Ornamental Artillery Shell Casing

Born in Salonika in the Ottoman Empire (today Thessaloniki, Greece), Raphael Avraham Shalem attended the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem, entering before the outbreak of World War I and completing his studies after the war’s end. Deployed to the trenches during the war, Shalem created art using detritus from combat, including etchings on shell cases. The practice of using surplus war materials for artistic purposes was common to battlefields across theaters of the war; Shalem’s trench art remains notable for its use of Jewish iconography and its context in between the end of Ottoman Palestine and the beginning of the British Mandate. Following World War I, Shalem became a teacher at the Bezalel School. In his later years, he published a number of messianic and biblical treatises, including a volume imagining the Temple in Jerusalem in accordance with the inferential descriptions of traditional rabbinic authorities like Maimonides.