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This Jewish farmer is harvesting corn — and planting a synagogue — in the Illinois prairie
STERLING, ILLINOIS — Nik Jakobs crouched down and scooped a handful of dirt. A third-generation cattle farmer and grandson of Holocaust survivors, he rubbed the soil between his fingers, testing its weight the way his father and grandfather once did.
But this time, he wasn’t thinking about crops. He was thinking about a synagogue.
Jakobs, 40, plans to build one right here: a 3,000-square-foot sanctuary and museum near land his family has worked for decades. It will house an ark, a bimah, a Torah, and twelve stained glass windows — all rescued by Nik from a shuttered Pennsylvania synagogue, fragments of light and lineage hauled halfway across the country.
The heirlooms sit in storage for now — not as relics, but as seeds waiting to be planted. Come spring, the Jakobs family plans to break ground.
Across the American heartland, sanctuaries that once anchored small-town Jewish life are closing faster than they can be saved. Some have become yoga studios or condos or Airbnbs; others have simply fallen silent. But in Sterling, Illinois, a family of farmers is trying something radical in its simplicity: to plant one again.
For Nik, that act is as familiar as it is audacious. The question isn’t just whether these sacred objects will find a home, but whether a tradition built on movement and memory can keep reinventing itself. Even among family and friends, there are doubts — about the cost, the scale, the odds of filling pews again. But Nik shrugs them off the way he does bad weather: “You plant anyway.”
It’s a lesson passed down from his grandfather, who started the farm after the war and taught his children that survival was only the first step. You work the soil, you care for it, you hand it off. That’s how things last — not through miracles, but through maintenance.
In the meantime, this fall, as crops ripened and combines roared to life, the family pitched a tent for Rosh Hashanah services. Nearly 50 people came to pray. An offering not of corn or soy, but of continuity, sown for the generations that might come after.
In Sterling, the Jakobses braid family, farm, and faith together.
Of corn and continuity
Jakobs Bros. Farms began with a refugee and a field.
After surviving the Holocaust, Norbert Jakobs arrived in Illinois in 1949, bought some land, and began again: raising cattle, planting corn and soybeans, and teaching his sons that survival was a kind of gratitude. Over the decades, the family grew the operation, a testament to their roots in this soil.
Dave Jakobs — Norbert’s son, Nik’s father, and the keeper of those fields — sat high in the cab of his combine, slicing through a sea of corn his father originally planted. He wore a cap adorned with the farm’s logo and a blue short-sleeve shirt that matched the afternoon sky. Outside, the air shimmered with dust; inside, the cab vibrated with the engine’s low thunder.
“I pitch, he catches,” Dave said, nodding to the tractor hauling a grain cart beside us. “Teamwork. That’s how the harvest gets done.”
For two hours, as he cut through the fields, Dave’s AirPods stayed in and his mounted iPhone on the dash blinked while he fielded calls from family and farmhands. Markets, moisture, machinery. The unseen math of keeping a farm alive. But before long, the talk turned to the synagogue.
“You don’t build the baseball diamond for them to come,” he said. “You build it because you love baseball.”
The line sounded like something out of Field of Dreams, and in a way, the Jakobs’ vision isn’t so different: faith built in the middle of a cornfield, for whoever still believes enough to show up.
He knows Sterling may never attract new Jewish families. The Jakobs family isn’t naïve about that. But the project was never only for them. The building will include a museum to tell the story of Jewish life in the region — and of families like theirs who rebuilt after the Holocaust. It’s a place for their children, yes, but also for their neighbors: a living record of what endurance looks like in the Midwest.
“Being a farmer, we’re at the mercy of God,” Dave said. “You take care of the land, and it takes care of you.”
If the harvest of corn measured what they could reap, this other harvest — the synagogue they were planting now — would measure what they could hand down.
A feast and a future
Back at the house, the roar of the combine gave way to a gentler rhythm — knives scraping, oven doors clicking, the percussive sounds of another kind of harvest.
