Andrea Simon’s work has explored the interaction between politics, culture and religion in a variety of times and places. Praised as both visually striking and intellectually provocative, her award-winning documentary films include multiple commissions from the Metropolitan Museum, MoMA, the National Gallery, the Jewish Museum, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage, as well as the wryly subversive KORIAM’S LAW (Grand Prize, Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival) and PBS specials DESTINATION MOZART: A NIGHT AT THE OPERA WITH PETER SELLARS (Grand Prize, Montreal Festival of Films on Art), and ART OF INDONESIA: TALES FROM THE SHADOW WORLD. TALK TO ME: AMERICANS IN CONVERSATION, a film-essay on American identity commissioned by the National Endowment for the Humanities has been recognized for its densely layered presentation of complex issues of race, class, and culture: “The Whitmaniacal spirit has been brought to film by Andrea Simon. This America sings.”  (Todd Gitlin). FAYUM PORTRAITS (original music by Meredith Monk), considers Egyptian funerary painting as a prism through which to view the death of the antique world and shares many themes with the SHA’AR project.  “The concept for this exhibition arose from a daily study of Talmud throughout the past two years: I am grateful to Rabbi Mike Moskowitz and my chevruta for opening the Gate to ‘Intimacy with the Invisible’ through this supremely difficult, and supremely joyful, discipline.”   Andrea Simon

“Blessed is God who opens to us the Gates of Mercy”

A prayer recited during morning service on Yom Kippur

Curator: Andrea Simon

Medium: Reproduction, vinyl on wall

Credit: University Library, Wrocław, Poland, Ms. Or. I 1, f. 90v 

Location: Kalifer Culture Hub

The images are taken from medieval Mahzors (holiday prayer books). They date back to the late 13^th- early 14^th century, testifying to the unity of a global diaspora that had taken Jews as far east as Afghanistan and China, and westward to the edge of the New World. On each page, the Gate frames the same key prayer: “Open unto Us,” from the morning service of Yom Kippur, asks God, on this particularly sacred day, to open the Gates of Mercy to the worshipper’s repentant heart. It is striking that each individual prays on behalf of the whole community: What is a Jew in solitude? asks Adrienne Rich in her poem YOM KIPPUR 1984. 

The Gate, שער SHA’AR, is one of the most primal and passionate images in the Hebrew Bible. 

It expresses both a fierce commitment to justice—Hate evil and love good / And establish justice in the gate, the prophet Amos proclaims—and the most intimate kind of personal longing for union with God, the Beloved, which is where we began. 

As Ibn Gabirol’s poem tells us:  ליוֹם בּוֹאך עדי  That day, you will come to me.

What quest, what questions, what desire keeps you moving forward?

What “Gate long closed” do you wish to open?

This is among the most richly illuminated Hebrew Bibles in the world, deftly combining Jewish, Islamic and Christian motifs into a beautifully integrated whole.

Curator: Andrea Simon

Medium: Reproduction, vinyl on wall

Credit: Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Kennicott 1, fol. 438v

Location: Kalifer Culture Hub

This glorious manuscript page takes the form of a double-gated “Moorish Arch”, clearly meant to evoke the architecture of Muslim Spain. The text here is a scholarly essay on Biblical grammar—the “Gate” or “Key”—that is often included in Medieval Hebrew Bibles from the Iberian Peninsula: you can see the Hebrew word שער in the keyhole-shaped arch on the right.

The Kennicott Bible is the work of the scribe Moses Ibn Zabarah and the illuminator Joseph Ibn Hayyim. It was created in Spain in 1476, when Islamic rule in much of Spain had been over for more than three centuries. In this work, two Jewish artists in Christian Spain are paying homage, through the use of Islamic imagery, to a lost time when Jews, Muslims and Christians lived together in relative calm.

Once again, the Book—if you know how to read it—is a time machine, a magical Gate that invites us to enter a distant, longed-for past.

“Blessed is God who opens to us the Gates of Mercy”

A prayer recited during morning service on Yom Kippur

Curator: Andrea Simon

Medium: Reproduction, vinyl on wall

Credit: New York Public Library, Dorot Jewish Division

Location: Kalifer Culture Hub

The images are taken from medieval Mahzors (holiday prayer books). They date back to the late 13^th- early 14^th century, testifying to the unity of a global diaspora that had taken Jews as far east as Afghanistan and China, and westward to the edge of the New World. On each page, the Gate frames the same key prayer: “Open unto Us,” from the morning service of Yom Kippur, asks God, on this particularly sacred day, to open the Gates of Mercy to the worshipper’s repentant heart. It is striking that each individual prays on behalf of the whole community: What is a Jew in solitude? asks Adrienne Rich in her poem YOM KIPPUR 1984. 

