EIN HOD, Israel — Israel’s only artists’ colony is nestled in the green hills of the Carmel mountain range.
Ein Hod, founded in 1953 by a transplanted Romanian Jew, is quiet
and idyllic, a sylvan retreat from the hurly-burly of Israeli society.
Southeast of Haifa, it is a pastoral place of Arab and Ottoman-style stoneclad buildings trailing red and white bougainvillea and well-tended gardens looking out at the shimmering Mediterranean Sea.
In a country that is fast becoming a congested megalopolis, who wouldn’t want to set down roots here?
Conjuring up visions of southern California, Ein Hod is home to some 450 inhabitants, the majority of whom are painters, sculptors, writers and musicians. People like Naomi Verchovsky, a potter, and Dan Ben-Arye, a sculptor.
Verchovsky, an American from New York City, has lived here since 1974 and has had her own studio since 1982. Ben-Arye, originally from South Africa, has been in Ein Hod for the past 23 years.
Verchovsky produces functional stoneware and teaches pottery classes. Her husband, Zeev, whom she met on an ulpan in a kibbutz in the Negev, operates a grocery store and a second-hand bookshop. He is also an immigrant, having been born in Riga, Latvia. Ben-Arye, who conducts guided tours of Ein Hod as a sideline, resided in Jaffa before coming here. His wife, Leah, is a fabric designer from Safed who has lived in Haifa.
At least one member of each family in Ein Hod is an artist. “We’re a very mixed group in terms of age and ethnic origin,” said Verchovsky. “We absorb people from alternative lifestyles, not too square, not your usual people. There are a lot of characters here.”
Members of the community are approved by an absorption committee. Candidates who pass muster have to live here for a minimum of six months and mount an acceptable exhibition.
By Ben-Arye’s count, Ein Hod has 18 galleries and workshops, plus 14 bedand-breakfast establishments.
Ein Hod is an incubator of Israeli art. “You won’t find a label saying ‘Made in China’ here,” said Ben-Arye. “Everything is authentically Israeli.”
Ein Hod owes its existence to Marcel Janco (1895-1984), one of the founders of the Dada movement, which had a major impact on 20th century art.
A painter and an architect, as well as a contemporary of Pablo Picasso, Janco was born in Bucharest but spent his formative years in Zurich, Switzerland.
Rebelling against the esthetics of Western painting and sculpture, he and a coterie of friends, including Hans Arp, Richard Huelsenback, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, created the Dada movement.
He returned to Romania in 1922, but fled to Palestine in 1941. Ein Hod was then a Palestinian village named Ein Hawd. During Israel’s War of Independence, the 1,000 or so inhabitants of Ein Hawd left. The abandoned village was subsequently populated by Tunisian and Algerian Jewish immigrants.
Janco, having been captivated by its rural vistas, convinced the Israeli government to let him build an artists’colony there.
In tandem with this development, a group of Ein Hawd’s former Arab residents built a new village on higher ground nearby. Their village, unrecognized by Israel for decades, was granted full recognition three years ago.
Janco did not pour all his energies solely into Ein Hod. According to Ben-Arye, he was chief architect of the restoration of old Jaffa, still a tourist mecca.
During the final years of his life, Janco – a 1967 Israel Prize winner – launched a campaign to build a Dada museum in Ein Hod. He died 10 months after it was finally opened in 1984.
The two-storey Janco Dada Museum, encased in an ultra-modern shell, is a showcase for Janco’s cutting-edge oils on cardboard, plywood and canvas.
Also worth visiting is the Nesco Museum of Mechanical Music. It contains one of the finest collections of antique music boxes and other mechanical musical instruments in the Middle East.
On weekends throughout the year, visitors can attend free outdoor jazz concerts near Ein Hod’s central square. During the summer, they can enjoy pop concerts at an amphitheatre near the ruins of a Crusader wall that once snaked around Ein Hod.
The home of 10 Israel Prize winners, Ein Hod is charming, yet Ben-Arye expressed concern that an Israeli government agency, the Israel Lands Authority, may inadvertently alter its ambience. He claims that the agency has raised land prices here and thus made it infinitely harder for new artists to settle in Ein Hod.
“When I arrived in Ein Hod, a plot of one dunam could be bought for $12,000, but today, it would cost $300,000. This may be Ein Hod’s last years as an artists’ village,” he warned. “But we’re fighting it.”
For further information on Ein Hod, contact the Israel Government Tourist Office in Toronto at 180 Bloor St. W. The phone number is 416-964-3784.
Lufthansa German Airlines flies to Israel 14 times per week through Frankfurt Airport. Business class flyers can use Air Canada’s lounge in Toronto and Lufthansa’s lounge in Frankfurt.