South African-Israeli artist uses fused-glass to depict Israel-Hamas war

If you ask stained-glass artist Barak Uranovsky why he chose this medium, he’ll explain his passion in terms of light.

“With any other medium, there is reflected light; but with glass, you’re seeing the light behind the medium, a direct message. And that makes it a very spiritual material,” he says. 

“The art doesn’t start with what I do on the surface. It starts behind the surface, with the light coming through the glass itself. I only channel the light and move it this way and that way,” he explains.

Since opening his glass studio, Barak Glass (barakglassart.com) in 1995, Uranovsky has created many large-scale stained-glass and fused-glass projects. His eternal lamps, Torah arks, bimot, memorials, dedication walls, and mezuzot can be seen in Israeli and American synagogues such as the Bobov Grand Shul in Borough Park, Brooklyn. He has also created commissioned works for private homes.

Lately, Uranovsky has been creating fused glass paintings using a step-by-step technique that includes numerous firings in a kiln. Even the paint itself is made of ground glass mixed with metal oxide. He feels that he does not have control over the “weird and abstract” glass that he uses, which is precisely what he loves about this technique.

“It’s not me making a work of art; it’s me getting divine inspiration. The glass decides where it’s going to go. I try to make the glass work with me to do what it wants to do,” he says. “It has to be a process of me and the glass.”

Depicting the feelings of the Israel-Hamas war through fused-glass art

Since the October 7 invasion and massacres by Hamas terrorists, Uranovsky has been using this style to make glass paintings that describe the Israel-Hamas war – “not the horrors, but the feelings.”

The first work in this series shows a soldier hugging his child. The picture was modeled on a photo of Uranovsky’s son and granddaughter. “Someone told my wife that she hadn’t cried until she saw my picture of my son. The beauty of art is that it forces you to go through an emotional process,” he says.

After that, he did glass renderings of other people whose lives were shattered by the war: hostage Shiri Bibas holding her two redheaded boys; IDF soldier David Mittelman, who lived at Rosh Tzurim and fell in battle on October 7; and others, such as a soldier blowing a shofar; and a bride and groom dressed in IDF uniforms.

“I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them; I’d like to do an exhibition at some point,” Uranovksy says. “I want to go forward with this technique. Big projects are nice, but this is far more exciting for me.”

RAISED IN Cape Town, South Africa, by parents who are both artists, Uranovksy came to Israel in 1990 on a one-year Bnei Akiva program at Yeshivat Har Etzion but decided to stay and join the army. 

“I always felt very Zionistic, and from the time I was 13 or 14 I had no doubt I would go to Israel. The first time I came here, I felt like I could finally breathe. I felt free in a way I had never felt before,” he recounts. 

Following his military service, he returned to South Africa to do a three-month apprenticeship with David Manning, one of South Africa’s leading stained-glass artists. “Then I taught myself everything I know.”

Returning to Israel, he worked for a few years at a stained-glass studio and then, after marrying a Sabra in 1995, opened his own studio. The couple lived on Kibbutz Rosh Tzurim in Gush Etzion for five years, then moved to nearby Alon Shvut, and finally in 2008 relocated to Moshav Bnei Re’em next to Yad Binyamin. 

“There’s nobody who speaks English here,” Uranovsky says. “I’m the only Anglo. I came to Israel and became Israeli. I wasn’t interested in being an Anglo here.” 

He and his wife, Limor, have seven children, ranging in age from 26 (that’s the soldier in his glass painting) to 10. Two of their adult children – and both their grandchildren – live on the moshav as well.

Uranovsky’s brother is an architect living in Rehovot. His parents live in New York. And his sisters, all musicians, live in the US as well.

It has not been easy earning a living as an artist in Israel. “It’s been tough at times,” he admits. “During corona, my business of doing pieces for synagogues overseas was knocked out of the water. That’s when I started experimenting with the new technique.”

There’s much that has changed about Israel since Uranovsky first arrived at the age of 18. 

“I came here before Oslo,” he says. “Oslo changed our psyche from being proud to being something more like just getting along. Israel, before I came here, was an Israel that was proud to be Jewish but wasn’t thriving in a material way; it was very difficult economically. In the late 1990s, Israel started thriving physically but fading spiritually,” he observes.

“I’ve seen this country change from having a backbone, to not having a backbone, to starting to have a backbone again. Like [Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist] Viktor Frankl said, if you don’t have meaning in your life, something to look forward to, you will not survive.”

Uranovsky has been doing voluntary guard duty on his moshav and says that he gets a lot of inspiration from speaking with the highly motivated combat engineering corps troops stationed there now. 

“It’s interesting to see a nation waking up from its slumber,” he says. “That’s what my paintings are about. They are filled with tikvah, with so much hope.” ■

BARAK URANOVSKY, 51 From Cape Town, South Africa, to Gush Etzion, 1990 to Moshav Bnei Re’em, 2008