Born Berlin, October 9, 1923. Died Wallingford, October 27, 2008, aged 85.
December 4, 2008 11:47By
The striking artworks of Israeli sculptor Nechemia Azaz can be seen in synagogues, schools, hotels and offices in Israel, the UK and the USA.
His main British works were created for Carmel College, the Jewish boarding school in Oxfordshire, and synagogues in central London and Belfast. For his largely abstract works, he used stained glass, ceramics, wood and stone.
Born in Berlin, he was taken at three months to British-mandate Palestine, where his Zionist father, who changed his surname from Zeidman, worked in the vineyards of Zichron Ya’akov.
His parents disapproved of his artistic bent and it was not till he had served in the British Army in Europe from 1941-45 that he started to study art.
Apprenticed to Italian monumental stonemasons in Bologna in 1946, he left in 1947 to learn stained glassmaking in Amsterdam. From 1949-50 he studied in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
Returning to Israel, he served as an officer in the Israeli Army where he was inspired by the abstract beauty of the Negev desert. He also met his wife, Yaffa, whom he married in 1954.
He left to study ceramic chemistry in Holland for a year, then worked in London. In 1955 his work was exhibited to acclaim at the Wakefield Art Gallery, the first of several exhibitions.
In 1956 he settled in Beersheva, where he founded a pottery school at the Harsa ceramics factory. He produced his first major commission in 1958 for the Evening News offices in Tel Aviv — a large tiled mural showing a newspaper rolling off the press. In 1960 he made a vast double-sided concrete wall in relief for Tel Aviv’s Sheraton Hotel.
His first major American commission in 1962 was a pair of wrought iron doors for a synagogue museum in Greater Chicago, incorporating the
Hebrew lettering of a liturgical poem.
In 1963 his bronze Hands of Peace was installed over the main entrance of Chicago’s Loop Synagogue. This shows the outline of a raised pair of hands, juxtaposed with the Hebrew and English wording of the priestly blessing.
He moved to England in 1963 to keep his promise to Kopul Rosen, founding headmaster of Carmel College, who had died prematurely the year before, to design and make stained glass windows for the school’s new synagogue.
Settling with his family in nearby Wallingford, Azaz became artist in residence from 1963-65 and made all the synagogue artworks. The decorative windows were praised by architectural historian Nicholas Pevsner as “brilliant and innovative”. In 1999, two years after the school closed, the synagogue became a grade II listed building.
In 1965 he designed silver and bronze ark doors with a bronze candelabrum and everlasting light for Belfast’s new synagogue. He also began to make 117 stained glass windows — reduced to 36 — at Marble Arch Synagogue. The last was completed in 1982.
By dispensing with lead-framed sections, he made it easier to see the scenes of Jewish festivals pictured in the glass.
In 1972 he was asked by a former fellow-officer of the Palmach, Yitzhak Rabin, now Israel’s ambassador to the US, to sculpt an artwork for the Israel Hall at the Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. The result was a vast walnut panel, showing 43 musical instruments named in the Bible.
Other works include optical mobile sculptures at St Thomas’s Hospital, London, and the Warwick Arts Centre.
He is survived by his wife, Yaffa; two sons, Yehu and Tamir; daughter, Orit; and four grandchildren.
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