The work, created not long after the 1967 Six-Day War, was never exhibited during Heller’s lifetime—he died in 2018. The print, along with numerous other works, was found tucked in a drawer at his home in Kibbutz Nirim, a community along the border with Gaza, where he lived for most of his life. At the time of the work’s making, Israel had just seized control of the Palestinian territory from Egypt, before ultimately withdrawing in 2005. That piece, along with eight others, is now being exhibited for the first time in Kibbutz Sometimes, a solo exhibition open at the Mishkan Museum, an art museum in northern Israel.

“Heller returns from reserve duty and writes a text—in real time, which I think is super radical,” Avi Lubin, the museum’s chief curator, and the curator of the Israel Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, told ARTnews. “This is a work from 1968 but I’m convinced he would say the same thing today, that despite what happened and despite the horrors of October 7 and despite everything Hamas did and everything Israel is doing in Gaza—we must find the way to make peace and talk.”

The exhibition is the second in a series that Lubin has devoted to artworks from towns along the Gaza-Israel border that survived the October 7 attack by Hamas. The curator, who has been a frequent figure at protests in Israel calling for a ceasefire and hostage deal, links the series to the historic mission of the Mishkan, which began in 1937 with the goal of salvaging European Jewish art and culture at risk of destruction. In the weeks after the attack, Lubin considered what became of the works by several artists active in the kibbutzim and towns that were targeted that day, which the museum considers part of its broader goal to “preserve the works of Jewish artists from communities that no longer exist,” per the Heller show’s description.

Other Israeli museums have also addressed this question, with Jerusalem’s Israel Museum installing a shrapnel and bullet-damaged landscape painting by Be’eri-based artist, Ziva Jelin, in November. A solo exhibition of photographic still-lifes by Osnat Ben Dov was on view at the time of the attack at Be’eri Gallery, an art gallery incinerated during the Hamas attack,  and was restaged at the Janco Dada Museum in December.

Lubin waited until April, when it was permittable to go to Nirim, to select works from Heller’s estate, noting when he was there that a structure close to Heller’s storage had previously been hit by a rocket. A painter, sculptor, and printmaker who established an etching workshop in Nirim’s defunct cowshed, Heller was best known for socialist and autobiographical works, like those that explored his separation from his parents due to the Holocaust.

(Heller was born in 1937 in Bucharest; his parents emigrated to British Mandatory Palestine in 1939 and he was unable to join them until 1949).

In the Mishkan exhibition, however, Lubin felt it was critical to show another side of Heller.

“It was important to me to put his political work at the forefront,” said Lubin. “He was a man who lived until 2018 and, despite years of war and rockets and conflict, he kept working towards dialogue.”

Like many who lived in kibbutzim along the Gaza border, Heller had deep political commitments, both as a Marxist and as one devoted to peace with Palestinians. (It is a bitter irony for Israelis that the communities attacked in October were typically home to some of the country’s most devoted peace activists.)

Kibbutz Sometimes highlights Heller’s seldom-exhibited works. A 2010-2011 etching titled Rabuba, of a bird perched on the trunk of a potted tree,comes from Heller’s late Tel Gamma series. Made after Israel’s 2009 war against Hamas, it recounts the tragic story of Majda Abu Hajaj and her mother Raya Salama Abu Hajaj, two Palestinian women fatally shot in an incident with the Israel Defense Forces. (While an investigation was inconclusive, witnesses at the time said the women were shot by IDF soldiers while carrying a white flag and fleeing fighting.)

Heller often used baskets and birds as motifs for works about his own life.

“He connected his biography with their biography and his images with the images of Tel Gamma,” Lubin said, explaining how Heller intermingled his personal visual language with individual stories from Gaza to highlight their shared humanity.

Another work, a print titled The Green Line, was made in 1972, exhibited a year later, and never since. For those who don’t live near a border, it can be an abstract concept. Heller, confronted by the border every day of his life, rendered it unflinchingly real. In the work, a rough swathe of emerald green hangs beneath a wire fence, referencing the demarcation line defined in the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and its neighbors. For Heller, the line represented an omnipresent literal barrier that prevents dialogue between two peoples.

