The legacy of Huvy Elisha: The quiet life of a Mea She’arim painter and matriarch

“My mother was an artist who defies categorization,” says Robert Elisha, as he strokes his long white beard.

Huvy Elisha (1927-2022) passed away three years ago. Robert’s decision to nurture his mother’s legacy with a new gallery comes with a personal mission to spread Torah words of wisdom, both overtly expressed and subtly encoded into every painting Huvy did over 40 years.

Robert strides across wood floors polished to a high sheen toward a painted scene straight from Torah. Huvy’s painting, The Spies, is a complexly detailed and sun-drenched desert scene, depicting the story of the spies sent by Moses to survey the land of Israel.

“For that particular piece, I had some important rabbinical scholars come to look at the painting. They looked very carefully at the tabernacle and Miriam’s Well. Then they asked: ‘What are boats doing there?’

“I told them that Huvy knew Miriam’s Well was vast, like a lake, and to avoid getting soaking wet, people had to shuttle by boat so they could cross between tribe and tribe.”

Robert explains how that came to be. “Shabbos was full of reading. My mother was fascinated by the parashat hashavua [weekly Torah portion].”

Ahuva Elisha signed her name with the moniker, Huvy, yet there was no mistaking who this quietly reserved female artist was, who went by a single, genderless name. Huvy left her two sons, the younger Robert, the gallery owner, and the older Rafael, to sell her art.

Well into her eighties, Huvy’s paintings commanded high prices at auction, with one timelessly haredi Ashkenazi wedding scene, recalling Eastern European shtetl life but set in modern day Israel, setting a record at $101,532 in 2012. Her colorful, energetic brushstrokes recall the French Impressionists, whose radical revision of art history made it okay to paint lively scenes of ordinary people going about their daily activities.

Huvy’s Impressionist brushwork was animated by her Torah understanding. She had a prodigious gift for infusing energetic strokes of color with breathtakingly beautiful sparks of light.

Full-bearded hassidic men dressed in frock coats, with their best Shabbos shtreimel, elaborate gowns worn in bridal processions, idealized her subjects from a bird’s eye view, is as if the artist wants to be both participant and observer to intimate moments around the Shabbat table, hassidim dancing with abandon on the Jewish holidays, and other joyous moments.

Huvy Elisha was born in 1927 in Jerusalem’s Bukharin section to native Jerusalem parents. When she was seven, her father set off with the family for business concerns in Czechoslovakia, then on to Austria. As the Nazi threat grew to frightening proportions, he relocated the family to London.

It was while being evacuated to the southwest of England that an elementary school teacher took notice of Huvy’s artistic gifts and encouraged her to apply to one of the top art schools in London.

Accepted to St. Martin’s School of Art in at the age of 14 – the youngest ever to have been admitted – Huvy steeped her learning in the Old Masters, mastering how to express the dramatic play of light in sunrises and sunsets, popularized by one of England’s greatest 19th-century painters, 19th-century greatest painters, J.M.W. Turner.

She became versatile in the classical, realist, Impressionist, and post-Impressionist techniques to be bold, even fearless, with her brush work, in order to give the viewer access to her heart on canvas.

“My mother lived in a typical British home in London,” says Robert. “During World War II, the family evacuated to Devonshire and Cornwall. Her headmaster told my grandmother to forget about her becoming a doctor, or a lawyer, or things like that; she’s going to be an artist.

“It was very hard for them to accept,” he adds. “But my mother knew exactly what she wanted, which was to study art at St. Martin’s School of Art, mastering the refined painterly skills of classic European realistic portraiture, still life, and intimate interior scenes – the light-infused outdoor landscapes of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

“While she knew all about contemporary art, I think she purposely cut herself out from the art movements of the past 60 years, for instance, pop art and abstract art. It’s a joke, she would say. About Picasso, she felt that they didn’t make sense. To her, it was like the emperor with no clothes,” Robert recounts.

STILL IN HER teens, Huvy married Eli Elisha, a businessman who specialized in the trade of rare Persian carpets, textiles, and antique furnishings fit for the nobility in whose circles he traveled – purchasing first-class airline tickets that positioned him to meet European aristocracy.

“My father was always on journeys, so the dinner table was with mum and we three children, more or less,” Robert recalls of his early upbringing in a Jewish section of North London.

“It was while father was away on business in Israel that a bell went off for Huvy. It was the mid-1960s, after the 1967 Six Day War, and she had a tremendous longing to return to Israel. She packed up the children while my father was still in Israel, leaving by boat to return home to the land where she had the happy memories of her childhood.

“In Israel, my mother felt she could give her children a proper education,” the gallerist added.

“My parents were happy to live in Israel. They had a beautiful house in Herzliya Pituah that my mother built from scratch. My mother put her focus on creating this wonderful home while raising my older brother, my sister Angela, and me, the youngest,” Robert recalls.

