Relational Aesthetics with Moshe Bernstein

Every year, Moti's parents marked their wedding anniversary by buying a piece of Israeli art. One year they decided to make an exception and bought three paintings from the artist Moshe Bernstein. They hung one painting in their house, and the other two they gave as a gift to their parents. When their parents passed away the paintings found their place on the walls of the Porat residence.

Moshe Bernstein was born in Poland. While in his twenties, he lost his family in the Holocaust and immigrated to Israel. His childhood memories from the Jewish community in Poland served as an inspiration for his paintings. He drew portraits of Orthodox Jews in black ink on paper – boys and men with long peyot and a yarmulke.
The sentimental expression in his paintings of the memory of East European Jewish culture that had been lost made him a popular artist in Tel Aviv. Apart from exhibitions in museums, many of his paintings hung on the walls of the bohemian Café Kassit.

Gil & Moti's interference with Bernstein's paintings, like the laying down of one painting, and adding a wheelchair to a certain character in another, serves as an allegory for social circumstances in Israel.