraits, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen – as well as Kyle, the Jewish boy from the satirical cartoon series South Park.
Leon Fenster at work (Credit: Louise Morris)[Missing Credit]
A page from the pictorial Haggadah that was seven years in the making[Missing Credit]
Above the walls of waves, you’ll also see some horses leaping in the air – reflecting his use of rabbinic sources. “There is a midrash that says the horses of Pharaoh’s army intentionally led them into the water, sacrificed themselves to save the people. So they go down in Midrash as heroic figures. I have got them jumping over the sea in celebration of coming back to life and sharing in our Pesach singing with us.”
A Living Tapestry, however, is not the 39-year-old artist’s first Haggadah. That came out around six years ago, its illustrations inspired by the city of Beijing, where he lived for several years.
Having begun his career as an architect, he had gone to China for professional reasons but all the time he had been creating artworks “imagining what architecture could be in an ideal world – one of those projects was looking at what a style of Jewish architecture might be.”
It was out there that “someone asked if they could exhibit some of those works and some other pieces I had done. And that went really well. So I became an artist.” He came back to London, but returned to China, this time to concentrate on his art. “Every day was an adventure there, discovering this society that was based on radically different assumptions to ours. Every time you walked around the corner there was some new surprise.”
All his art is “a form of storytelling really. If I am drawing an entire city, it is really telling the story of that city. If making a ketubah, it will be telling the story of that couple around the text.”
In a conversation with a friend about one of his works, on Beijing, which “tells a story but not in a linear way but as if in a dream, one thing leading to the next, I thought, ‘You know what, the Haggadah is just like that, I should make a Haggadah.’”
Then the opportunity came. “There was a very good friend of mine, Michael Cohen, who was living in Beijing, he was a big pillar of the Jewish community and the Moishe House. He left Beijing and sadly died when he went back to the States.
“His parents came to China to learn about his life there and they said they wanted to do something in his memory… In a taxi ride we had, stuck in Beijing traffic, we thought, ‘What if we make a Haggadah.” It is basically the Haggadah he would have wanted to use as someone who loved exploring new cultures combined with his own Jewish culture.
“It is as if for one night the whole of Beijing is taking part in our Seder. The city becomes a character in the Haggadah in some ways.”
The Beijing Haggadah, which came out six years ago, is now sold out. His head swarmed with ideas for others. “‘Truth be told, I have about ten different haggadot in my head that I’d like to make. I’d like to make a London Haggadah, I’d like to make a New York Haggadah”.
While he began working on A Living Tapestry in the Chinese capital, it was not long before he moved from there. He received a request from the Jewish community of Taiwan to come and take over from its elderly rabbi who was no longer able to lead it himself. As a madrich of the Masorti youth movement Noam, Fenster had been schooled in Jewish leadership skills but was unsure whether to accept the offer.
“But a month later I read that the first case of Covid had reached Beijing so I called them and said I am coming.”
He spent three years leading services, helping with life cycle events and doing some teaching there before resettling in London.
His travels must have reinforced the cosmopolitan spirit that dances through the pages. Immediately before the Ten Plagues, there is an invented city-scape made of different houses – each a drawing of a Jewish home from different times and different places, Baghdad, Istanbul, Amsterdam, which reinforce the sense of a global people. Look closely and you will see a splash of red on the front doorposts of each home, symbolic of the blood the Israelites were ordered to daub on the dwellings so that the Angel of Death would pass over as he struck down the Egyptian first-born.
The artist's giant mural outside JW3 Centre, in London[Missing Credit]
[Missing Credit]
[Missing Credit]
In the declaration of the “bread of affliction”, Haggadot often, naturally, show a matzah. But rather than the actual food, Fenster shows boxes of the manufactured product from communities around the world that have come to define the contemporary Pesach.
The celebratory song Dayenu is presented in a theatrical scene where each line performed on the stage of the “Dayenu Theatre” is represented by an accompanying prop. As well as the historic events for which we traditionally give thanks in the Haggadah, some of the props indicate future episodes in the history of the Jewish people that also might elicit gratitude – such as the ship the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II sent to rescue Jews expelled by the Spanish Inquisition or the set of the comedy Seinfeld, which marks “Jewish integration into American pop culture”. Meanwhile, Seder participants are invited to come up with their own “Dayenu moments” in discussion.
One of Fenster’s challenges was over the size of the book so that it would be “big enough to appreciate the artwork but not too big that everybody’s elbows hit each other”.
Small details can be crucial to the understanding. Illustrating the passage that contains the line “in every generation they rise to destroy us”, there is a procession of Jewish figures who at first appear modern in their dress. Unusually, when vivid colour is the norm in the book, they are drawn in shades of grey – except for an item in red or more often yellow: it signifies an item of clothing that at some period of history Jews were forced to wear, up to the yellow star of the Nazi era.
To produce the Haggadah, he secured the sponsorship of Mem Global, the umbrella body for the Moishe Houses for young Jews in their twenties and thirties in different cities. He and Michael Cohen lived in a Moishe House in Beijing. But don’t expect this to be his last word on the Pesach story.
“As soon as I finished this, my first thought was I want to start working on the next one. If I could spend the rest of my life just making Haggadot, I’d be very content. I could do this for ever.”
Leon Fenster’s Haggadah is available through leonfenster.com/newhaggadah
Ordered copies can be collected in Edgware on Sunday morning
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