“The driving force and the source from which I draw my inspiration,” wrote the Israeli sculptor and experimental artist Yaacov Agam, “stem from my desire to give … expression to the ancient Hebrew concept of reality, which differs in its essence from that of all other civilizations … .”
Thus Agam began his “Artist’s Credo,” which he wrote in 1964 and never altered.
“Art is a mirror of reality … ,” he continued. “The special significance of Judaism is the unity of G‑d and its conception that all the world is Him. The Jewish art form, then, must be special for it must reflect the Hebraic conception of reality.”
Agam, who passed away on June 21 (6 Tammuz) at the age of 98, would spend the rest of his life giving expression to the Jewish view of reality.
Internationally celebrated for paintings and sculptures that shift and change as the viewer moves, Agam was the most renowned Israeli artist of his era, with works in the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Just months before his passing, Agam received the 2026 Israel Prize for Visual Arts, the nation’s highest cultural honor.
Perhaps one of his most viewed pieces is the towering menorah that stands at Fifth Avenue in Manhattan menorah, which he designed for Chabad-Lubavitch in 1986. The World’s Largest Menorah is erected outside the Plaza Hotel every Chanukah and draws crowds each night of the festival. The iconic menorah is seen by millions each year in person, and even more through various forms of media.
Menorahs had for a long time been built with curved branches, as famously depicted in relief on the Arch of Titus in Rome, which memorializes the Siege of Jerusalem. The Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, objected to the widespread use of this design to depict the Temple menorah, taken from a Roman triumphal arch meant to humiliate the Jewish people. He also noted that it contradicted a famous sketch of the Holy Temple’s menorah made by the Rambam (Maimonides), which clearly showed the menorah constructed with diagonal branches.
The Rebbe posited that curved menorahs were used to illuminate other parts of the Temple and were differentiated from the main diagonal one. Though the Chanukah menorah has more branches than the Temple menorah, in order to celebrate the eight-day miracle, it is still meant to be evocative of the Temple menorah; therefore, the Rebbe preferred the design to be close to that of the original.
It would be up to Agam to build a menorah original in design, but true to this spirit, to be constructed at the crossroads of the world. Agam worked on it for months, producing a model which he gave to the Rebbe.
The Rebbe kept the model on his desk for three days, before giving it an emphatic stamp of approval.
From the Holy Land to Paris
Born Yaacov Gibstein in Rishon LeZion, Mandatory Palestine, in 1928, Agam was the son of Rabbi Yehoshua and Kendel Yocheved Gibstein. His father was a rabbi and kabbalist, whose mystical sensibility shaped his son’s lifelong fascination with the unseen.
He learned in cheder as a boy, later training at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem under Mordechai Ardon, As a teenager he was swept up in the British Operation Agatha roundups of 1946, spending months in the Latrun detention camp. In 1949 he left to study in Zurich under Johannes Itten, and in 1951 he settled in Paris, which remained his home for the next seventy-five years.
There Agam’s vision flowered. By his late 20s he was exhibiting alongside household names like Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder and Jean Tinguely, taking part in the landmark 1955 Paris show that gave kinetic art its name.
Perhaps most emblematic of the artist was Agam’s conviction that art was not a thing that is finished by the artist. Instead, he believed that art was something only truly finished by the viewer. His kinetic works could not be taken in all at once. One could look at one of his works and believe that the whole was always present, yet they would quickly realize that not all was wholly visible. This represented a theology he brought from his life into his art. “The special significance of Judaism is the unity of G‑d and its conception that all the world is Him … ,” he wrote in his credo. “In this sense, my works are reality, not abstraction, for to the observer is revealed a world that is ‘One, yet unique in unity.’”
Agam would eventually become one of the most widely-collected Israeli artists, living or dead. His dazzling Agam Salon graced the Élysée Palace in Paris, and the Fire and Water Fountain is a landmark in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square. He also invented the “Agamograph,” and developed an acclaimed visual-education method for young children honored by UNESCO.
An Artistic Philosophy Rooted in Torah
It was the Israeli diplomat and statesman Joseph Ciechanover who first introduced Agam to the Rebbe around 1975. (Agam’s wife, Kalila, was herself a descendant of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the first Rebbe of Chabad.) The bond was immediate.
“[T]hank you for the wonderful album,” the Rebbe wrote to the artist in 1977, after Agam sent him Frank Popper’s 500 page album of his work. “Even though it’s completely outside my field, the overall impression is striking even to someone who is not an art expert. But surely, your work is aimed not only at experts.”
Over a period of nearly half a century, the Rebbe had articulated a revolutionary vision of the role of art in the Jewish experience. Creative art, the Rebbe explained, was a powerful medium with which to reveal the G‑dliness inherent in the material world—the ultimate purpose of humanity.
His letter to Agam offers a window into this worldview.
Agam had presented the album to the Rebbe in honor of the latter’s 75th birthday, and the dedication he inscribed on the inside cover amounted to an original artwork.