“My mother built this magnificent house in the same way she went about making her paintings – with attention to the greatest and smallest details. The staircases in the hallway went round and round up to the fourth floor.

“They had a chandelier installed way up, 12 m. high, that came from some palace. They brought over antiques and furniture from Europe. There were massive carpets imported from Persia, and in the garden, a rockery with massive rocks, so she was very artistic in the house, too. That’s the way it was.”

But the one thing that money couldn’t buy in well-to-do Herzliya Pituah – the seaside neighborhood that Robert notes is favored by Israel’s elites, politicians, and entertainment personalities, wives, and ex-wives – had to do with Torah values.

“My mother was increasingly drawn to ultra-Orthodox observance in her middle age.”

Herzliya Pituah’s tree-lined streets and impressive homes fortified by high walls were designed for exclusivity, privacy, but not neighborly warmth, he adds.

“My mother was very friendly. On her morning walks, she would say ‘hello’ to everyone. The neighbors would look at her like she was meshuga,” Robert says, adding that once again, it was Huvy who steered the family toward the move to Jerusalem, close to the Bukharin neighborhood of her childhood.

The family chose the haredi neighborhood of Mea She’arim and a walk-up apartment on Salant Street, modest and unassuming, and in radical contrast to their Herzliya Pituah home of pomp and splendor.

“My mother loved life in Mea She’arim,” Robert says, noting that she took on the dress code and merged with the Torah-focused way of life of her ultra-Orthodox neighbors. Inspiration for her paintings came from poring over the weekly Torah reading portion, and from the joyful singing and dancing of the Breslav seminary that she and husband had established for the young hassidim in the flat below their apartment.

Huvy’s artistic vision shifted with the move to Mea She’arim, opening her art world viewers to the extremely sheltered world of haredim. She painted scenes of daily life: the Shabbat table, rabbis and Torah scholars steeped in learning – scenes for which she is most well-known – and capturing the wedding entourage under the wedding canopy in big gardens overflowing with flowers and community warmth.

For Jews seeking to come closer to Yiddishkeit, to learning Torah, and to Israel itself, Huvy’s paintings are like road maps, making the hidden world of Jewish Orthodoxy enticing. The longer you look at the picture, the more you are rewarded by secrets revealed.

But not everyone agrees. One female artist familiar with Huvy’s paintings panned them as commercial and overly sentimental. But Robert laughs it off, as only a devoted son dedicated to preserving his mother’s legacy would do.

“What made my mother happy, truly happy? Selling a painting, not really. Knowing that her paintings were on the walls of the King David Hotel, the Waldorf Astoria, or purchased for the office of former US ambassador David Friedman. No, not that.

“It’s not about me. It’s from God, she would say. All the rest meant nothing to her.

“My mother was painting above nature. I used to pop in before she woke up to say ‘hi.’ She would tell me to look outside and say, ‘Look at the trees, the way they’re moving up and down. They’re playing morning music.’ And as for the sky, for Huvy, it was the biggest show on earth, changing clouds, formations.

“The birds used to come to her window for a piece of bread. Each bird had a different name, like ‘the bully.’ In her neighborhood of Mea She’arim, she was much loved, while keeping a low profile.”

“For the past 40 years, all my work life, I’ve been promoting my mother’s art,” Robert says. “I started because she was always selling, here and there. People could come in the house and sit down, have a cup of coffee, and she would say, ‘Do you want to buy it?’ If they didn’t have the money, my mother would then often say, ‘Take it as a present.’ That’s the way she was. I put my foot down and stopped that.”

When Huvy’s sons went into the business together in 1985, they opened up two galleries in Tel Aviv on Ben Yehuda and the corner of Frishman streets and were very successful. They began to see that people were willing to pay top dollar for her work.

Yet Robert notes: “Still, people didn’t know about her. I realized that my mother was very special, so I wanted to make a ‘thing’ about my mother, to continue to let people know who she is, her love for people, and to give some understanding. From the new gallery on Washington Street, I’ll try to get her legacy out.”

After Huvy’s passing in May 2022, the brothers amicably split their mother’s collection and went their own ways, opening locations steps away from their original gallery on King David Street, home to a cluster of Jerusalem’s finest art galleries. The original Huvy’s Gallery, run by both brothers, was at 8 King David St. in Mamilla; it closed about a year ago.

“What I do from my gallery on Washington Street is a bit different,” Robert explains. This is a space for relaxing in comfort, for sitting and taking time to contemplate Huvy’s art and other great Israeli masters, like Yaacov Agam and Alexander Calder.

“People of North Tel Aviv shouldn’t be scared to see a person like me. I can talk in their language with the payot [side locks], the beard, and they’ll understand after a conversation that despite what seems like 180-degree different views, we can unite,” he says.

“That’s what it’s all about – to unite the Jewish nation worldwide. That’s what my mother Huvy has accomplished. She’s simply adored.” 