April 2025
Jerusalem stone, sterling silver, Eilat stone

With the rise in global antisemitism and the efforts of some loud but erroneous voices trying to erase Jewish indigineity in the Judean homeland, it's been a tough couple of years to be Jewish. As an artist, I naturally turned to my craft as part of my coping strategy.

The phrase עם ישראל חי (Am Yisrael Chai, "the People of Israel live") dates back to at least 1895 and was used as a message of hope and resolve by concentration camp prisoners during the Holocaust in the 1940s. It quickly became a slogan of Jewish solidarity after October 7, 2023. That phrase is emblazoned upon the silver band on the front of this piece, in the paleo-Hebrew style of the Siloam Inscription. This Hebrew inscription was found in a tunnel in the City of David in East Jerusalem in 1880 and has been dated by archeologists to the 8th century bce.

This body of the pendant is a single ashler of Jerusalem stone with both rough and smooth surfaces secured in place by the silver band on the front which is inset into the stone and attached to the back plate. Jerusalem stone is a type of dolomitic limestone that is unique to Israel, and has been used as a building material from antiquity through modern times—the retaining wall of the Second Temple in Jerusalem was made of it (including what remains as the Western Wall), and for the last century municipal law has dictated that all buildings constructed in Jerusalem must be clad in the stone.

The back plate of the piece is a negative cut-out of a Star of David, offering a view of the back of the Jerusalem stone. The pendant hangs from a necklace made of Eilat stone and silver spacer beads. Eilat stone is an amalgam of azurite, chrysocolla, malachite, pseudomalachite, and turquoise, and is also known as King Solomon stone due to the discovery of it in the mines of that Jewish monarch who reigned from 970 bce to 931 bce and established the First Temple in Jerusalem.

Finally, the bail of the pendant is designed to emulate the stylized four-branched letter shin (ש) found on the ketzitzah, the boxy enclosure for tefillin scrolls used by Jews in prayer. Wearing of tefillin finds its origins in Exodus 13:9 (composed, according to secular scholars, in the 6th century bce) where the Jewish people are told of "a sign upon your hand and a reminder on your forehead in order that the Teaching of the Lord may be in your mouth." The bail's physical overture to the tefillin embodies the hope that the phrase Am Yisrael Chai will eternally serve as a reminder to both the ingathered and the exiles that the people of Israel still live.

Beaded Jewelry