Margo Jakobs, Nik’s mom, called out from the kitchen, her voice rising above the clatter of pots and the hum of an old house. She stood barefoot on the wood floor, auburn hair brushing her shoulders, a heather-gray T-shirt with “Peaches” across the front. On the counter sat a sous-vide cooler holding the evening’s main course: prime rib for Rosh Hashanah.
She moved with the calm and choreography of someone who had done this many times before, stirring and chopping, calling out to her husband and sisters-in-law as they passed through. Every motion felt purposeful, like another line in a prayer.
Her grandfather was taken to Dachau on Kristallnacht, lined up before a Nazi guard who pointed a gun and pulled the trigger on an empty chamber. He was able to escape with a few other men, thanks to a commandant he served under in World War I. The family fled on one of the last ships from Rotterdam. “The ship before theirs was bombed,” Margo said.
They rebuilt their lives in Wisconsin: her grandparents in a paper factory and department store; her parents later opening a bakery. Now, in rural Illinois, Margo keeps those stories alive — kneading resilience into every meal she prepares.
By the time she married Dave Jakobs in 1983 and moved to Sterling, two hours west of Chicago, the town’s Jewish community was already shrinking. Temple Sholom had once thrived, its sanctuary filled by families drawn to the promise of a postwar Midwest. But when the Northwestern Steel and Wire plant closed, so did the shops and synagogue it sustained.
“It made Sterling so vibrant in the 1940s and ’50s,” Margo said. “But as the mill closed, people moved away. It’s just sad.”
When she joined the congregation, she and Dave were among the few young Jewish couples left. “We had picnics and potlucks,” she said, smiling.
Earlier this year, Temple Sholom sold its building to a church. Members packed away the Torahs and yahrzeit plaques and began meeting in a tent on the Jakobs’ farm. When word spread that they planned to build again, on a two-and-a-half-acre cornfield in the middle of town, something unexpected happened: other synagogues that were closing began sending their remnants. Prayer books and pews, windows and wine goblets, all to be replanted here.
“We’re humbled,” Margo said. “People are entrusting us with what’s precious, with their stories.”
She wanted to be clear, though, that the project isn’t just about her family. It’s about Temple Sholom and all the congregants who have kept it going. “It takes a village,” she said, wiping her hands on a towel.
In that village is Scott Selmon, the congregation’s treasurer, who has quietly kept Temple Sholom alive for decades — paying the bills, leading services when no rabbi could make it, and making sure the lights stayed on long enough for the Jakobs’ dream to take hold.
He doesn’t see it as their project alone. “It’s all of ours,” he told me. “We just happen to have good people willing to lead the way.”
Selmon spoke of Nik’s grandfather, who became a pillar of the Jewish community in Sterling. “Norbert taught us what it meant to belong somewhere,” Scott said. “To show up for each other, to make this town home.”
People carried in casseroles for Rosh Hashanah and a neighbor dropped off a basket of apples from her orchard. Selmon watched quietly. “That’s what this is,” he said. “Community. You tend it, you keep it alive.”
Standing next to Selmon was Bill Sotelo, 79, who spent three decades as a machinist at the mill. He grew up in Mexico, was raised Roman Catholic, but had always felt a pull toward Judaism. In the 1980s, he started attending Temple Sholom and volunteered whenever something needed fixing. “I helped run the water line to the bathrooms and the kitchen,” he recalled.
Sotelo and his wife, Teresa, eventually converted. Bill celebrated his bar mitzvah at the shul when he was 68. “I did a DNA test recently,” he told me with a grin, “and it turns out I’m 8% East European Jew.”
Once, this village had been vast. Downtown Sterling bustled — clothing shops, newsstands, scrap yards, law offices — many owned by Jewish families who helped build the town’s economy. The steel mill by the river powered the synagogues and storefronts across the Sauk Valley — in Sterling, Rock Falls, Dixon, Morrison, even tiny Mount Carroll and Milledgeville.
Now the mill sits quiet, but Sterling is trying to grow again: a redevelopment project, a new hotel, a sports park, green trails along the river. “Sterling’s been reinventing itself ever since the mill closed,” former Mayor Skip Lee told me. “What the Jakobs are doing — taking something old and giving it new life — fits right into that story.”
