Exhibition 'Yakir's Light' brings together art by a fallen soldier and his mother

First, the show combines drawings and photographs with pictures of architectural projects, which is a little unusual. Second, one artist is living, and the other is dead, which is very unusual.

“Everything is a story for me these days,” said Chaya, sitting in the cafe at the Jerusalem Theatre for our interview a few days before the scheduled opening. She has the manner of a person who wants to say many things and isn’t sure she can get to everything. “Since Yakir was killed, my life is like this every day. I keep seeing all these connections wherever I go.”

The story she wants to tell through the exhibition is about the relationship between her grief and the way she found to express it, and to give a glimpse into her son’s soul, through his art.

The exhibition is comprised of “very dark and very powerful and real photographs” that she has taken since he passed away, and through Yakir’s own work and photographs, which she hopes will give “a peek into Yakir’s genius and the light he brought into the world.”

Yakir, an architecture student at Ariel University, lost his life on his second tour of duty in Gaza on January 8, 2024, just before his 27th birthday. The eldest of three boys in the Hexter family, he also studied in a hesder yeshiva. Chaya said that while her son was a yeshiva student, “He was also so many other things – a top athlete, studious; he had so many sides to him.”

“I started taking pictures at moments that were just too impossible to comprehend, or even ingest, or process,” she said, calling being a bereaved mother “a whole new entity.”

Chaya’s photographs are like a diary of her two years of grief, captured in clear images that draw the viewer into her sorrow. With some, you instantly know exactly what you’re looking at, and it can bring you back to moments when you were mourning someone, such as pictures she took of the death notices for Yakir, when they were new, and later as they were battered by the wind and rain.

Others show the box the family received with Yakir’s belongings, photographed in a way that makes you feel what Chaya went through when she received it. Text added to this photo of the box references the trauma of dealing with the military bureaucracy. “Each time, there was a new ‘unknown’ surprise to deal with and more bureaucracy,” she said.

In a black-and-white photo, there is sky glimpsed from below in a curving structure, which turns out to be the Memorial Hall at the national military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, which evokes the desire to float away and escape the reality that has brought her there.

The drawings by Yakir, many of which are from a sketchbook that his parents looked at only after his death, show the workings of a young artist who was developing rapidly and in unexpected directions. There are many different sketches of people and places around him in his life, while others show images that came from his imagination.

Assignments for his architecture studies are included, and several show his vision for projects he dreamed of building. One shows a house attached to a tree, seemingly growing out of it, in a forest, a house that looks like an organic extension of the tree on which it has been mounted. Chaya noted that on this assignment, he had to draw without using a ruler, although you would never guess that from looking at it.

There are photographs of other projects he built as models, including one of a “mushroom chapel” that features curving lines, and looks like it could be some kind of retreat or even a set for a sci-fi movie.

Finally, there are photographs that further complete this portrait of the artist as a young man, including one of him hovering in the air as he jumps for joy at a friend’s wedding.

“The photograph of him jumping at his best friend’s wedding shows him full of life and endless possibilities just beginning to spread out before him, just as his limbs do....The last photograph of him was taken moments before he was killed. He was in a school used for terrorism [in Gaza]. He is sitting amidst garbage but finds a piece of paper and makes a paper airplane; showing his innocence, love for fun, even in the dark danger.”

The heart aches for the loss of this son and this artist. As Chaya spoke about the exhibition, she veered back and forth between describing it in artistic terms and wanting to give an even fuller picture of the son she loved, and whom you sense she is still getting to know through engaging so deeply with his work.

Curator Yair Medina spoke about why he felt it was important. “The exhibition is about the story of the tragedy and the truth of the mother and the child, and those pictures captured a moment of understanding and the feeling. Everything is not necessarily clear, and everything is complicated, but everything is connected.”

He mentioned the photographs of the death notices. “Chaya took a picture a day after, and six months after, and then she took this picture again a few months ago, and it’s already almost vanished. The only thing that’s left is the masking tape. So, this is a kind of philosophical reflection about what’s gone, and how can you deal?... It’s a collection of moments.”

Curating this exhibition affected him deeply, and he feels others will have a similar response: “We wanted to create a place where everyone can identify with something from it. And for me, it begins to heal the wound our society suffers from. And Yakir – it shows the beauty of this person.”

Chaya spoke of her son’s love for his Israel, and his devotion to the country, saying he didn’t have to go back for his second tour because he was a university student. But his mother recalled that he said, “There’s no way I’m leaving my brothers,” meaning his comrades in arms. “Inside, I was begging, but I just said, ‘Yakir, you did enough. You did so much.’”

She spoke of how long he fought in his first tour and under what difficult conditions. As a family of immigrants to Israel, she said she felt “We didn’t get the handbook,” that there would be such a long and deadly war. She has spoken to his fellow soldiers at length, and said, “I do know the circumstances of his death but still don’t know the details because once I do, I can’t ‘un-know’ them.”

Yakir was a barman at Jerusalem’s popular Nocturno night spot, where he invented a cocktail; he often volunteered, raising money for causes such as Alyn Hospital, and dedicated runs and bicycle races to various causes. Some of his charity work she knew about, but much of it he kept private, and she only learned about it after his death.