Shortly before his death, Heller met Haran Kislev, an emerging artist living in nearby Kibbutz Be’eri who was also creating images of the border. The two met at the opening for The Road to El Bureij, a 2017-2018 exhibition at Be’eri Gallery showing Kislev’s abstracted landscape paintings depicting a path between Be’eri and the El Bureij refugee camp in Gaza. For over a decade, Kislev has painted the landscape around Be’eri as, in his artist statement, “in the shadow of an armed struggle, concrete roadblocks near the border and the constant presence of armed forces.”

“Haran peers outwards and documents the blocked road, the changing light, atmosphere, and landscape, capturing the political interruption and estrangement,” artist Etti Abergel wrote in that exhibition’s catalogue. “The intense beauty erupting from his paintings stresses the horror and anxiety, the missed opportunities, the obstructed feeling of existing between the studio and reality, between the painting and the geographical location, between a utopia and its downfall.”

For Kislev, who carries on Heller’s legacy of engaging with the border, the series has taken on new meaning since October 7. Kislev was born and raised in Kibbutz Be’eri and was there with his wife and two children during the attack.

“That’s where they broke into the kibbutz from,” reflected Kislev. “There was always this fear in the paintings, of ‘what would happen if? If there was a very, very big catastrophe. And what does it mean to live there?’ This bubbling of the earth is something that preoccupied me for many, many years.” Since October 7, Kislev and his family have been displaced to a kibbutz in central Israel and he moved his work to a temporary studio in Tel Aviv; while repairs and reconstruction of Kibbutz Be’eri are underway, resettlement is currently slated for sometime in 2025.

Kislev’s work, in many ways, prompted the Mishkan’s ongoing series showing works that survived the attack. His last series produced in his Be’eri studio formed the basis of the first exhibition, Kibbutz Anxiety, which opened in December. It included nine works that the artist evacuated in a complex multi-trip process that involved military permits and the aid of a nonprofit organization—since regular movers weren’t allowed in the area—all during a period of frequent rocket attacks from Gaza. The exhibition, ironically, saved the artworks.

“A week after we removed [the paintings] a rocket or something fell in the area and the roof above where the works had been kept was completely destroyed,” Kislev said. “If we hadn’t done the exhibition, it all would have been destroyed.”

Lubin is continuing to work on the exhibition series, but at a wartime pace.

“Everything is very sensitive and I’m trying to do this very slowly together with the artists and their families, in order to understand what their needs are,” Lubin said. “I thought about one person and understood that this person is in a difficult emotional state, and that it’s better to wait at the moment.”

Returning to Heller’s Remaining Words, the artwork gracing the invitation to the opening of Kibbutz Sometimes, Lubin is unsure how audiences will respond to this print and the other artworks in the show.

“I think there are two components to our responsibility as a museum. One is to express solidarity and promote healing and extend a hand,” Lubin said, recounting how the museum immediately began hosting daily activities and workshops for the many displaced families in the area. In October alone, the museum hosted roughly 5,000 displaced Israeli children.

“In parallel, as a museum, we can’t only be a place of refuge and healing. We must also ask questions and challenge ideas. And part of our role, in this moment, is to not forget the questions: Where are we going, how do we move forward, and what is our future here?”

The museum’s website originally claimed the exhibition, titled Treasured Ornament: 10 Centuries of Islamic Art, was delayed by “a scheduling conflict,” the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported last week. Elizabeth Barker, the museum’s executive director, later told the Tribune-Review that “we realized that we were about to open an exhibition that a forgiving person would call insensitive, but for many people, especially in our community, would be traumatic.”

Not everyone agrees. According to the Times, both Muslim and Jewish groups criticized the postponement, arguing that the decision “seemed to suggest or imply a false connection between masterpieces of Islamic art and terrorism.”