The Jews scattered across the Sauk Valley are rooting for Sterling — for this family, this field, this synagogue — to succeed.
Margo opened the oven to check dessert: a peach crisp warming beside an apple-bourbon cake. The smell of cinnamon and butter filled the kitchen, a small sweetness before the holiday began.
A tent that became a temple
The September light was fading, the fields turning the color of old straw. Out on the lawn beside the house, Nik and his brothers, Alex and Ricky, worked in rhythm, raising a canvas tent where the Rosh Hashanah service would be held. Metal poles lay scattered in the grass like the ribs of something waiting to take shape.
“It’d be easier if we had a temple,” someone joked.
In the distance, a combine droned through the corn, a harvest of another kind unfolding just beyond the prayer site. Nik carried folding chairs from the basement. Alex unspooled an extension cord from the garage to power the lamps and string lights. When they tamped the final stakes into the soil, the tent stood ready — not planted, exactly, but rooted for a day.
By morning, the field had turned into a sanctuary. Nearly 50 people gathered beneath the sloped roof, the air still and expectant after weeks without rain. Some women wore sundresses and cowboy boots; others went barefoot, their toes brushing the grass. They faced east, toward Jerusalem, toward renewal.
At the front, three Torahs rested on a table covered with a white cloth embroidered decades ago by Nik’s grandmother, Edith, while she hid from the Nazis — her childhood handiwork carried through war, exile, and soil.
Cantor Lori Schwaber, who has helped lead High Holiday services in Sterling for three decades, stood beside Hannah, Nik’s cousin, her prayer shawl pale pink in the morning sun. Their melodies carried across the field.
When it came time for the haftarah, Hannah chanted from the Book of Samuel, the story of another Hannah who prayed for a child and was answered with life. The promise echoed here: Even in barren soil, something new can take root. This was a harvest whose yield measured not in bushels, but in belonging.
Then Taylor, Nik’s eldest, stepped forward to read the same passage in English. It was a rehearsal for the bat mitzvah her family plans to hold in the new synagogue. The rabbi from Pennsylvania, whose congregation donated its stained glass and ark, has already promised to officiate a service that weekend.
As the service ended, Nik’s four daughters called out the shofar blasts: Tekiah. Shevarim. Teruah. Tekiah Gedolah. Each shout met by their father’s ram’s horn, its note low and unbroken, bending through the air until it joined the wind.
The synagogue and the soil
In a storage area tucked away on the farm sit the rescued pieces from Temple B’nai Israel — the century-old synagogue in White Oak, Pennsylvania, whose sacred objects Nik salvaged.
The space was quiet, almost reverent — a warehouse of waiting. Along one wall, stained-glass windows lay boxed and labeled, their blues and ambers dulled by dust, their light waiting to be released. A pair of rabbi’s chairs stood sentinel beside the bimah, their arms worn smooth by generations. At the far end, Nik lifted a heavy blanket to reveal the ark — twin lions perched on top, their wooden paws folded in patience.
“This is what we’re saving,” Nik said softly. For a man who measures life in acres and seasons, this was another kind of harvest.
Around the objects sat more fragments of American Jewry: twelve stone tablets engraved with the tribes of Israel, salvaged from another synagogue — Beth Israel in Washington, Pennsylvania — beside the yahrzeit plaques from Sterling’s own Temple Sholom. Legacy upon legacy, boxed but not buried. A reliquary of Jewish endurance.
He was done storing the past like seed. It was time to see what would grow.
In the center of town, there’s the cornfield where the new synagogue will rise, beside New Life Lutheran Church. A farmer from the congregation had sold them the land: steeple on one side, shul on the other. The name felt like a promise.
On the hood of his truck, Nik spread the blueprints, the paper snapping in the wind. A sanctuary lined with stained glass from White Oak. Beside it, a museum to tell the story of Jewish life in small-town America — and the people who refused to let that story end.
One area will honor the Jewish merchants and families who once filled the Sauk Valley towns. Another will recreate the room where a Christian family hid Nik’s grandmother and her relatives during the Holocaust — her childhood spent in whispers, her prayers muffled beneath a pillow.