Perhaps most importantly, he was a valued friend and was close to people who were secular and religious. “I got calls during the shiva, some of them from people I didn’t know, saying, ‘He saved my life.’ He helped people in all kinds of ways. He had an impact.”

She also learned that even in the toughest moments of war, he held on to his humanity. When his unit captured terrorists, other soldiers tied them up tightly. “And Yakir went around and said, ‘No. We don’t. This is not the way we act.’ He untied the terrorists’ hands and retied them so it wouldn’t hurt them. That’s who he was. He didn’t change, no matter the circumstance…It’s inspirational.”

Nothing about any of what the Hexter family has gone through is easy or simple, and Chaya feels that because of the inevitable focus on saving the hostages taken by Hamas, in some ways the more than 900 fallen soldiers were swept aside in the public consciousness. She noted that many don’t realize the heavy price paid by the olim (immigrants to Israel) community, which lost so many of their sons. She said that it was frustrating that American Jews abroad don’t seem as aware of this fact as she wishes they would be.

The exhibition came about as she looked into her son’s sketchbook and kept taking photographs documenting her own grief. “I thought at first, I would do two exhibitions – mine and his – but my good friend from Berlin, a curator I worked with at an art gallery named Nathalie Arfi, said, ‘You have to do both.’”

The exhibition features some short text, but Chaya said, “The stories won’t be written. I want people to take in the images. I’ll give tours – so people can understand the story behind the pictures and Yakir. But even without too much information, it’s powerful. You’re not going to experience what we lived through by seeing these pictures. But it’s a little peek.”

She compared it to the impact of Anne Frank’s diary: “You can’t take in six million stories, but you can relate to one and understand what was lost… And I want people to get to know Yakir – a little – through his art, and through that, understand.”

Chaya wears a dog tag like the ones worn to support the hostages, only hers features an image of Yakir and the words Nisht pashut, Yiddish for “not simple,” in the elaborate calligraphy of a religious scribe, a skill he taught himself.

A friend of Yakir’s from the army who was also his roommate at the university said at Mount Herzl on the occasion of the shloshim (mourning period), the one-month commemoration of his death, “Nothing is black and white… That Yakir wasn’t complicated, but he was complex. That’s what ‘nisht pashut’ means. That’s what my exhibition is about.”

She had words of gratitude to Medina, the curator, and the team from Jerusalem Fine Arts Prints. “He’s been amazing. His team has been sensitive. It’s been therapeutic and very hard at the same time.”

She said that she hopes the show would be a new beginning for the family and for those who remember Yakir. One project using his work is already underway. “We’re building a lookout in nature near Ness Harim, where Yakir used to bike. On a clear day, you can see all the way to Tel Aviv and the ocean. There are architects involved – classmates and professors – who are using Yakir’s ideas to build the lookout. It will be based on Yakir’s designs. And there’s work we still haven’t seen. We haven’t gone into his laptop yet – it’s been two years. It’s still too painful.”

Chaya’s statement at the beginning of the exhibition was the last message she sent to Yakir in Gaza. It reads: “Yakir, my dearest, You inspire us and remind us why we love this land and our Torah, and why we live. You represent everything that is good and pure. You are forever in my heart. I send you love, light, and strength... I hope you always feel it. With love, Mom.”

But this isn’t all she would like to tell him. “I was shocked by how he progressed as I looked at his work. He designed a whole new plan for that area by the area across from the Old City walls. He redesigned the whole area. It’s incredible. I walk around Jerusalem and think what ideas he would have put to use here – how the city would have looked different.

“Beyond his architectural ideas, he has definitely changed the world for the better and is still spreading his light,” she said.

It would please Chaya to know that those who see the show will think, too, about how Yakir might have changed Jerusalem for the better. And that thought will achieve something of what she is striving for in the exhibition, to show the world Yakir’s “light.” It’s also a way of marking the continuing evolution of their relationship, which has not ended with his death.

Yakir’s Light is one of many upcoming exhibits being shown at the Jerusalem Theatre, which is a cultural venue that brings together the arts of the stage and screen, as well as the plastic arts, with original initiatives that express the meeting point between ideas and art.

While the venue is currently closed due to the war, the exhibition program at the Jerusalem Theatre consists of eight galleries with monthly and bi-monthly changing exhibitions of original works of contemporary art, showcasing emerging and new artists in various mediums – photography, acrylic and oil, pen and ink, watercolor, and prints – alongside gifts and long-term loans of original artworks.

Exhibitions on social and community issues have always been a priority of the Theatre and its director, Sharon Yardeni Abramovitch. The Theatre acted for the community during the Israel-Hamas War, serving as an active cultural center connected to and influenced by the Israeli pulse, including a video presentation with the hostages’ images displayed in the Theatre’s Foyer.

Several exhibitions on the theme of the October 7 massacre, with the participation of artists from the communities of the Gaza Envelope and the surrounding southern areas, were shown, including: watercolor drawings of a combat soldier who served more than 300 days in Gaza and Lebanon; artistic journals of the Women of Be’eri, three of whom were murdered on October 7 2023; a solo exhibition of Ta’ir Bira, who was murdered, along with members of her family, also at the start of the war; a group exhibition entitled #Creating Hope, initiated by monday.com; a photography exhibition of Sharon Gabay, who accompanied the Zaka Search and Rescue team in Kfar Aza; and more. – H.B.