“The decision to postpone the … exhibition under the pretext of potential harm to the Jewish community perpetuates the harmful stereotype that Muslims or Islamic art are synonymous with terrorism or antisemitism,” Christine Mohamed, the executive director of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a public statement.

Adam Hertzman, an official with the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, echoed that sentiment on WESA radio, saying “few people in the Jewish community would have been concerned about an exhibit on Islamic art because we understand that has nothing to do with Hamas, which is a terrorist organization.”

In a more fully fledged statement posted to their website, the museum said the exhibition was planned years ago and “it would have been impossible to predict that war would erupt in the Middle East during the time of this show, prompting widespread heartbreak and mounting social tension.” The museum added that, as it stands, the exhibition “lacked sufficient historical and cultural context” and “participation from the regional Islamic community and others.”

The exhibition, which was rescheduled for August of next year, was organized by the nonprofit International Arts and Artists on behalf of the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia. “There is nothing wrong with the exhibition,” Gregory Houston, president and chief executive of the nonprofit, told the Times. “I think the timing was not right for them. We will work with them to reimagine it in the context they deem appropriate.”

Walter B. Denny, a retired professor of Islamic art who helped prepare a publication related to the exhibition, told the Times the postponement is ironic since the exhibition was meant to help people understand the diversity of Islamic art. “The collection is so far away from anything that is remotely political or sympathetic to fanaticism.”

On Friday, Kate Sutton, an associate editor at Artforum since 2018, announced on X that she had officially resigned. On Saturday, Zack Hatfield and Chloe Wyma, both of whom were senior editors at Artforum, also announced that they had resigned. ARTnews has also learned that Emily LaBarge, a London-based contributor who edited international reviews, has severed ties with Artforum.

“The firing of David Velasco violates everything I had cherished about the magazine and makes my work there untenable,” Wyma wrote on X.

Meanwhile, prominent artists Nan Goldin and Nicole Eisenman told the New York Times that they would no longer work with Artforum, with Goldin describing the current environment as the most “chilling period” she’s ever lived through.

Velasco’s firing came after Artforum published an open letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza on October 19. The letter, signed by thousands of artists, also appeared in e-flux and Hyperallergic, and had circulated as a Google document before it was published on those websites and Artforum. Velasco, along with several other members of Artforum’s staff, signed the letter, although it is still unclear who initially wrote it.

“We support Palestinian liberation and call for an end to the killing and harming of all civilians, an immediate ceasefire, the passage of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the end of the complicity of our governing bodies in grave human rights violations and war crimes,” the letter published on Artforum reads.

After the letter was published, it became the subject of blowback, with dealers Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, and Amalia Dayan writing a statement on Artforum in which they condemned it for failing to mention the Hamas attack on October 7 that killed 1,400 Israelis and involved the taking of 200 hostages.

Another letter signed by major dealers and artists also began to circulate; its subject was an “uninformed letter” in an unnamed publication, and it made a call for “empathy” after the Hamas attack. That second letter did not mention the thousands of Gazans who have been killed by Israeli airstrikes, as reported by the local health ministry.

As pressure mounted, Artforum’s letter continued to shift, with added texts mentioning “revulsion” over the Hamas attack and a preface that the letter “was not composed, directed, or initiated by Artforum or its staff.” Some names also dropped from the signatories.

Artforum publishers Danielle McConnell and Kate Koza put a post on the Artforum website earlier this week saying that the letter was posted to the site and to social media “without our, or the requisite senior members of the editorial team’s, prior knowledge,” and that doing so was “not consistent with Artforum’s editorial process.”

After he was fired, Velasco, who became editor in 2017, told the Times, “I have no regrets. I’m disappointed that a magazine that has always stood for freedom of speech and the voices of artists has bent to outside pressure.”

Penske Media Corporation, which owns both ARTnews and Artforum, did not respond to a request for a comment.

“I’d like to utter support for your freedom fight,” says Ben-Tor in the video. “I’m still on the fence about the massacre of the babies. On the one hand, they were colonizing babies, they were Zionist babies…” 

In the video, which has since been taken down on Instagram, Ben-Tor suggests that the alleged killing of babies and raping of women during the October 7 attack in Israel—when Hamas killed more than 1,400 Israelis and took over 200 hostages—was justified and is supported by the women’s rights movements. 