He paused, tracing calloused fingers along the edge of the paper. “It won’t be dark,” he said. “People will walk through and understand what it means to come out of hiding.”
Since the Forward first published Nik’s story about the synagogue in a cornfield, envelopes have arrived at the farm, postmarked from towns Nik had never heard of — some with checks for $18, others with offers of sacred objects from shuttered shuls across the country. One rabbi wrote to donate his congregation’s bimah chairs; Nik plans to use them as seating in the museum, each marked with a small plaque naming where it came from.
Margo told me she still dreams of Torah crowns, the silver rimonim that once shimmered atop scrolls in sanctuaries now gone. Each new package feels like a quiet affirmation, a widening circle of faith.
The Jakobs family and the small but mighty Sterling Jewish community are not trying to save Judaism. They’re proving it can still take root here, in open country.
Hope, here, isn’t an idea. It’s a practice, the daily work of planting what you may never see bloom.
Stretching before us, the field was bare, the soil raked smooth and waiting. Nik stood in silence, listening for the faintest stir of something beginning, the sound of a harvest yet to come.
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A century-old Jerusalem photo album sparks search for forgotten images of the Western Wall
(JTA) — When David Freedman discovered a long-forgotten photo album in his parents’ Montreal basement last year, he found nearly 100 pages of century-old photographs from his grandfather’s year in British Mandate Palestine, capturing Jerusalem street scenes, market stalls and holy sites.
The photographs were not only century-old and in near-perfect condition, but included figures who would later become central to Jewish medical and political history, among them Israel’s future first president Chaim Weizmann, Jerusalem ophthalmologist Abraham Ticho, malaria researcher Israel Kligler, future British prime minister Winston Churchill and Herbert Samuel, Britain’s first high commissioner for Palestine.
David Freedman said he knew he had “struck gold” when he found the album, which had been untouched for decades. “I realized in disbelief I was looking at extraordinary images of Jerusalem,” he said.
Though Freedman said the album showed his grandfather’s “passion for skillful, impromptu photography,” it was images of a site that epitomizes endurance that are having the broadest impact.
Freedman’s pictures of the Western Wall has inspired a public appeal by the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum, which is asking people to look through old albums and attics for photographs, postcards and other visual material that could help expand the historical record of Judaism’s holiest site.
The request comes ahead of a major exhibition opening in 2027 marking 60 years since the 1967 Six-Day War brought the wall, known in Hebrew as the Kotel, under Jewish control for the first time in nearly two millennia.
Although the Western Wall is now one of the most photographed sites in the world, museum curators say the visual record of earlier decades remains surprisingly fragmented, with many of the most intimate images likely still tucked away in private collections and family albums.
“The Western Wall, the Kotel, in its simplest form, is a structure of ancient stones. Yet its true meaning has never resided in the stones alone — it has been shaped and elevated by the countless individuals who have stood before it over the centuries,” Eilat Lieber, the museum’s director and chief curator, said in a statement.
Next year’s exhibition, titled “Eyes on the Wall” and curated by Shimon Lev and Yael Brandt, will be the first large-scale exhibition dedicated entirely to the Western Wall, the museum said, and will trace its transformation over nearly 2,000 years. It will be one of the major exhibitions staged by the Tower of David Museum since it reopened in 2023 after a $50 million renovation of its ancient citadel complex.
The wall, the exposed section of an ancient retaining wall around the Temple Mount, the site of the biblical Jewish temples, has long been Judaism’s most sacred places of prayer and pilgrimage. From 1948 until the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel captured the Old City and East Jerusalem from Jordan, Jews were barred from going there.
Among its most iconic images was David Rubinger’s photograph of three Israeli paratroopers standing at the wall shortly after its capture, looking upward in a mixture of awe and disbelief. The picture was taken 59 years ago this week.