Writing in Hebrew in yellow marker: “To Rabbi Schneerson/On the occasion of his birthday/With faithful blessings.” Then, overlapping the forms of the initial birthday message, he wrote a second message, this one in blue marker: “To the esteemed leader of the generation/And light unto Israel who blesses/His faithful with hope and prayer/With great respect.”
One message Agam had written in letters of light (yellow), the second their shadow (blue). In his reply, the Rebbe picks up on this point, drawing a lesson from the interplay of light and shadow which Agam deploys in his heartfelt inscription. It was the shadow that contained the far deeper message.
“Shadow, at first glance, appears to be the result of something that conceals light and its source,” the Rebbe wrote. “However, according to our Torah … which states that ‘everything the Creator made in His world, He made for His glory,’ this includes shadow. This means that if one places the shadow in its appropriate form and in its appropriate place, then it too becomes a source of positive influence, just like light.
In this there is a concrete lesson, the Rebbe continues: “That even in days of ‘shadow,’ days that are ‘gray,’ in our physical and material world, where at first glance the shadows outnumber the lights and matter prevails over spirit, etc., a person is still required to fulfill their mission in this world according to the statement of our Sages, that even shadow should be for the honor of the Creator. On the contrary, the advantage of light over darkness then becomes apparent, meaning that through, and by, and in combination with darkness … it is within man’s capacity to ‘turn darkness into light.’”
The Fifth Ave Menorah
On Chanukah of 1985 Ciechanover’s wife Atara passed the giant menorah erected by Chabad-Lubavitch on Fifth Avenue and found it lacking. This was one of the busiest corners in the world, and the current menorah, she felt, fell short of the Rebbe’s wish to engage every Jew.
She brought her concerns directly to the Rebbe, while in a private audience together with her husband.
“She told the Rebbe that she aimed to make a beautiful and dignified menorah,” Josef Ciechanover told Chabad.org in 2017. “The Rebbe agreed with her concern and told her the new one should be built according to the design of the Rambam. He corrected her sketch to show what he meant by it.”
With the Rebbe’s go-ahead, she approached her longtime friend Agam. The artist took the commission, although not without some trepidation, saying that while he “was excited to fulfill a request coming from the Rebbe,” he did have some “internal hesitation” due to what he saw as “the complexity of the project.”
Agam designed a new menorah following the Rebbe’s guidance and the Rambam’s depiction of the Temple menorah, with its branches rising straight and diagonal rather than rounded. He brought a miniature model to New York. It sat on the Rebbe’s desk for three days before an emphatic approval came—a fact Rabbi Shmuel Butman, who lit the menorah each year until his passing in 2024, would remind attendees of every year.
When it was noted that Agam’s design departed somewhat from the Rambam’s classic sketch, the Rebbe responded that the essential requirement was the diagonal branches and that within those parameters, an artist such as Agam must be given room to express himself.
First lit on Dec. 26, 1986, the 32-foot menorah at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, beside the Plaza Hotel, was certified by Guinness World Records as the largest in the world. Two days later, Agam brought a model to the Rebbe during “Sunday Dollars,” when the Rebbe would distribute dollars for charity and people would have an opportunity to speak briefly to the Rebbe.
“Thank you for designing the menorah according to the opinion of Maimonides,” the Rebbe told him, in a moment captured on film.
“When the Romans drew the menorah, they did it according to others they had seen,” Agam replied. “I was told that the Rebbe said the arms should be straight.”
“And diagonally,” the Rebbe said.
“I also gave this menorah a spiritual dimension,” Agam said. “Everything ascends; there is no corporeality [gashmiut], and the crown is above.”
“It should be that, just like with Chanukah candles, we add from day to day,” the Rebbe said. “You too should add to your accomplishments every day, not only on Chanukah, but throughout the whole year. As I wrote to you, it is an integral part of Judaism—as during Chanukah—to not remain static; rather, we go from strength to strength until we reach ‘G‑d in Zion’ with the true and complete Redemption. And we will see Aharon the Priest kindle the Temple menorah of seven branches.”
Agam told the Rebbe of his intention for the menorah to be not just beautiful, but “Jewish.” “May this be a good beginning for the entire United States,” responded the Rebbe, “and for the entire world.”
Every Chanukah, millions pass beneath Agam’s golden menorah branches, light and shadow arranged, as the Rebbe taught him, in their proper form and proper place.
!["Surely, your work is aimed not only at experts,” the Rebbe wrote to Agam. Pictured in an exhibit from the Agam Museum. - WikiCommons](https://w2.chabad.org/media/images/1376/uUSx13762502.jpg?_i=_n504BC99DD0473598AAE3BCDC5D75568D ""Surely, your work is aimed not only at experts,” the Rebbe wrote to Agam. Pictured in an exhibit from the Agam Museum. - WikiCommons")
Start a Discussion