“I will be waiting for you at the university campus when you invade and finally win your exhilarating battle of freedom,” she says.

Ben-Tor is known for performing a range of “despicable stock characters,” as New York Times critic Ken Johnson wrote in a 2012 review, including Jews and other identities. In Johnson’s words, “It emerges that the real targets of Ms. Ben-Tor’s satire are not particular deluded people but academic institutions that embrace and support ludicrous ideas in the name of open inquiry.” Ben-Tor’s work has been generally well received by critics, and her art is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Perez Art Museum Miami, and the Israel Museum, among others. 

Yet her latest video has provoked a different reaction at New York’s Hunter College, where she is an adjunct professor. Several days after Ben-Tor posted the video, two student groups, Palestine Solidarity Alliance of Hunter College and CUNY for Palestine, published an edited version to Instagram that began with text calling the artist a “Zionist” and demanding her “immediate dismissal.” 

“We refuse to be in an academic setting with a professor who references animals as she mocks our martyred children,” read text on the video, which has since been taken down by Instagram.

The edited video is a shortened version of Ben-Tor’s with pauses to overlay images and texts. When Ben-Tor mentions killed Israeli children, the edited version includes what appeared to be images of dead Palestinian children, along with text reading, “4,651 martyrs. 1,873 children. 1,023 women,” referring to what was then the casualty count of Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza. The video ends with a link to language students could use in emails to Hunter’s administration demanding Ben-Tor’s firing. 

A week after the Hamas attack, Israeli military forensics teams tasked with examining bodies of those killed told Reuters it found evidence of rape and abuse of multiple victims, though the publication noted that officials did not provide forensic evidence in pictures or medical records. Ben-Tor’s reference to “the massacre of the babies” would seem to refer to a claim that spread across social media on October 10 that Hamas beheaded 40 babies, which was later repeated by Biden. While the claim was later walked back, by both Biden and the Israeli government, relief workers tasked with removing bodies at Kibbutz Be’eri said many children were among the dead.

In an interview with ARTnews, Ben-Tor said that the video was a critique of “Western academic humanists who ignorantly aligned themselves with Hamas terrorist organization.” She stressed that she does not conflate Palestinians with the militant group and called the edited video a “hate crime,” adding that she was deeply offended by the inclusion of deceased Palestinian children in the video and accusations of Islamophobia.

“I am against the harm of any civilian of any nation. I am against the killing of any civilians of any nation,” Ben-Tor said. 

In a response to ARTnews, CUNY for Palestine students questioned Ben-Tor’s characterization of the video as a critique of academics.

“The video puports to be mocking performative liberals but actually plays on a string of crass anti-Indigenous, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim stereotypes,” the group said in an email. “Emphatically, her target is not liberals—it is the people who liberals purport to care about.”

The group said that the video’s “mocking, drawling tone” and “crude caricature” is serious, violent, and “left most of us feeling sick.” It further said that Ben-Tor’s accusation of their video as a “hate crime” is a “racist attack” and “exacerbates our vulnerability,” noting that they and other Palestine solidarity groups at the school have faced “routine harassment and violence.”

The organizers further explained that they edited the original video so as to avoid simply reproducing the “violence” of Ben-Tor’s video and to provide commentary for those that “might fail to understand the gravity of what [the video] was doing, and/or wave it off under cover of ‘art’ or ‘satire.’” 

Hunter College told ARTnews that Ben-Tor’s video is currently “under review.” Ben-Tor, meanwhile, said she met with members of Hunter administration last week, and was assured that she had not lost her position. She and the administration agreed that she would send a letter to explain her position to students.

In the apology letter reviewed by ARTnews, Ben-Tor wrote, “I am Israeli. However, I do not live in Israel, nor do I affiliate with its government’s policies. I am not a nationalist, nor do I consider myself a representative of any political group. The video was my emotional response to the odd affiliation of several intellectuals in our society with a patriarchy of terrorists who wish to destroy everything we all stand for.”