Abraham Orkin Freedman, a Canadian physician and Zionist activist, took his photographs before the site was so contested. He arrived in Palestine in July 1920, just as Britain was replacing military rule with a civil administration, and stayed until 1922, serving during that period as managing director of Hadassah Hospital. His grandson David, also a doctor, said the album’s timing gives it much of its historical value, with photographs that capture people in the streets, as well as the terrain and buildings of Jerusalem during the nascent years of the British Mandate.
Among the images Freedman uncovered, the one that struck him most was a photograph of women praying side by side with men at the oldest part of the Western Wall, a scene far removed from the gender-separated prayer sections at the site today. The question of mixed-gender prayer at the Wall remains politically charged, with a recent High Court order to advance the egalitarian section followed by Knesset moves to strengthen Chief Rabbinate control over prayer at the site.
After recognizing the album’s significance, Freedman met with his family who decided collectively to give it to the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum for safekeeping, research and public access. Freedman said the family was proud the album had found “a new home, not many meters from where my grandfather once stood.”
Lev said he hoped the appeal would bring more discoveries like Freedman’s into public view, expanding the visual record of the Western Wall beyond official archives.
“There is something profoundly moving in the moment when an intimate private photograph transcends its original purpose and becomes an important historical testimony,” Lev said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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5th man charged in March arson of London’s Hatzola ambulances
(JTA) — Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service announced Tuesday that an 18-year-old man has been charged in connection with the March arson attack that destroyed four ambulances owned by Hatzola, a Jewish volunteer emergency service.
Subhan Ahmed, a British national, was charged on Monday with “assisting an offender” in connection with the arson.
The ambulances were set ablaze in the early morning of March 23 in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in London. The incident spurred increased patrols in Jewish communities.
The charge is the latest development in an investigation being led by the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit.
Four others have already been charged in connection with the attack.
Three British nationals — 20-year-old Hamza Iqbal, 19-year-old Rehan Khan and 18-year-old Judex Atshatshi — along with a 17-year-old dual British and Pakistani national were all charged in April with “committing arson, destroying or damaging property, and being reckless as to whether life would be endangered.”
The four have remained in custody ahead of a trial planned for January. Ahmed, meanwhile, was released ahead of a June 16 court date.
The ambulance arsons came at the early edge of a wave of incidents that have put London Jews on edge and induced the city’s police force to step up their presence in Jewish communities. The incidents have included multiple incendiary devices placed near synagogues as well as the stabbing in April of two Jewish men in Golders Green. The Metropolitan Police reported last week that antisemitic hate crimes in the capital rose 72% in May.
Following the announcement of Ahmed’s charge, the Community Security Trust, a Jewish organization, thanked the police and the Crown Prosecution Service “for their ongoing work investigating this attack and other arson incidents targeting the Jewish community.”
It added in a statement, “These are very serious allegations, and it is right that those responsible are being held accountable.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Israel boycott battle intensifies at Venice Art Biennale, testing tradition of inclusion
The anti-Israel protests that disrupted the opening of the Venice Art Biennale continue to escalate, with more than 100 artists and curators declaring last week that they will bring legal action against Biennale authorities if their names are not removed from consideration for what in normal times are coveted awards for best artist and best national exhibition.
It’s just the latest battle between activists seeking to shut down Israel’s art exhibition in Venice and the Biennale’s administration who are committed to keeping it open.
Chaos erupted in the streets on the third day of the biennale’s opening last month as demonstrators engulfed the Via Garibaldi chanting Palestinian liberation slogans during their march toward an art exhibit hosted by Israel, held back by Italian police in riot gear. The demonstration was organized by the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), a coalition of artists and art industry workers campaigning to ban Israel from participating in the world’s most prestigious art show.
ANGA’s agenda is reverberating throughout the Biennale, which is structured around a main international show that this year is hosting 110 invited artists, 100 national exhibitions and 31 official art shows. Many of the artists now threatening legal action first signed a letter this past March demanding that the directors of the Biennale exclude Israel’s exhibition from the show.
Just before the exhibition opened, the Venice Biennale’s five-member international jury — which oversees the prestigious Golden Lion for best artist and best national pavilion — announced that, in keeping with the spirit of the main international exhibition curated by the late Cameroonian art impresario Koyo Kouoh, who appointed them, it would “refrain from considering those countries whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court” — namely, Russia and Israel.
