The yellow ribbon pins and “Bring Them Home Now” hats and shirts of the past two years are no longer in use as of late January, when the body of the final hostage in Gaza was released.
But Rabbi Adam Raskin didn’t want these items to go to waste or sit untouched in the back of a junk drawer.
“These artifacts, these items, have a certain almost holiness to them because of how we wore them and used them and kept them close to us for so long, and they became part of our identity,” Congregation Har Shalom’s Raskin said.
Community members approached the rabbi to ask what they should do with their no longer needed hostage memorabilia: “I don’t want to throw it away — I don’t know what to do with this.”
In late January and early February, Raskin consulted his colleagues at Har Shalom in search of an artist. “‘Who in the congregation might be able to create something that would not only be a piece of art, but be used as an educational piece and a reflective piece, a tribute to the victims, but also to the many people who kept solidarity with them?’” he asked.
The group landed on member Erin Friedman, an abstract artist with a degree in fine art. Though Raskin’s proposed art project was the painter’s “first real collage piece,” her answer was a resounding yes.
“I liked the idea of what [Raskin] had in mind about collecting items and then using those in a piece because I felt like it was noting a time in our history and I wanted to be part of that,” Friedman said. “And I like the challenge.”
Raskin set up a collection bin in the lobby of Har Shalom, filled twice with stickers, buttons, pins, flags, ribbons, beaded bracelets, T-shirts, hats, letters, posters, dog tags and even ceramic pieces.
“People came with tons of things; it was unbelievable,” Raskin said. “It was very powerful just to watch the collection build up. I think everyone really felt like, ‘I want to do something meaningful with these things that I’m no longer wearing, and I don’t have an active use [for] now that the hostages are back.’”
“We got to the point where [the box] was overflowing, and … I ended up taking the pieces back to my home at an earlier date than intended,” Friedman said, adding that the creative process took less than three weeks.
Friedman got to work planning out the 48-by-60-foot collage — on a wood panel rather than a traditional canvas due to its sheer size — and sifting through dozens of ephemera.
She manipulated and cut up the collected items, then sorted them by color and material. “She managed to work in some element, some piece, of every single thing that people brought in, which was so meaningful,” Raskin said.
“I used something from every piece that I got, but I might have only used a portion of it, like if someone gave me a T-shirt, I might have used the collar of the T-shirt and not the whole thing,” Friedman said. “I just felt like it was important to use something from everyone because it really felt like a community-oriented piece.”
As she went through the items, she realized that every piece told a story. Some contributors even wrote letters explaining the significance of their donated memorabilia.
One contributor told the artist she needed to drop off her items at Friedman’s house. At first, Friedman wondered why. The ensuing conversation brought her to tears.
“Her son was in Israel and was going to fight for Israel, and she was worried about him,” Friedman recalled. “When all these people were in the tunnels [under Gaza], she was crossing off each day and she had physical records. Her heart was in these items and it really made me feel emotional.”
Raskin spoke to the art’s “mesmerizing, minute details.”
“It’s so multi-layered. It has contour and texture and depth.”
The collage is a medley of blues, yellows and whites, with some red and black mixed in to represent the Bring Them Home Now campaign.
“[It’s] commemorating [an] ostensibly very sad moment, a very catastrophic moment [in] Jewish history,” Raskin said. “But it’s also vividly colorful and contains words … that kind of jump off the canvas that are words of hope and encouragement and strength. So that’s very powerful.”
Individual beads from bracelets dot the painted gray sky above. A closer look reveals strips of masking tape, each containing a three-digit number: tracking the hostages’ days of captivity in Gaza.
Raskin added that although the piece recalls a tragic, traumatic event, it’s also a reminder that Jewish people came together in solidarity after Oct. 7 to demand the hostages’ return.
“This isn’t a single story,” Friedman said. “It’s a collective story and it reflects this period of time that we were holding onto as Jews and waiting and searching for in difficult moments. I think that the piece is about community connection and not carrying things alone. There’s a greater community of people that are feeling the same way.”
The collage is now permanently on display in Har Shalom’s gallery. After their annual Yom Hazikaron ceremony, the community gathered for the unveiling.
“There was a palpable gasp,” Raskin said. “People were just so taken with the first glimpse of it.”
“I had people that were in preschool that were amazed by it, and then I had 90-year-old women and men that were impacted by it,” Friedman said. “This rainbow of connection that it had was really special.”
Dena Blaustein, a longtime member of Har Shalom, said she appreciates the final product.
“The piece is really such a conversation starter,” she said. “I have two small kids, and at the Yom [Hazikaron and] Ha’atzmaut program, I went over with my little one to look at it. He’s 3 1/2, and for him to be able to [recognize], ‘That’s a Jewish star,’ and ‘That’s the flag of Israel’ — at all ages, this is an opportunity for us to have conversation.”
Attendees sang “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem, together, then stayed through the evening for a community dinner, Israeli dancing and arts and crafts.
“It wasn’t just a sad event — it was also a celebration,” Friedman said.