Ben-Tor’s video, at times in its edited form, has continued to circulate on social media. Ben-Tor said she has been the target of online harassment and threats to her personal safety. She said she had nearly been lured into meeting someone who falsely claimed to be part of CUNY’s administration, and that she has since talked to New York police about the edited video and subsequent harassment. She told ARTnews that she told Hunter administrators that she wanted student groups involved in the edited video to release an official apology.

Tension in the art department, meanwhile, has continued to rise since Ben-Tor’s letter. Students associated with Hunter’s MFA program have—independently of CUNY for Palestine—circulated a petition calling for Ben-Tor’s termination. The letter claims that the apology she offered was “dismissive” and that her satire was misplaced. The letter has been signed by nearly 40 members of the Hunter community, primarily students of the visual arts MFA, though only three students who took Ben-Tor’s graduate class this year (her first) have signed. Among the signatories are four professors, including Nari Ward, a Guggenheim Fellowship awardee and head of the Hunter studio art department. 

However, two current MFA students and a former undergraduate student of Ben-Tor’s—all of whom asked to remain anonymous—described the artist as an exceptional and supportive teacher. One student noted that Ben-Tor provided trigger warnings to students ahead of potentially uncomfortable material. Another described her as unpopular with some students due to giving bad grades and not being tolerant of tardiness or absences. 

Regarding signing the petition, one of the MFA students said, “It’s a tense environment where people don’t want to do the wrong thing. But they’re not thinking critically. It’s serious to feel entitled to demand a professor’s termination based on their artwork. People feel afraid and pressured.”

It’s not the first controversy for Hunter’s art department this year. In May, artist and adjunct professor Shellyne Rodridguez was fired by the school after video circulated online showing an incident in which she confronted a group called Students for Life of America on the school’s campus.

On October 7, roughly 1,400 Israeli citizens were murdered, while another 3,500 were wounded, and 200 hostages taken during a brutal attack by members of Hamas, the militant organization that governs Gaza. In response to the act of terrorism, the Israeli military cut off food, water, and electricity to Gaza and began a campaign of sustained airstrikes on the region that has killed more than 3,000 Palestinians civilians and injured over four times that, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.

Last week, Israel ordered more than one million Palestinians who live in northern Gaza to evacuate, which the United Nations deemed was “not feasible” and “could transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.”

The open letter, signed by a number of arts and cultural leaders, stated that the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza are suffering a “collective punishment on an unimaginable scale” from Israel and called for “the end of the complicity of our governing bodies in grave human rights violations and war crimes.” The letter ended with a direct appeal to arts organizations and institutions “to refuse inhumanity, which has no place in life or art”.

The Israeli art community responded with a statement of its own posted to Instagram Saturday. “What’s most upsetting is the complete absence of any mention of over 200 people kidnapped, most of them civilians, including babies, children, old and sick people,” it read. “[T]he hostages are not part of the humanity they are appealing for. By omission, they are giving legitimacy to the abduction of civilians.”

The statement continued, “By ignoring the rights of all who live in Israel, it’s as if those who signed the letter are dehumanizing all of those who live in Israel, the 9 million people who have a right to exist.”

Ultimately, they argued that making “a general statement” condemning the violence “undermines the moral stance taken by the letter’s signatories.”

It ends with an appeal for unity among groups that have been impacted by the conflict, with “no contradiction between staunchly opposing the Israeli occupation and the crimes in Gaza, and unequivocally condemning brutal acts of violence against innocent civilians in Israel.”

The organizers include Mosaic United, the World Zionist Organization, and Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group of over 1,000 family members of the hostages. The organizers also produced a booklet with traditional texts and songs, as well as testimonis from suvivors of the brutal assault on southern Israel, which killed over 1,400 citizens and wounded over 4,000, the Times of Israel reported Friday.