Belu-Simion Fainaru, representing the Israeli pavilion, reportedly responded by threatening that if he were excluded from consideration for the awards, he would sue the Biennale in the European Court of Human rights on grounds of antisemitism and nationality-based discrimination. Facing potential legal liability, all five jurors took the unprecedented step of quitting. The Biennale administration then announced that the juried awards would be replaced with Visitor Lions Awards, a popular vote by visitors to the show.
It’s that substitute award that the ANGA-allied artists are now renouncing.
There also have been attempts from the other end of the political spectrum to silence artists representing South Africa and Australia because of alleged anti-Israeli biases. Indeed, the 2026 Biennale, which opened on May 9 and runs through November 26, has become a referendum on artistic freedom of expression and on the place in the cultural sphere of the movement to boycott Israel. “Boycott the Genocide Pavilion,” the brochure ANGA demonstrators handed out at their demonstration stated, “For decades, the Venice Biennale has handed Israel an international stage to culturewash its occupation of Palestine,” and stated that in doing so Biennale authorities are helping to “normalize the ongoing decimation of an entire population.”
The president of the Venice Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, has refused to cede ground. “Closing the door to some means making openness to others more fragile,” he argued in an impassioned speech announcing the opening of the Biennale’s 61st International Exhibition, adding, “if the Biennale began selecting not works but affiliations, not visions but passports, it would cease to be what it has always been: a place where the world meets, especially when the world is torn apart.”
Serene space
When I stepped into the Israeli exhibition, it seemed to be an invitation to leave behind the fractious world outside. The transcendent artwork, inspired by Paul Celan’s poetry, consists of a large rectangular pool in a tranquil space where the only interruption is the soothing sound of dripping water.
Given Israel’s destructive bombing campaigns, first in Gaza and now in southern Lebanon, presenting Fainaru and his serene artwork to represent the country is a fraught choice. Fainaru lives in Haifa, one of Israel’s most culturally diverse cities, and is a professor at Haifa University, where he told me the rector is Palestinian and more than 50% of his students are Arabs. Fainaru said that his art is about bringing people together and “collective consciousness,” and he argued it should be viewed outside of the political prism that has roiled the Biennale in recent years. “This environment is becoming more and more about boycott, censorship, limitation of freedom, exclusion,” he said, adding “that’s changing the meaning and role of art.”
Some observers who study censorship say the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale have always functioned as cultural diplomacy and in many instances are a form of “artwashing,” a term that refers to the ways that governments and corporations utilize art exhibits to obscure or gloss over unethical policies.
“Clearly they are an attempt to make a country look better, but on the other hand there is something in the art that exceeds the national ambitions,” Svetlana Mintcheva, former director of programs at the U.S,-based National Coalition Against Censorship, said in a phone interview, adding: “It’s counterproductive to censor because it then homogenizes everyone in that particular country as holding particular ideas and that’s not the case.”
The censorship campaign against Israel and Russia took place against the backdrop of the main international exhibition “In Minor Keys,” which emphasizes anti-colonialist themes and the utility of art as a means of reconnecting to local and indigenous practices. The leitmotif of the show, which primarily emphasizes art from the African diaspora, chimes with ANGA’s agenda to give voice to a Palestinian culture that the group claims has been sidelined by Israel’s “colonial expansion.”
Some artworks in the international exhibition address the Palestinian displacement and trauma, while none deal with Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre or Israel’s wounds.
Gazan artist Mohammed Joha, who signed a March 26 ANGA petition calling for the exclusion of the Israeli pavilion, is exhibiting No Shelter, which the artist made while witnessing the conflict in Gaza. The work consists of collages made from discarded paper, fabric and cardboard intended to call attention to the cycles of destruction and rebuilding that Palestinians endure. Haitian artist Manuel Mathieu’s Genocide portrays a dark sea alongside what looks like pummeled charred flesh. British Ethiopian artist Theo Eshetu’s Garden of the Broken Hearted includes a rotating dais with a live olive tree, a symbol of Palestinian resilience.
