For several years now, I have photographed the work of Daniel Kafri. In our many meetings, Daniel told me much about himself – his past, his thoughts on art and culture, his religious beliefs, and other things. I saw him at work and was with him during times of personal and artistic crisis. I think I got a true picture of the man and the artist.

Kafri is an unusual bird in the Israeli art world. He is not linked with the contemporary art crowd, or, indeed, with any stream of art. This leaves him isolated, and he knows it. He also knows that his isolation comes at a price. In his view, this is the price, however great, that an artist seeking and portraying his own truth must pay.

The way Kafri sees things, the Jewish people is eternal, and the Torah will lead to the ultimate mending of the world in accord with the beliefs of the prophets of Israel. Clearly, Daniel cannot possibly fit in Israel's secular art establishment, which perceives itself as Western. In Kafri's opinion, since the end of the Renaissance, from the moment that man placed himself in the center, around which everything revolves, art has steadily degenerated.

Daniel Kafri was born in Czechoslovakia (in an area that is now Slovakia) on May 11, 1945, right at the end of the Second World War. His parents had fled the Nazi occupation and hid in a small, damp storage hole for potatoes, under a wooden floor, in the house of a Slovakian peasant. His mother was four months pregnant with him when they began to live in the storage space. For five months, through the cold of a European winter, the couple hid in the hole, with barely enough room to move their arms and legs. As his mother was about to give birth, they came up from the hole – without an ounce of strength and suffering from malnutrition – and made their way to the hospital, where, pretending to be a Gentile, she gave birth to Daniel.

Daniel’s parents, Yosef and Hada Knaffelmacher, not wanting to carry a German name any longer, changed their name to Kress. Yosef's father had been one of the heads of the Jewish community in Bratislava. Hada's father headed the Jewish community in Bica. Her mother was the head of WIZO in Czechoslovakia. After making aliya to Israel, in 1949, Daniel and his parents settled in Kiryat Motzkin, near Haifa.

Daniel went to elementary and high school in Kiryat Motzkin, where he also began to study art. His exceptional drawing and sculpting talent, his stormy temperament, and restlessness were evident already as a youth.

Daniel moved to Jerusalem in 1966 to study at the Bezalel Art Academy, Israel's leading art school, where he took to his studies with great enthusiasm. It was there, too, that he got to know and feel the special essence and spirit of Jerusalem. The teachers who had the greatest influence on Daniel were the painter Yosef Hirsch, from whom he learned drawing, history of art teacher Avigdor Posek, and the artist Avraham Ofek, a friend as well as teacher. One of his classmates was Ruth Mokotov, whom he married in 1967. They were to have four children together.

After the first year at Bezalel, the students specialized. The only one who chose sculpture was Daniel Kafri. The school did not have a department of sculpture, but the school set up a studio for Daniel. He went to work learning to be a sculptor, mostly on his own.

In 1970, Daniel finished his studies at Bezalel. For the next three years, he worked in the "western" style of sculpture. He sought a perfect, stylized image, in round, sensual shapes, with great esthetic care, and with the desire to maintain balance and harmony, with an inclination to the abstract.

The Yom Kippur War came as a shock to Daniel, as it did to many Israelis. Yom Kippur, the traditional day of atonement and reflection, changed Israelis into a more sober and realistic people. Daniel’s soul-searching brought him to thoughts about our right – the Jewish people’s right – to live in the Land of Israel. He came across a Bible, by chance, while on the front during the war. This chance occurrence changed his life. Reading it during the war, at a time of national confusion and national self-doubt, brought Kafri to see things anew, both as Jew and artist. As a Jew, he realized that it was his duty to obey the Torah’s commandments; as an artist, he understood that he had to seek the way to nurture his art with the spirit emanating from the Middle East. The two realizations have accompanied him, in good days and bad, ever since.

Western art, Kafri thought, was irrelevant to the creative needs of an Israeli sculptor. So he studied and followed in the tradition of ancient sculpture from the Middle East, Israel in particular. He was especially influenced by the Canaanite sculptures made in simple, concise, soft, and sensuous shapes. Biblical stories formed his spiritual world from age thirty onwards, and he manifested them in his sculptures.

His religious studies brought him in contact with Talmudic scholars who were original thinkers with sharp, clear minds. He came to know, and join, the world of the ultra-orthodox community. Daniel turned this knowledge and understanding into art. He started with small sculptures on Jewish themes. An example is his sculptures depicting musical instruments, in an expression of prayer and supplication, the musician's head turned toward heaven as he plays. Daniel was greatly impressed by the image of King David, and in a number of works, he emphasized the royal and spiritual nature of King David. He portrayed him as a man of spirit pouring out his heart to God, a man of majesty, a lofty and noble image. In doing so, Daniel portrayed King David differently from the way King David was portrayed in western art, which emphasized him as warrior, or as a shepherd with a slingshot in his hand.

Another work from this period is Noah’s Ark (1974), a two-meter-tall work made from Hebron stone using only two implements – hammer and chisel. In this work, he produced the entire world contained in Noah’s Ark . The sculpture is located at the Judah Halevi School in Jerusalem, which commissioned the work as part of a municipal program to embellish its schools with original works of art.

Kafri’s internal conflict – between his life as sculptor, with its inherent need for free and liberal thinking, and as Torah-observant Jew, with its inherent rigid demands – grew in the two decades following the Yom Kippur War. He smashed many of his earlier works, those that portrayed women in particular, which he deemed inconsistent with his religious beliefs. His sculptures during this period dealt with biblical and Jewish themes and included, among other things, walls of synagogues and arks for housing Torah scrolls. He gave new and original expression to Jewish sculpture.

The internal conflict continued. Then, in 1991, feeling he could no longer carry on living this dual-existence, Daniel decided that the time had come to choose. It would have to be one life or the other. For whatever reason, he left the world of observant Judaism and returned to the life of a secular sculptor.

Kafri began to work with renewed vigor. Yet, despite living a secular life, his religious beliefs remained. This secular-religious divide led him to seek a new way to maintain harmony and balance in his life. This balancing act, with its accompanying ups-and-downs, including crises from time to time, affected his art and his personal life. This fruitful, creative period tells us much about the man and his philosophy. It was then for example, that he sculpted curved cylinders, some of which change, appearing to be wings or floating cloth material. In these works, Kafri expresses the enormous external pressure that twists and threatens to break man. Ultimately though, man gains strength, changes shape, and manages to free himself from the pressure and goes free. The great effort made by man to release himself from external forces was expressed as far back as Michelangelo in his slave statues, with one major difference: the slaves did not manage to go free, and continued in a struggle that they could never win. In Daniel's sculptures, release is possible and the struggle ends in victory.

This period ends with the exhibition in the patio outside the Sherover Theater, in Jerusalem: fourteen monumental sculptures from Carera marble. Out of huge blocks of marble, Daniel created a flood of images of a once perfect world on its way to destruction. The works provided a silent, powerful testimony resulting from the tempest churning inside the artist, which, to my astonishment, was true also for Israeli society as a whole.

The contradictions inside him unconsciously joined the internal contradictions in the reality of life in Israel. The never ending war with the Arabs, the conflict between the religious sector and the secular sector, Sephardim with Ashkenazim, the poor versus the rich, the Left opposing the Right, between new immigrants and veteran Israelis continued in the shadow of the brutal intifada that began in 2000. The exhibit, which was installed in 2002 but whose conception predated the intifada, portrays, with mathematical precision, this reality.

A sculpture exhibition of this magnitude – both in terms of cost and the sheer power of the sculptures themselves – was new to Israel. Unfortunately, the exhibition suffered as a result of its timing. In the midst of the intifada, art and sculpture were not on people's mind. Kafri was understandably disappointed: three years of intense labor had gone for naught. Or so he thought at the time. In any event, the pain and disappointment affected him greatly. He returned to the Torah-observant life that he had abandoned a decade earlier. Understandably, the sudden change affected his wife and children, and resulted in much pain, and scars, on all sides. Daniel found himself alone, an outsider, both in his art and in his family life.

It was during this period that Daniel began a project that was to last for until 2005 – biblical stories in large reliefs. Those who know Daniel see in the sculpture of the Jew, his body sunk inside the wall and his fingers tearing at the stone, Daniel's ultimate expression of his worldview, yearnings, and suffering.

The stories were not chosen chronologically, but from his emotional relation to the biblical story depicted in the relief. For the most part, the reliefs emphasize the human aspect of the story. Daniel seeks to interpret the meaning and ethical teaching of each of the stories.

Daniel's works have become an integral part of the landscape in Israel and abroad. From the moment they are installed, Daniel's sculptures have been a center of attraction and a pilgrimage site. This book cannot possibly do complete justice to the breadth of his work. It might be helpful and instructive, therefore, to describe in some detail a few of his works. These works, which are in my opinion milestones in Kafri's artistic life, can give the reader a feel for the intensity, emotion, religious belief, and skill inherent in Daniel's work.

In 1981, Daniel was studying at Ohr Sameach Yeshiva, in Jerusalem. He had abandoned the world of art and joined the yeshiva world. Sculpture, he thought, was a lie. This belief caused him to act hastily: he left his studio, sold his implements, and shattered many of his works, the ones his wife did not manage to hide from him. He later realized that he erred in acting so rashly.

While he was at the yeshiva, Uri Blumenthal, the architect of the Sonesta Hotel, in Taba, across the border from Eilat, who had been impressed by The Gate of the Faith, asked Daniel to sculpt a stone wall – eight and a half meters tall and seven meters wide – in the lobby of the hotel, which was then under construction. At first, Daniel refused the commission, but he reconsidered and sought the counsel, and support, of the head of the yeshiva. The rabbi gave his support.

The hotel's owner, Eli Papushado, wanted the sculpture to express the spirit of Eilat, a secular vacation site along the sea. This conception, of course, conflicted with Daniel's religious values. Where lay the grounds for a compromise – a sculpture that would simultaneously satisfy Daniel's religious worldview and the owner's desire to portray the secular spirit of Eilat?

Daniel found the answer. His sculpture, made from Jerusalem stone and, at sixty square meters, among the largest sculptures ever made in Israel, depicts Mother Earth, constructed from unrefined stone panels in which a waterfall is embedded, at the base of the work. Above it Daniel sculpted the sea, with fish and other sea objects. Above that lie the heavens, with the sun shining brightly over the whole land. The verse engraved on the wall is from Psalms 24:1-2 ("The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein. For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods”), which consolidates the work and connects it with the Creator of the World.

In 1991, the Jewish National Fund commissioned a monument in memory of the Ethiopians who perished during the long trek that ultimately brought large numbers of Ethiopian Jewry to Israel. The monument is a five-stone-relief sculpture that sits in a field west of Kibbutz Ramat Rachel, in the southeastern part of Jerusalem. The reliefs use African shapes and forms in depicting the life of the Ethiopian immigrants. From the time it was placed on the site, the Ethiopian community has used the memorial as a pilgrimage site and meeting place. I visited the memorial on a day that the community gathered there. Some cried, others stroked and caressed the memorial, others prayed alongside it. Daniel had managed to construct a work from the Ethiopian community's perspective, with their symbols, dress, feelings, and culture.

Raising the Flag, which Kafri sculpted in 1995, also draws many visitors and has become over the years a leading tourist site in Eilat. The commission came to Daniel after he won a competition organized by the Ministry of Tourism for a memorial to commemorate the conquering of the city.

Daniel's task here was to express a military theme in a work of art. It was neither his nature nor his desire to produce a work glorifying military might and heroism. Rather, he sought to combine the local event, the vanquishing of the city, with the spirit and atmosphere of the Palmach fighters and the War of Independence, a spirit of innocence and youth. Not force or weapons, but faith, innocence, and vision were the significant factors. The War of Independence, Daniel goes on to remind those who view his sculpture, was replete with miracles more than any other war Israel has fought.

The bronze sculpture is huge – 7.5 meters tall. It contains five figures, each about two meters in height. They are so realistic that the viewer might think that Daniel prepared the work by pouring plaster over living persons. The eyes and heads of the soldiers look upwards, to the flag, reflecting their youth and their astonishment. I know of no other monument anywhere in the world that commemorates a military victory in which the visitor rejoices in the face of a work that rejects violence and force and exudes human warmth and youthful innocence.

The Weintraub Gallery was one of the leading sculpture galleries in the United States in the twentieth century. Henry Moore, Jacob Lipschitz, Alberto Giacometti, and Osip Zadkin were a few of the world-famous sculptors whose work was shown there.

In his first visit to the United States, in 1985, Daniel went to the gallery. Without an appointment or any advance notice, Daniel knocked on the door of the owner’s office at the gallery and asked to show him his works. It did not take long before Mr. Weintraub offered to present an exhibition of Kafri's stone works. The exhibition of fourteen sculptures was held for three weeks in 1987. In preparation, Daniel worked feverishly, and with great excitement, to find the funding (ultimately provided by his good friends Barry and Leni Klein) and create the works (he did this at "the source" – Carera, Italy – where he worked in the studio of the renowned sculptor Carlo Nikoli).

In the catalog that Mr. Weintraub published on the master sculptors of the twentieth century, he included Daniel's work, Reclining Woman.

Daniel’s exhibition at the Weintraub Gallery ended an active decade of work. In addition to his large works, he also sculpted small works in a Canaanite style with Jewish motifs, and made wall sculptures in synagogues. His notable works dating from this time portray, among others, King David, Jacob's dream, Abraham blessing Isaac, Ruth the Moabite, Daniel in the lion's den, Ruth and Boaz, a Jew putting on phylacteries, a Jew at prayer, musicians putting Jewish prayers to music, a Jew dancing. These sculptures exude deep feeling and unrealized love and yearning, features that are particularly evident in Daniel's several variations of the theme of Ruth and Boaz and his different works portraying Kind David.

Daniel Kafri is unique among Israeli artists. Sculpture by an Orthodox Jew is an oxymoron, a phenomenon unknown in the history of the Jewish people. With orthodox Jewish thought firmly opposed to the making of images, another Daniel Kafri is unlikely to appear anytime soon.

The branding of Kafri as a Torah-observant sculptor affected him, at times greatly. After forty years as an artist, with more than 600 sculptures to his credit, he finds himself isolated from the Torah world and from the secular artistic world, neither of which is willing to grant him the recognition he deserves. Yet, he has received the recognition, and appreciation, of the general public, who have warmed to his works at home and abroad – in parks, schools, auditoriums, hotels, synagogues, and in museums and private collections.

I should mention, in closing, Jack and Marilyn Belz, from Memphis, Tennessee. The two of them have adorned Memphis, at their expense, with art works from around the world. Over the years, they have also directed much of their generosity to the State of Israel. Recently, they donated to public institutions in Israel monumental marble sculptures created by Daniel. Without doubt, the support that the Belzs have given Daniel over the years, and the friendship that has grown between them during this time, have been crucial in enabling Daniel to reach the artistic heights that he has attained.

I have worked with and come to know Daniel very well. It may be that I am not objective when I write about him. So be it. But I expect that Daniel’s unique qualities and personality make it almost impossible for anybody who knows him and his work to remain objective about Daniel as man and as artist. In any event, I am happy, and thank Daniel, for having chosen me to photograph his works, and to write these thoughts about a dear friend, a good and sincere man, and an artist of uncommon insight, creativity, and skill.

Edited and translated, from Hebrew, by Harold Jacobson