The somber dinner table installation is only one of many tactics that activists in support of Israel are doing to draw attention to the hostages. Many have been distributing and posting flyers emblazoned with the word KIDNAPPED in capital letters and photographs of those taken during the attack in public places, from subway stations to lamp posts, New York, Buenos Aires, Berlin and other cities. The flyers are “part public street art and part viral activist campaign” created by the Israeli artists Nitzan Mintz and her partner Dede Bandaid, according to The New York Times 

Empty Shabbat tables or place-settings have lng been a symbol of solidarity for captive Jews, according to the Times of Israel, the practice having become prominent during the movement to free Jews held captive in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Empty Shabbat tables, with booster seats for those children taken in the assault, have been organized by the local Jewish community in Rome’s Jewish Quarter and on Bondi Beach in Australia.

The latest reports from military sources indicate there are just over 200 hostages in Gaza, including 30 children and 20 people over the age of 60, according to Reuters. On Friday, two American hostages, Judith Raanan, 59, and Natalie Raanan, 17, a mother and daughter from Illinois, who had been visiting family in Israel, were released by Hamas.

A spokesman for the militant organization said that the hostages were released due to mediation by Qatar and “for humanitarian reasons, and to prove to the American people and the world that the claims made by Biden and his fascist administration are false and baseless,” Reuters reported.

As the Israel Defense Forces has conducted widespread air bombardments of Gaza, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum has conducted a media campaign, #BringThemHomeNow, to draw attention to hostages’ plight, which some have worried has become secondary to Israel’s greater assault on Hamas. The exact location of the hostages is unknown, and Hamas has said that 20 hostages have already been killed by Israeli air strikes. 

Part of the reason that Battir is a UNESCO site is because of an ancient irrigation system that feeds the lush valley defined by aqueducts, terraces, and an abundance of prized olives and eggplants.

“The water distribution system used by the families of Battir is a testament to an ancient egalitarian distribution system that delivers water to the terraced agricultural land based on a simple mathematical calculation and a clear time-managed rotation scheme,” the UNESCO page for Battir reads, further defining the site as having a “high level of authenticity” as villagers refuse to use modern implements to keep the careful balance of the ancient system in place.

However, water distribution is exactly what would be most effected by the planned Israeli settlement. Israel already controls most of the water supply in the country, limiting the amount of water Palestinians can access. The planned settlement would bring 560 new residences to a hilltop overlooking the valley, which would not only drain water sources but effectively block the water from reaching the valley down below, as the groundwater in the area come from rainfall that is deposited onto those hills before being slowly absorbed.

“If you build an extensive town at the top, it destroys this landscape,” said Nadav Tal, a hydrologist who serves as the Middle East Water Officer for EcoPeace, a joint Israeli-Palestinian group, told the AP.

Meanwhile, 40% of the villagers in Battir receive their livelihood from local agriculture, so not only would a protected cultural landscape disappear, but Palestinians would lose their independent economy. Yet it seems that despite protest by Battir residents, environmental groups, and anti-settlement activists, the settlement will likely be built.

The 2,500-year-old pottery shard, known as an ostracon when used as a surface for writing, was found in the remains of the Persian royal administration building in the ancient city of Lachish, the one-time administrative hub of the area. The inscription written in Aramaic reads “year 24 of Darius”, which dates the artifact to 498 B.C.E.

The ostracon was found in December by Eylon Levy who works as the international media adviser to Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Levy told Times of Israel that the artifact was laying in plain sight. 

“[It] was right there, directly next the wooden pergola that had been built for the visitors,” said Levy. “It was right there, right under everyone’s noses this whole time. Immediately when I picked it up, I thought it was an elaborate prank. I thought, this can’t be real, this doesn’t really happen to people when they’re just hiking”. 

Levy quickly contacted the Israel Antiquities Authority which, after a barrage of tests and scans, and a stint at the Dead Sea Scrolls Lab, deemed the ostracon authentic.