The Gate, שער SHA’AR, is one of the most primal and passionate images in the Hebrew Bible. 

It expresses both a fierce commitment to justice—Hate evil and love good / And establish justice in the gate, the prophet Amos proclaims—and the most intimate kind of personal longing for union with God, the Beloved, which is where we began. 

As Ibn Gabirol’s poem tells us:  ליוֹם בּוֹאך עדי  That day, you will come to me.

What quest, what questions, what desire keeps you moving forward?

What “Gate long closed” do you wish to open?

Curator: Andrea Simon

Medium: Reproduction, vinyl on wall

Credit: The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary KET 268

Location: Kalifer Culture Hub

A Ketubah (Jewish marriage contract) often places its key text, which details the obligations of the loving couple to each other, within the frame of a Gate. This practice consciously invokes the hope that the newlyweds will create a home as happy and holy as the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem; that their marriage will bring us all closer to a Messianic time to come.

The exuberant 1847 Ketubah from Oran, Algeria, surrounds its Gate with verses from the Book of Ruth: elders gathered at the Gate to congratulate Boaz on his marriage to Ruth, comparing her to “Rachel and Leah, builders of the House of Israel.”  

The modest 1896 Ketubah from Meknes, Morocco celebrates a wedding among Megorashim (Jews expelled from Spain in 1492) and includes a request—some 400 years later—that God protect and have mercy upon the exiled community of Castile.

In the beautiful Italian Ketubah from 1756, the Gate image speaks with particular directness:     two spiraling “Solomonic columns” framing the text allude to those said to have adorned the Temple. The Gate marks a passage, a journey, a transformation: like all Jewish rituals, the marriage ceremony joins past to future, memory to hope.

Curator: Andrea Simon

Medium: Reproduction, vinyl on wall

Credit: The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary KET 447

Location: Kalifer Culture Hub

A Ketubah (Jewish marriage contract) often places its key text, which details the obligations of the loving couple to each other, within the frame of a Gate. This practice consciously invokes the hope that the newlyweds will create a home as happy and holy as the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem; that their marriage will bring us all closer to a Messianic time to come.

The exuberant 1847 Ketubah from Oran, Algeria, surrounds its Gate with verses from the Book of Ruth: elders gathered at the Gate to congratulate Boaz on his marriage to Ruth, comparing her to “Rachel and Leah, builders of the House of Israel.”  

The modest 1896 Ketubah from Meknes, Morocco celebrates a wedding among Megorashim (Jews expelled from Spain in 1492) and includes a request—some 400 years later—that God protect and have mercy upon the exiled community of Castile.

In the beautiful Italian Ketubah from 1756, the Gate image speaks with particular directness:     two spiraling “Solomonic columns” framing the text allude to those said to have adorned the Temple. The Gate marks a passage, a journey, a transformation: like all Jewish rituals, the marriage ceremony joins past to future, memory to hope.

Curator: Andrea Simon

Medium: Reproduction, vinyl on wall

Credit: New York Public Library, Dorot Jewish Division

Location: Kalifer Culture Hub

A Ketubah (Jewish marriage contract) often places its key text, which details the obligations of the loving couple to each other, within the frame of a Gate. This practice consciously invokes the hope that the newlyweds will create a home as happy and holy as the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem; that their marriage will bring us all closer to a Messianic time to come.

The exuberant 1847 Ketubah from Oran, Algeria, surrounds its Gate with verses from the Book of Ruth: elders gathered at the Gate to congratulate Boaz on his marriage to Ruth, comparing her to “Rachel and Leah, builders of the House of Israel.”  

The modest 1896 Ketubah from Meknes, Morocco celebrates a wedding among Megorashim (Jews expelled from Spain in 1492) and includes a request—some 400 years later—that God protect and have mercy upon the exiled community of Castile.

In the beautiful Italian Ketubah from 1756, the Gate image speaks with particular directness:     two spiraling “Solomonic columns” framing the text allude to those said to have adorned the Temple. The Gate marks a passage, a journey, a transformation: like all Jewish rituals, the marriage ceremony joins past to future, memory to hope.