An exhibition for Independence Day showing love for the Israeli flag
The new show follows a collection of photographs of women Harpaz took to mark Israel’s 70th Independence Day, and The Eyes of the State project she presented two years earlier.
By BARRY DAVISAn Israeli flag [Ilustrative](photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Some people just know what they want to do with their lives from the get-go. Others, and I’d include myself in the second category, take a while before they manage to home in on what really turns them on, and what they’d like to do with the lion’s share of their waking hours.It took Judith Harpaz a couple of decades or so to figure out real estate wasn’t really her cup of tea. It also took a trip abroad to provide the spark, and appliance wherewithal, to launch her leap into the photographic unknown.“My partner in the real estate office in Jerusalem, who was a keen amateur photographer, lent me his camera before I went on a family visit to New York,” recalls the 61-year-old grandmother of four. “I took it and I fell in love with the sound, the click, of the camera shutter.”That was that.“I called my partner from New York. I told him that when I come back from New York, we are closing the real estate office and getting into photography,” says Harpaz. “He was really happy. It had been a dream of his for a long time. That did it for him too. Today we are both photographers.”Over the last decade or so, Harpaz has been clicking away merrily, following her muse through all sorts of thematic areas. Her latest offering is a 72-piece digital exhibition of Israeli flags, to mark the country’s 72nd anniversary.“For me, the flag is love,” she states simply. The new show follows a collection of photographs of women Harpaz took to mark Israel’s 70th Independence Day, and The Eyes of the State project she presented two years earlier.That is patently clear from the range of snaps on the My Israeli Flag website. Harpaz caught the national blue and white emblem in all sorts of places and in all manner of circumstances. There are stately settings with, for example, President Reuven Rivlin ensconced in the foreground. There’s a shot of the coffin of Shimon Peres draped in a flag in the forecourt of the Knesset.And there are plenty of quirky contexts, such as a miniature model Harpaz espied lying on the ground next to a strawberry, or the remnants of a flag high up on a pole that had been shredded almost beyond recognition by the elements. There are also shots taken on trips of Israeli flags, snapped in unlikely places around the globe.Harpaz never misses a trick, or an opportunity to catch our flag.“One day I went on a trip to [the Druze village] Beit Jan. There is a sewing workshop there where they make IDF uniforms. It is run by a local woman, and there are 230 women working there. I took a picture of a uniform with the chief of staff’s epaulets and the Israeli flag. It’s an amazing place,” she says.For Harpaz, the national emblem comes with hefty emotional and familial baggage.“This is the flag my mother made, from scraps of cloth, when she made aliyah in 1950,” she says proudly, showing me a family heirloom. Harpaz’s cultural backdrop takes in her maternal grandmother who was born in Iraq and met her Iraqi-born husband in Singapore while she was on a business trip selling spices. To get away from the ravages of World War Two, the couple subsequently relocated to Indonesia, where Harpaz’s mother was born. The latter survived a German forced labor in Indonesia before moving to the Netherlands where she met her husband. They made aliyah soon after the creation of Israel.With such a complex geographic and cultural substratum, Harpaz says, being a proud Israeli puts everything into a neat emotional context for her.“Yes, you could say that, for me, the flag is important,” she smiles. “The flag brings it all together for me.”For more information visit myisraeliflag.com.
![An Israeli flag [Ilustrative] (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)](https://images.jpost.com/image/upload/q_auto/c_fill,g_faces:center,h_537,w_822/438338 "An Israeli flag [Ilustrative]")