And Kouoh and her team gave pride of place in her show to artists who have been victims of Israel’s conflicts. The very first exhibit to greet visitors at the entrance of the massive Arsenale, a brick linear hall serves as the main exhibition space, which t originally was part of Venice’s Renaissance-era ship building complex, features the poem “If I must Die,” by Palestinian poet Refaat al-Areer, which he posted to social media in late 2023, about a month before he was killed along with several of his family members by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. The poem, which has become a rallying cry for Palestinian activists, sits below a canvas portraying a disembodied face with penetrating eyes against a fractured background by Issa Samb, a Senegalese artist known for his anti-colonial themes.
The subsequent exhibition at the Arsenale is a monumental multi-media installation titled Khalil by Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi, a former refugee from the 1976 Lebanese Civil war. Sabsabi is also representing Australia at its national pavilion in the nearby Giardini fairground.
Khalil, which was originally intended to be displayed at the Australian Pavilion, was intended as a meditation on Sufi mysticism. It consists of digital projections on a canvas painted in acrylic with swirling shapes, accompanied by sonorous background music and the piped in scent of Oud, which is used in Middle Eastern perfumery.
But Kouoh’s invitation to Sabsabi to exhibit at the Arsenale, which she extended after he was temporarily disinvited from showing the work at the Australian Pavilion, appears to have as much to do with his notoriety as it does his artistic merit. Sabsabi’s commission to exhibit at the Australian Pavilion was canceled after conservative Australian members of parliament and right-wing newspapers denounced him as promoting antisemitism and terrorism over work he had produced in the past, notably YOU, a 2007 multimedia piece that portrays multiple images of former leader Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Australia’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), where the You is on permanent display, originally described the artwork on its website as “obscuring Nasrallah’s face with beams of light that shine from his eyes and mouth, suggestive of a divine illumination.” But last year, after Sabsabi was dropped from representing the Australian Pavilion, the MCA engaged in an act of self-censorship by removing the section of text deifying Nasrallah and updating the description of the artwork to inform viewers that: “The Australian Government listed the entirety of Hezbollah as a proscribed terrorist organization in 2021.”
Meanwhile, subsequent larger furor in the international arts community over Sabsabi’s being censored led to an independent review, which resulted in the reinstatement of his invitation to show at the Australian Pavilion, greatly raising his profile.
Another controversial figure is Gabrielle Goliath, the video and performance artist invited to represent South Africa, was the only artist to be officially banned. Elegy, the work she had planned to show, is a performative piece about gender and LGBT violence that has also addressed the killing and displacement of Palestinian women. But Goliath’s commission was canceled and the South African pavilion shuttered by the country’s culture minister Gayton McKenzie, a vocal supporter of Israel, who reportedly deemed Elegy “highly divisive in nature and relates to an ongoing international conflict that is widely polarizing.”
After an unsuccessful lawsuit accusing the South African government of unlawfully revoking her commission, Goliath was relegated to presenting Elegy in a rented church in Venice. This version of the work she exhibited there features eight “funereal screens,” with women singing and commemorating female victims of violence, including a murdered South African student and the Palestinian poet Heba Abunada, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza in 2023.
The closing of the South African pavilion didn’t stifle Goliath’s voice and, as with Sabsabi, the controversy over her being canceled may have given her a larger platform. After Venice, Elegy will be traveling to London before moving onto Milan.
It’s difficult to imagine Fainaru’s message of “collective consciousness” finding a similar welcome in arts venues throughout Europe and the United States.
Recent events in Venice and elsewhere suggest that the cultural boycott campaign is gaining momentum, putting freedom of expression under increasing strain. And it’s not just principles that are at stake. Closing Israel’s exhibition in Venice and further marginalizing Israeli artists works at cross-purposes with efforts to achieve mutual understanding and peace in the Mideast. “The price of cultural boycotts is quite high, says Mintcheva of the National Coalition Against Censorship, “because you limit any kind of exchange and you limit understanding of dissent within a country like Israel.”
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