Darius I was one of the most famous Persian kings, and ruled when the Persian empire was at its largest, spanning much of the South West Asia and parts of Northern Africa. His son and successor, King Ahaseurus, is better known by his Greek name, Xerxes. Ahaseurus is thought to be the biblical king Achashverosh, a central character in the story of the Jewish holiday Purim, which is celebrated from the evening of March 6th to the evening of March 7.

Signed by Dayan and other heads of Israeli organizations on February 6, the joint letter was reportedly addressed to U.S. ambassador Tom Knides several weeks before Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion in Ukraine, as the Washington Post first reported. The U.S. had already announced it was drafting a list of individuals with ties to the Russian government to target with sanctions as a response to Putin’s military advances into Ukrainian territory ahead of the assault.

A little more than two weeks later, on February 22, Dayan said that the museum had entered into five-year “strategic partnership” with Abramovich that would see the Yad Vashem’s research initiatives expand with an eight-figure donation from the Russian oil magnate. In a statement, Dayan said the support was crucial “at a time when Holocaust distortion, denial and politicization are rising alarmingly worldwide.” Since then, Dayan has condemned Russia’s recent missile attack on the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv.

“Mr. Abramovich has contributed to worthy causes for more than a decade,” Dayan said in the letter.

Abramovich, who regularly appears on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list, is a major donor to Jewish causes and holds dual citizenship in Israel. He amassed his wealth in the oil and gas industry, and is worth $13.5 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The news comes on the heels of Abramovich’s decision to sell his majority share of the Chelsea F.C., the English soccer team he has owned since 2003, as U.S., U.K., and European sanctions put a grip on Russian banks, freezing the assets of ultra-wealthy oligarchs in Putin’s inner circle. The team is estimated to be worth at least $2.5 billion and is being eyed by a consortium of bidders that includes Swiss and U.S. billionaires.

The museum closed after 47 participants in a group show demanded the withdrawal of their art as a show of solidarity with David Reeb, whose work was removed from the exhibition. The exhibition was the first at the museum following a years-long renovation.

The dispute began after the museum took down a painting by Reeb at the urging of the city’s mayor, Carmel Shama-Hacohen, who deemed it offensive. The Reeb painting in question, Jerusalem (1997), depicts two black and white mirrored images of an Orthodox Jewish man standing at the Western Wall. Alongside them are Hebrew-language captions reading “Jerusalem of Gold” and “Jerusalem of Shit.” It appeared in “The Institution,” an exhibition of explicitly political works organized by the museum’s chief curator, Svetlana Reingold.

In a statement, the museum expressed “sorrow and disappointment” over the results of the mediation process. The institution said it, “worked resolutely to promote the continued existence of the exhibition,” but ultimately was unsuccessful.

Jerusalem hadn’t elicited an outcry when it appeared at other venues. Reeb told Hyperallergic that the mayor’s comments on the piece were “insulting,” adding, “He just saw a political opportunity and seized on it.” Reeb makes work about issues of state oppression in Israel, and has previously shown his art at the Documenta quinquennial and Tate Modern.

Tel Aviv’s mayor, Carmel Shama-Hacohen, condemned the work several days after the show’s opening on December 23, describing it as “racist towards ultra-orthodox Jews.” In response to mounting pressure from Shama-Hacohen and reported threats to defund the state-subsidized institution, the museum’s board of directors voted to remove the work from display. In a show of solidarity, a majority of the participating 60 artists in the exhibition responded to the decision by covering over their works with black fabric. The artists had demanded the removal of their works altogether, but by the time the museum closed this week, they had remained on view with covers on top of them.

The activist appealed the decision in a Tel Aviv court in a hearing on December 29. With representation by the Israeli Association for Civil Rights, Reeb and his counsel argued that the decision to take down the painting violated the state’s 1983 Museum Law, which stipulates that museum exhibitions are protected from government interventions. The court sided with the museum and subsequently ordered that no further changes be made to the exhibition until a decision is reached.

“The Institution” was the museum’s first exhibition following a multi-million dollar expansion that began in 2017. The project grew so expensive that it forced the museum to make some unpopular financial maneuvers, including the deaccessioning of works from its permanent collection, to raise further funding.