Artist and scholar Elisheva Gavra explores the mysteries of how her great-grandfather's burial place became a site of pilgrimage.

Rav Yitzchok Gavra was a beloved Yemenite rabbi who passed away more than 70 years ago. In the intervening decades his grave has become a popular pilgrimage site, known for the miracles people say they received after praying there. How he was transformed into a venerated figure was a question that first began to perplex his great-granddaughter, artist and scholar Elisheva Gavra, after she saw a photo of a man boarding a plane during a 1949 airlift of 40,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel and wondered if it was him. Drawing on Kabbalistic manuscripts and Yemeni prayer books from the Library’s Dorot Division, and images from its Photography Collection, Gavra examines how memory, images, and religious texts explain how his grave has become a living site of devotion.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Elisheva Gavra employs interdisciplinary research to investigate vision and its relationship to belief, using performance, photography and installation. Her work has been exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York, The Broad Art Center in Los Angeles, the Wallach Art Gallery in New York, Jenkins Johnson Projects in Brooklyn and elsewhere. Her performances have been presented at the Lenfest Center for the Arts in New York, the 14th Street Y in New York, and the Frankel Center at the University of Michigan. She received an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, was a participant of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York, and is currently doing her research at the Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities, NYPL.

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Courtesy Elisheva Gavra