Spreading the light: Israeli artist makes 'ner tamid' art during Gaza war

South African Israeli Barak Uranovosky is a stained glass artist who lives with his wife and family in Bnei Re’em. I had the pleasure of meeting him when I spent a Shabbat there with my friend, who is his relative. Uranovosky showed me his impressive glass painting studio in the basement of his home.

I was impressed by his art and asked to interview him for the Magazine, to which he gladly agreed.

Born in 1972 in Cape Town into an artistic family – his father is a painter; his mother, a fabric artist; and his sisters, musicians – he knew from a young age that he wanted to do something with art: “I always loved art; we were all involved in art, growing up,” he said. 

The life and art of Barak Uranovsky

In school, he studied art and majored in it. However, it wasn’t until he came to Israel in 1990 to study at MTA – Yeshiva University’s midrasha-based one-year program – when a friend asked him to paint a glass window around an ark, that he discovered glass painting “and kind of fell in love with it by accident.” Although Uranovosky had never done anything like this before, he found that he really enjoyed it and decided to study stained glass. “It was just so exciting. I knew immediately that this was what I wanted to do. I really loved glass. I was crazy about it.”

He went back to South Africa for a few months and started reading more about stained glass, teaching himself new techniques and practicing them. However, it wasn’t until he was accepted into an apprenticeship at David Manley, one of the leading stained glass studios in South Africa, that his 25-year career began. After returning to Israel and completing his military service and yeshiva studies, Uranovosky started working at a stained glass studio. In 1995, he opened his own studio, called Barak Glass (barakglassart.com).

While he was in yeshiva, he thought he would go into education. “Everybody who goes to yeshiva thinks he’s going to go into education. It’s kind of like the course of things,” he said. “I thought I’d better go into education. But at some point, one of the rabbis at the yeshiva said to me, ‘Listen, you’ve got to be doing something with your art. God gave you this gift. You can’t just decide that you’re not going to use it.’ That was an interesting eye-opener for me, and I decided that I was going to do something real with my art.”

When asked who or what inspires his art, he responded passionately. “My favorite artists who I am inspired by are Van Gogh and Chagall. I find them both absolutely fascinating.” He went on to describe how he loves the “Jewish feeling” depicted in Chagall’s paintings – “He can be painting Jesus, and it’s Jewish; it has this Jewish feel about it, which is very interesting” – and the passion and raw talent of Van Gogh: “You see who he is.” Here, he recounted a time when he went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with two of his daughters: “There was a picture of Van Gogh’s shoes that he painted. It was so moving. How could it be that you have a picture of shoes, which is such a mundane object, yet there’s so much emotion that you see in the shoes?”

Uranovosky has created many large-scale stained glass and fused glass projects, such as Torah arks, memorials, and dedication walls, as well as commissioned works for private homes. In his work, he uses a technique called “fusing,” which involves melting pieces of glass together in a large kiln at a high temperature and sliding them over each other.

SINCE THE Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7, Uranovosky has been creating paintings, using his unique style to describe “the feelings, not the horrors,” of war. His latest creation is a ner tamid (eternal flame), which incorporates a piece of the Iron Dome which he received from Eli Beer, founder of United Hatzalah, fused with glass pieces. This is a project that he began alongside artist Marla Buck two weeks after Oct. 7, 2023. 

Buck is a passionate artist and philanthropic activist. For a period of five years prior to COVID, she conducted boutique trips to Israel with small groups of people and introduced them to organizations that were actively involved in tikkun olam and were not well known at the time. Her goal was to connect trip participants to Israel on a visceral level and encourage them to volunteer and donate.

Ten organizations were highlighted on these trips, which included United Hatzalah and Shalva, the Israel Association for the Care and Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities. Through her involvement with Shalva, Buck dedicated to her mother a ner tamid, created out of stained glass by Uranovksy, for the shul in Shalva’s new building “because she was my ner tamid,” Buck said. 

On a visit to Israel five years ago, Beer gave half of a missile head to Donna and Barry Bank, who took part in one of Buck’s trips. The Bank family asked Buck to turn the missile head into a piece of art and auction it to raise money for Hatzalah. Shortly after, Donna died, on December 21, 2022.

At first, Buck said, she didn’t know what to do with the missile head. However, around Oct. 7, “I suddenly realized that I wanted to make a ner tamid out of this missile head, to convey a message of creating light from darkness.” She got in touch with Uranovsky, and two weeks after Oct. 7 the artistic collaboration began. Buck is very pleased with the results. “He’s given it wings. It is spectacular,” she marveled.

Plans have been initiated to auction it at the annual fundraising event of United Hatzalah in Miami on December 19, 2024. According to Buck, the goal is to have a donor purchase the ner tamid to be given to one of the many synagogues in Israel’s South that were damaged or destroyed by the war “that need to be rededicated and given new light.” The ner tamid will be dedicated to Donna Bank and the synagogue that acquires it.

Once the price is set, the audience will be invited to purchase additional nerot tamid to dedicate to more synagogues in Israel. Buck’s goal is for 10 nerot tamid to be donated at a price of $50,000 each. “All profits will benefit United Hatzalah’s most needed work, with gratitude to the bravery, commitment, and dedication to our land and people,” she said. 