Marc Chagall's twelve stained glass windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah University Medical Center on the Ein Kerem campus in Jerusalem, installed in 1962, represent the crowning achievement of his engagement with the biblical text of the Hebrew Bible - a project in which the Russian-Jewish master painter gave visual form to the ancient tribal poem that closes the patriarchal narratives.
The biblical program derives from two sources: Jacob's deathbed blessing of his twelve sons in Genesis 49, which assigns each son a characteristic image ('Judah is a lion's cub'; 'Issachar is a rawboned donkey'; 'Naphtali is a doe set free'), and Moses's final blessing of the twelve tribes in Deuteronomy 33. Each of Chagall's twelve windows is dedicated to one tribe, with its imagery drawn from these ancient blessings. The result is a visual commentary on some of the oldest poetry in the Bible.
Chagall worked on the windows for three years in his studio in Reims, France, collaborating with the master glazier Charles Marq and his wife Brigitte Simon, who had already worked with him on the Metz Cathedral windows. The scale was modest - each window approximately three by two and a half meters - but the color intensity and compositional ambition were extraordinary.
The palette varies by tribe but consistently deploys Chagall's characteristic luminous jewel-tones: sapphire blues, emerald greens, ruby reds, warm ambers. Within each color field, his dreamlike imagery floats free of gravity - animals, celestial symbols, flowers, Torah crowns, menorahs, fish, birds, and human figures drift in a space that is simultaneously ancient and contemporary, naturalistic and symbolic.
Chagall himself, though a deeply cultural Jew who had immersed himself in the Scriptures since childhood in Vitebsk, Russia, described the windows as his love letter to the Jewish people and to the land of Israel. He insisted on using figures without human faces - a concession to the Jewish prohibition on figural representation in synagogue art - while maintaining the emotional and narrative richness that characterizes his greatest work.
The drama of the windows' subsequent history added another layer of significance. During the Six-Day War in June 1967, four of the twelve windows were damaged by bomb blasts. Chagall, then eighty years old, traveled to Jerusalem to inspect the damage and personally oversaw the restoration, inserting his own hands into the repair of work he had created five years earlier.
The synagogue in the Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center is open to visitors. The windows are displayed in four groups of three, set in the four walls of the cubic synagogue, creating an immersive environment in which the entire biblical tribal heritage of Israel surrounds the worshipper and visitor alike.