THE NEW YORK TIMES
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| Zoya Cherkassky’s “An Open Air Minyan” (2020), depicting men gathered for prayer with the requisite social distancing, is in a virtual exhibition at fortgansevoort.com. |
In quarantine at her home in Tel Aviv last month, the artist Zoya Cherkassky came across a
YouTube video of a wedding ceremony held in a Jewish cemetery just outside the city during the early days of the coronavirus outbreak. She learned that such “plague weddings” had evolved in the 19th century across Eastern Europe as a ritual to ward off cholera epidemics.
The artist drew “Black
Chuppah” in response, a quick work on paper in ink of a sweetly somber bride and groom in black, holding hands under the Jewish wedding canopy erected amid tombstones.
Every day since, Ms. Cherkassky has completed another melancholic vignette evoking pre-World War II Jewish life. [
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