This Jerusalem Sukkot poster offers a window into the religious imagination of the emerging Haredi community in the Land of Israel. Its photographs bring together holy places and revered rabbis around a traditional prayer for entering the sukkah.
At the center is a photograph of the Western Wall. Elsewhere appear Rachel's Tomb and other sacred sites. Arranged around them is a striking gallery of rabbinic figures drawn from different places, periods, and religious traditions. They include Hasidic masters alongside leading figures of the non-Hasidic rabbinic world.
Historically, some of the traditions represented here stood in sharp opposition to one another. The most famous example is the Vilna Gaon, Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, and the Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Hasidic movement. The conflict between Hasidim and their opponents divided eastern European Jewish communities for generations. Yet those divisions disappear on this sheet. Both figures belong to the same visual fellowship of revered teachers.
That juxtaposition tells us something important about the religious culture that produced and used such an object. The poster is not presenting a history of Jewish intellectual movements. It creates a community of the righteous. Figures separated by centuries, geography, and sometimes profound disagreement can be gathered together because each has become an embodiment of Torah, holiness, and piety. Their portraits function less as historical documentation than as devotional images.
The traditional Ushpizin prayer at the right makes this process especially interesting. The ancient symbolic guests of the sukkah remain Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, and David. The text has not been rewritten to invite the rabbis whose portraits fill the sheet. Instead, two sacred communities coexist: the biblical Ushpizin named by the inherited liturgy and a later fellowship of revered rabbis assembled visually around them. There is a quiet irony in the prominence of Rachel’s Tomb: Rachel is powerfully present through the sacred landscape, even as the traditional Ushpizin invoked by name remain exclusively male.
This distinction suggests how tradition could absorb new objects of devotion without necessarily altering an established ritual text. The patriarchs, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, and David remain the guests formally invited into the sukkah. The rabbis are present differently: through their images, names, memories, and the authority attached to them.
The photographs of sacred places work in much the same way. The Western Wall and tombs of the righteous make the geography of the Land of Israel immediately present within the domestic ritual space of the sukkah. Rabbis and holy places together create a sacred landscape that the viewer can inhabit imaginatively.
The poster therefore offers more than instructions for a Sukkot custom. It shows how a religious community pictured itself. Biblical ancestors, revered rabbis, holy graves, Jerusalem, and the Western Wall occupy a single devotional field. Historical distance and ideological difference yield to a shared vocabulary of sanctity.
Its popular graphic style is itself part of that story. This was not elite art intended for detached contemplation. Inexpensive photographic reproduction, bold blocks of color, familiar portraits, and readily recognizable holy sites made a complex sacred world visible and accessible on the walls of an ordinary sukkah.
