Stage Dressing

• According to a guide (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/time-well-spent.html ), themes for most of the cite-creation murals around the city were chosen by the people who live or work near them.
• Neighborhood merchants, she says, asked that the mural above Maayan Stub (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/transportation-mural.html ) show future transportation (light rail) replacing the past.
• The mural represents a stage backdrop being tightened into place. Perhaps the artists doubt that the dream will become reality. Or perhaps something else is meant. Or perhaps many things.

Copyright 2007 Jane S. Fox

Transportation Mural

• Above the Maayan Stub (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/retail.html )treasure house is another trompe l'oeil mural (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/fooled-my-eye.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/trompe-loeil.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/mural.html describe three others ).
• Its subject is transportation in Jerusalem, past and present.
• Look up and to the right as you walk west on Yafo from Ben Yehuda.
• (Note added 21 January 07) Then look again. The mural shows the picture as stage dressing.

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Fooled My Eye

• Only when I walked up the ben Yehuda Midrahov after dark did I notice another Trompe l'Oeil mural. (See http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/mural.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/trompe-loeil.html both, like this one, creations of http://www.cite-creation.fr/ Lyon, France.)
• Look left.
• Trompe.

Copyright 2006 Jane S Fox

Trompe L’Oeil

• Walk northwest down Agrippas from shouk Mahaneh Yehuda (away from the Ben Yehuda Midrahov and towards Binyanei HaUma) just past the point where the street changes its name to Shmuel Baruch. Turn around and look back towards the market.
• Ahead of you, on the left, a trompe l’oeil mural covers the wall of a five- story building. (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/mural.html describes another tompe l'oeil mural.) Along the bottom the painter has made a blue-flowered weed grow. To the right you see a portal in the stone wall, the lion of Judah on its lintel. A vendor displays fish. Another piles fruit on his table. The shouk stretches to imagined Judean Hills.
• On the ground floor of the building is a bakery. I blink. It is part of the mural.
• Far up on the wall, a woman leans, unmoving, over a railing to beat a rug. The pictured rail continues to reality. Around the building’s corner, a woman stands on her balcony. She is as real as the TV antenna on the roof, and she probably has a vacuum cleaner.
• The mural is the work of http://www.cite-creation.fr/ Lyon, France.
• If you come up the street from Sderot Ben Zvi before you see the shouk, you may think the picture more beautiful than the market itself. Though idealized, it is not more lovely.
• Trompe l'oeil fools the eyes but not the nose and ears. Mint, green onions, peaches, and the aroms of Iraqi cooking perfume the real market. People talk in tens of languages, while vendors shout instructions to porters, prices to potential customers, and greetings to old friends. (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/abundance.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/shesek.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/unexpected-february-entertainment.html )

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Mural

• Walking down Rehov Yafo from Shouk Mahaneh Yehudah (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/unexpected-february-entertainment.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/shesek.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/abundance.html ), past the bus stop and before Davidka Square, ahead of you to your right, you will see a five-story high mural, drawn to look like photographs on a bulletin board.
• On the left, are girls and women from the Alliance Israelite Universelle school, founded toward the end the nineteenth century to provide an education that combined Torah study with vocational training. For the girls, work with textiles was important to the curriculum. The school promised they would produce cloth as good as that from Damascus.
• On the right are the men and boys, who learned metalworking and other trades. One picture shows a workshop for painting and sculpture, but I have not yet discovered anything about those classes.
• French was the language of instruction.
• The same organization (Kol Yisrael Hkhaverim or Kiahkh) opened schools elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire and in Morocco.
• At the time, Jewish religious leaders warned that a secular education would draw children away from religion. Parents liked the school, it had an excellent principal, and its students learned well, so it succeeded. In one picture the girls, smiling for a class photograph, are bare-kneed in what look like 1940s school uniforms.
• One of the school’s two buildings was torn down. Its gate sits in the middle of a wide part of the sidewalk, about a half a block farther down Yafo, across Kiahkh Street. Set Paralell to Yafo, the gate is easy to miss. The other building is now a vocational school for haredi men.
• The mural is the work of http://www.cite-creation.fr/ Lyon, France. (See also http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/trompe-loeil.html ).

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox