For about four decades through 2009, worshippers at Kesher Israel Congregation enjoyed a cultural experience unique to Washington, D.C.
It occurred once each year, always during the afternoon break in the Yom Kippur prayer services, when they could view a massive, Marc Chagall-designed mosaic affixed to a brick wall in the shaded garden of a home across the street. The house belonged to a widow who, along with her husband, knew the famed French artist.
In the early 1990s, Fran Kritz, a synagogue congregant then, saw Bible scholar Nahum Sarna studying Talmud there.
“It felt like different moments of Jewish history coming together,” she said. “You’d have thought there was no way to elevate this beautiful garden.”
The hostess, Evelyn Nef, didn’t attend the synagogue, never explained her invitation to its leadership and rarely was present during the visits. She simply sent a note before each year’s High Holy Days to extend the offer, then left the gate open on the appointed afternoon.
“She told me she was Jewish but that, at age 7, she lost all faith in religion,” said David Epstein, another congregant.
Just as Chagall created the work and presented it in 1971 as a gift to Nef and her husband, John (he died in 1989), she apparently decided to share it with the synagogue that still stands at the corner of 28th and N streets in the Georgetown neighborhood of the city’s northwest quadrant.
Chagall was born in Belarus on July 7, 1887. He spent most of his life in France and died in 1985.
The shul’s Chagall-viewing tradition began shortly after word emerged about the mosaic’s installation.
Ken Horowitz might have been the first congregant to see it, and perhaps inadvertently spurred Nef to issue the annual invitation.
Horowitz was among a handful of worshippers who, after services — he remembers it being a holiday, but not which one — jumped near the property’s outer wall trying to glimpse the art.
Nef invited them into the yard.
“It was well worth it. It was a gorgeous mosaic,” said Horowitz.
It certainly was imposing: 10’ x 17’ (3m x 5.2m), mounted on a 30’-high (9m) brick wall that Chagall painted gray. Chagall had told the Nefs what it depicted, according to a story she wrote in The Washington Post in 1972. The main figures at the center come from Greek mythology: Orpheus playing a lute, ringed by the Three Graces and the winged horse Pegasus. In blue at the bottom-left lies a body of water at which people stand; Nef paraphrased Chagall as saying it symbolizes European Jewish refugees like himself who escaped the Nazis’ persecution for shelter in the United States. In the bottom-right, a man in blue-green and a woman in purple sit against a tree.
Nef asked Chagall whether the couple represents her and John.
“If you like,” he replied.
The mosaic of stone and glass tiles was executed by Italian artist Lino Melano, who worked in a studio in Biot, a French village near Nice, close to Chagall’s studio in St. Paul de Vence. Melano, Chagall and Chagall’s wife Valentine visited Washington to oversee the installation of the mosaic’s 10 panels and attend a dedication ceremony where France’s ambassador spoke.
The Nefs hosted the Chagalls at least once before, in 1968. Chagall told them then he’d create art for their home to honor the couples’ friendship.
“Then, toward the end of the visit, Marc announced one morning at breakfast: ‘Nothing for the house. The house is perfect as it is. But I will do something for the garden. A mosaic,’ ” Nef wrote in the article.
The Chagalls and Nefs had vacationed together for several summers in southern France. In 1970, at his studio — “the holy of holies,” Nef wrote of visiting it — Chagall showed them a watercolor maquette, or scale model, of the mosaic.
“With some ceremony, Marc approached a large brown paper-covered rectangle on the wall,” she wrote. “After a short speech, he tore off the covering to reveal a stunning, brilliantly colored gouache design.”
Viewing the work in the Nefs’ garden was a striking experience, said Epstein, because “sometimes, when the sun hit it, the gold in it would gleam.”
“It was amazing it was in somebody’s backyard,” said American diplomat Daniel Renna, who twice saw the mosaic while attending Kesher Israel between 1995 and 2001.
John Nef, a University of Chicago economics professor, had been collecting art, including two Chagalls, by the time he befriended Chagall after inviting him to lecture at the campus in 1946. A widower, he met the divorced-and-widowed Evelyn in Washington and married her in 1964. Neither had children.
She by then was an expert on Arctic exploration (her second husband’s field), and later became a psychotherapist. She was active in Washington’s social circles.
She died in 2009, bequeathing the mosaic and other pieces, including Chagall works, to Washington’s National Gallery of Art. Conservators in 2010 painstakingly disassembled the mosaic and transported it to the museum, where it’s been displayed since 2013 in a sculpture garden. It even acquired a name, Orphée. (It was untitled during the Nefs’ ownership.)
The piece is “monumental,” among Chagall’s largest mosaics, said Harry Cooper, the National Gallery’s curator of modern art. Its acquisition “filled a major gap” in the museum’s Chagall holdings, he said.
“The flying figures is pure Chagall. The flowing colors, beautiful colors — that’s Chagall,” Cooper said. “He gives people this sense of magic, freedom, flight — all these things we really need … as an escape from daily life. It’s a bit of the Mediterranean or Atlantic in our sculpture garden, whatever beautiful spot you want to think about.”
Kesher Israel congregants who enjoyed the Chagall mosaic on long-ago Yom Kippur afternoons praise Nef’s gesture today.
“It was a wonderful experience. I remember thinking how generous it was of her to allow a select public to come in,” said Jerusalem resident Ruth Frank, who saw the mosaic, in either the late 1980s or early 1990s, while attending the synagogue.
“It was a lovely place to spend the [Yom Kippur] break,” said Edith Gelfand, of Florida, who also viewed the mosaic once during her years in Washington.
Said Kritz: “It was a lovely invitation by this woman. To me, it became a holy opportunity.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at [email protected].