The High Holidays are a season of reflection: a time to ask what we carry forward into the new year, and what we choose to release. This joint exhibit brings together two artists whose work speaks to that cycle of renewal.
Through fiber, paint, and print, this exhibit evokes the feelings of the High Holiday season through the work of Rabbi Eliana Jacobowitz and Mel Brown. Together, these works invite us into the new year with intention, honoring both continuity and change.
Eliana Jacobowitz creates tallitot (Jewish prayer shawls) as wearable art, bridging past and present through ritual. Each piece weaves together fragments of old garments with new fabric, evoking the ways memory, identity, and tradition shape who we are in community today.
Painter and printmaker Mel Brown is also a spiritual leader who works with deliberately limited colors, allowing the essence of each hue to emerge fully. Each work begins as a journey without a clear destination, guided not by a fixed idea but by the act of listening - a form of meditation that also serve as a form of visual midrash, storytelling.
- Opening Reception: Thursday, September 4
- Exhibit on display: August 18 - October 10
Mel Brown
Mel Brown is a self-taught painter, entrepreneur and a possible occasional mystic descended from a family of Eastern European rabbis that originally came from Spain. He grew up in a working class steel town in Northwest Indiana.
For many years he has also been a dedicated teacher of Jewish mystical texts. In addition to leading intimate study groups in a line-by-line parsing of the Torah, he co-leads a post-denominational Jewish spiritual community in the Boston area.
Mel is engaged in creating non-representational art that is unique and evocative, drawing on his own wide ranging experiences, his sense of mystery and his ongoing engagement with ancient Jewish texts.
Rabbi Eliana Jacobowitz
Rabbi Eliana Jacobowitz has been the rabbi of Temple B’nai Brith since her ordination from Hebrew College in 2010. Born and raised in Israel, she studied law at Tel Aviv University and holds both a certificate in Fashion Design from Tel Aviv's Miriam College and an MA degree in Medieval History from Boston University.
For the past two decades, Eliana’s teaching has focused on Holocaust education and Jewish mysticism. She has been the facilitator of the Gvanim Leadership program of the AIC in Boston, as well as a guest lecturer on Judaism and Jewish mysticism at Simmons College, Boston College and Boston University. She is co-editor of the Hebrew translation of Arthur Green’s These are the Words, (Yedi’ot Acharonot, 2008).
In partnership with:
