Vintage Eretz Israel poster of “Palestine and Near East Exhibition and Fair” from 1929. Designed by Eliyahu Sigard, “Omanut” Printing Press. The poster says “Prepare for the Exhibition” (Hebrew).

The Orient Fair (Hebrew: Yerid Hamizrach, also known as the Levant Fair) was an international trade fair held in Tel Aviv during the 1920’s and 1930’s.One of the early precursors to the Orient Fair, an exhibition titled the “Exhibition and Fair for the Promotion of Goods Made in Israel”, took place in April 1914 and was held at a boys’ school in Tel Aviv. Another such show was held in the summer of 1923 in three rooms of the Zionist Club on Rothschild Boulevard. This exhibition’s success in turn paved the way for five subsequent exhibitions. The success also improved the area provided by the municipality for entrepreneurs, a desolate, southern part of Tel Aviv with an old bus station. The area is now home to the Administration Building of the Society for the Protection of Nature. There were further exhibitions in 1925, two in 1926, 1929, and one in 1932, with the fair in 1932 being the first to be called the “Eastern Fair”. A special symbol called the “Flying Camel” was designed for the fair by its chief architect, Lion Elhanani. Trees were planted during the fair in honor of the former exhibition, and three such palm trees still survive to this day. Henceforth, these exhibitions were referred to as fairs and also became quite successful, attracting tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of Jews, Arabs, English, and tourists. The 1932 fair was visited by nearly 300,000 people. Voice Jerusalem, an Israeli radio station, began regular broadcasts about the fair, in Hebrew, starting in 1936. Some very distinguished people have visited the fair, including British High Commissioners for Palestine Herbert Samuel (1920-1925), Herbert Plumer (1925-1928), John Chancellor (1928-1931), and Arthur Wauchope (1932-1937), as well as Arab mayors of Jaffa and Jerusalem. wiki

This vintage poster advertises an upcoming ball for the Students association of the Jerusalem Art School’s “New Bezalel” and the Palestine consevatoire; held for the benefit of destitute students. The event was held on the evening of Dec. 2, 1939. The picture depicted is of a snake wrapped around a tree, with apples all around. At the base an artist’s palette. Printed by Central Printing, Jerusalem.

Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design is Israel’s national school of art. Established in 1906 by Jewish artist and sculptor Boris Schatz, Bezalel is the oldest institution of higher education in Israel. The art created by Bezalel’s students and professors in the early 1900s is considered the stepping stone for Israeli visual arts in the 20th century.

Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design is Israel’s national school of art. Established in 1906 by Jewish artist and sculptor Boris Schatz, Bezalel is the oldest institution of higher education in Israel. The art created by Bezalel’s students and professors in the early 1900s is considered the stepping stone for Israeli visual arts in the 20th century. The academy is currently located at the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem – with the exception of the Architecture faculty, located at the historic Bezalel building in downtown Jerusalem. In 2009 it was announced that the academy will be relocated to a new campus in the Russian Compound, as part of a wide municipal plan to revive Jerusalem’s downtown. The new Bezalel campus is planned by Tokyo-based award winning architectural firm SANAA.

The Bezalel School was founded in 1906 by Boris Schatz who envisaged the creation of a national style of art blending classical Jewish/Middle Eastern and European traditions. The school opened in rented premises on Ethiopia Street. It moved to a complex of buildings constructed in the 1880s by a wealthy Arab surrounded by a crenelated stone wall. In 1907, the property was purchased for Boris Schatz by the Jewish National Fund. Schatz lived on the campus with his wife and children.[1] The first class consisted of thirty young art students from Europe who successfully passed the entrance exam. Eliezer Ben Yehuda was hired to teach Hebrew to the students, who hailed from different countries and had no common language.[2] His wife, Hemda Ben-Yehuda, worked as Boris Schatz’s secretary.[3] In addition to traditional sculpture and painting, the school ran workshops that produced decorative art objects in silver, leather, wood, brass and fabric. Many of the craftsmen were members of the Yemenite Jewish community, which has a long tradition of working in precious metals. Silver and goldsmithing had been traditional Jewish occupations in Yemen. Yemenite immigrants were also frequent subjects of Bezalel school artists. Many of the students went on to become well-known artists, among them Meir Gur Aryeh, Ze’ev Raban, Shmuel Ben David, Ya’ackov Ben-Dov, Zeev Ben-Zvi, Jacob Eisenberg, Jacob Pins, Jacob Steinhardt and Hermann Struck studied at Bezalel[4] In 1912, the school had one female student, Marousia (Miriam) Nissenholtz, who used the pseudonym Chad Gadya.[5] The school closed in 1929 in the wake of economic difficulties. After Hitler’s rise to power, Bezalel’s board of directors asked Josef Budko, who had fled Germany in 1933, to reopen the school and serve as its director.[6]The New Bezalel School for Arts and Crafts opened in 1935, attracting many teachers and students from Germany, many of them from the Bauhaus school shut down by the Nazis.[7]Budko recruited Jakob Steinhardt and Mordecai Ardon to teach at the school, and both succeeded him as directors.[8] In 1958, the first year that the prize was awarded to an organization, Bezalel won the Israel Prize for painting and sculpture.[9] In 1969, Bezalel became a state-supported institution. In 1975 it was recognized by the Council for Higher Education in Israel as an institute of higher education.[10] It completed its relocation to Mount Scopus in 1990.