Artist portrays rabbis as rock stars

Rock stars and rabbis don’t usually share the stage, but in her debut solo exhibition, Rockstar Rabbis, South African-born artist Natalia Rabinowitz brings the two worlds together. Her bold and playful collection reimagines 14 Jewish spiritual leaders as larger-than-life cultural icons, inspired by the rock posters that populated her home as a youngster. 

The exhibition took place on 1 July at Chabad of Hampstead Garden Suburb in London and was attended by many people. There are hopes of bringing it to Cape Town in December. Rabinowitz is also selling prints of the rabbis on her website. 

Rabinowitz grew up in Cape Town surrounded by music icons. Her father is Stephen “Sugar” Segerman, the record store owner whose hunt for vanished American musician Rodriguez became the Oscar-winning film Searching for Sugar Man. 

“Our house was like a teenager’s bedroom that never got stopped. There were posters of rock stars all over the walls. The first thing he ever did was put up a big Beatles poster in my room. I remember looking up at the Beatles every night,” she says. 

When Rabinowitz moved to London some years ago, she started noticing that many people put pictures of rabbis around their houses and she didn’t understand why. 

“But a few months ago it clicked for me that the reason people put a picture of a musician up is that music is this abstract thing, like this kind of cloud in the sky. But unless someone writes a song that you can listen to, you can’t connect to it,” she says. “And then I realised that Torah is the same thing as music. It’s this big abstract thing. But these rabbis, because they interpret it and make it easy for us to access, they are the rock stars of Torah. That’s why people put up pictures of them, because they represent their connection to this big abstract thing, the Torah. 

“If you think about photos of rabbis, they’re not generally very good because they’re taken by people who have very bad cameras in these very religious communities, very bad rabbi art on people’s walls. And I just thought, if you’re going to put up a picture, let’s make it beautiful. That was also a motivation for me,” she says. 

The exhibition is her solo debut, and Rabinowitz explains that it both cements her as an artist and shows that she doesn’t have to sacrifice her artistic ambitions for her Judaism or vice versa. 

“It’s an interesting way for me to tie the two worlds together and to show that when you become more religious, you don’t change who you are. You don’t just become a robot. You still have a personality, and you still have your background,” she says. “I never want to feel embarrassed that I didn’t grow up religious or that I don’t know as much as the people around me. I’m very proud of where I come from and how I see the world because of where I come from.” 

She says that while things may be tense for Jewish people in London, she is not afraid to make Jewish art. “We have to be positive and have to live positively. And I refuse to battle the side that is in defence. I’m going out, I’m doing productive, positive work.” 

The exhibition started as a one-off hand-drawn portrait of the Lubavitcher Rebbe as a gift for her husband on his 40th birthday. 

“I did the one portrait reluctantly for my husband because we are Chabad and he really wanted me to do a picture of the Rebbe. I did that and then I actually really liked how it looked and I thought, let me do one more, and I did Rabbi [Lord Jonathan] Sacks. I am familiar with both of them and both of their work. And while I was drawing, I listened to YouTube videos about him, and I found it so fascinating to learn about all these different rabbis; they all have the same source, they have the same five books of Moses, but they all live and interpret completely differently,” she says. 

Rabinowitz then drew one rabbi a week, studying each through that week’s Torah portion and doing a D’var Torah until she could capture “not just a likeness but an essence”. 

In the eight months that she devoted to the project, she completed portraits of 14 rabbis, from different sects of Judaism. 

“I was talking to a lot of people and really just saying, ‘Who’s your favourite rabbi?’ And then I felt like I was doing a lot of Ashkenazi rabbis, so I pushed myself to do some Sephardi rabbis. I found that I spoke to people who were very in the know, and they told me exactly who I should draw. And I’d love to do more in the future. I’d love to just keep adding to the collection because there are so many I didn’t get to do,” she says. 

For Rabinowitz, the first two portraits are the most personal. 

“In my house, I’ve got the Rebbe and Rabbi Sacks, and learning about him, I felt literally energetically moved that entire week. I felt like a different person. He was so powerful, learning about him and his energy,” she says. 

The project taught her how varied Judaism is. “Coming from South Africa, I didn’t know any Sephardi people. I thought everyone was Ashkenazi. I thought everyone used Yiddish words. It was quite an education for me coming to London. And so I loved learning about these rabbis from Baghdad, Morocco, and Yemen. It was a real education in just how different and varied Jews are from around the world,” she says.