2003 – Tree of the Field, Zadok Ben-David

This plasma-cut, corten steel statue in Yad Vashem’s Partisans Plaza was commissioned by a family of descendants of Jewish partisans who, by hiding in the forest, both attacked the Nazis and survived the Holocaust. This work by Zadok Ben-David (b.1949) commemorates those partisans. The leaves of the tree are human figures, and when we view them closely, we see that the trees, which hid people and preserved their lives, are the people themselves, a metaphor based on Deuteronomy 20:19: “For a man is a tree of the field.” (Image copyright Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem; collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem, through a gift of the Karten family in memory of parents Julia and Isidore Karten)