Finding his track

Shimon Futterman is busy from dawn to dusk making his dream of a train exhibition come true.

By PEGGY CIDOR
Shimon Futterman with railways521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Shimon Futterman with railways521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
It’s a little after 8 a.m. and a chilly morning in Jerusalem’s First Station, once an Ottoman railway station and today a leisure and entertainment complex. On the center stage, a group of women practice yoga, and on the left, hidden behind the unfinished structures that will soon house the open market, is a large pavilion, painted white with glass doors on each side. Inside, a tall, slim man in his early 60s with blue eyes and short gray hair, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, reigns over incredible disorder.
Shimon Futterman is busy from dawn to dusk making his dream of a train exhibition come true.
Futterman was born into a religious-Zionist family in Jerusalem, which became more observant over the years, and eventually became haredi.
“I was sent to a religious elementary school, then to a yeshiva,” he recalls during a short break from the demanding work of the exhibition. “My path was clear, guided toward a strict religious life – but then, when I was about 13, I encountered [philosopher Baruch] Spinoza for the first time. It changed the course of my life dramatically.”
The young Futterman immersed himself in Spinoza’s theology, took off his kippa and eventually had to leave home. “I just couldn’t go on as expected from me. I couldn’t remain at home.”
He left Jerusalem for Eilat, then came back to his grandparents’ home, trying to balance himself between his parents’ wishes and his aspirations.
It went on this way, with ups and downs, until his army service – which, once finished, left him with a narrow choice as to where to go from there.
“My mother’s family, which fled to America from the Old City’s Jewish Quarter before 1948, invited me to come and work in their business there. It was a kind of bargain – keeping me away from eventually dropping out of the religious community, and still earning my living. Everything was ready, including a visa and a green card, for my flight, scheduled for October 7. But on the day before, the Yom Kippur War broke out and everything changed overnight.”
He pauses for a second, then adds that he came back from the war – during which he fought in Sinai – a very different person.
“I guess that I experienced, like so many others in that war, some trauma,” he explains, smoking a cigarette. “But I was not the kind of person to break down, probably because of all the things I experienced during those years I grew up away from home. I met someone who suggested that I study working with at-risk youth, and I went for it.”
After a while, he says, he intuitively realized he was also, in a way, a youth at risk who had managed to work his way out of the dangers around him. He completed his studies and immediately began to work with the youth who were hanging out around town, disconnected from their homes and families, dangerously exposed. Later, he focused more on the use of drugs among this group, and initiated a few innovative programs while working at a Jerusalem association against drug abuse .
But all these years, his real love was trains – which he collected, along with any item linked with railways, and installed in the attic of his Rehavia home. He can’t remember exactly when this passion began, but he recalls that somewhere back in elementary school, before the seeds of Spinoza took him away from his planned path, trains always attracted him.
All these years, he hoped a day would come when he could display his hobby to the general public.