The colorful elephant looks ahead from a painting hanging from a first-floor wall in Rishon Lezion’s city hall. The pachyderm’s blue, green, orange, yellow and red body, depicted in wide brush strokes, may not fit on an African savannah, but it seemed plenty natural to Eden Ben Rubi, the local artist who painted it.
The image so appealed to Meirav Ben Rubi that she wore it on a t-shirt while being interviewed for a short film about the life of her daughter, 23, who along with her boyfriend Ariel Bitton was murdered by Hamas terrorists after fleeing the Nova music festival and taking refuge in a bomb shelter on October 7, 2023.
Eden painted the elephant during a two-week art workshop in India during a visit the last summer of her life. Because the canvas hadn’t dried when Eden left India, the workshop’s director mailed it later. It reached Eden a week before her murder.
When the city hall exhibition — displaying works of six natives killed at Nova and in the war since — closes, the painting will return to the Ben Rubis’ home — the only artwork by Eden displayed there. It’s not that Eden particularly loved elephants, Meirav said. Rather, her daughter had been struck by this post in English:
ADVICE FROM AN ELEPHANT
- Make a big first impression.
- Don’t work for peanuts.
- Be all ears.
- Know when to put your foot down.
- Be gentle, no matter your size.
- Have big ideas.
- Charge ahead.
“This was Eden: that it doesn’t matter your size — bring big ideas,” she said. “Leave an impression that you won’t be forgotten.”
The blonde-braided Eden loved to create. “A gallery in New York” read one item on a handwritten checklist of her life’s goals in a notebook found under Eden’s pillow. Eden didn’t live to open a gallery, but Meirav achieved the next-best thing by arranging for Eden’s work to be displayed, along with pieces by other Nova victims, in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood in April.
“What spoke to me about Eden’s art was the realness. You can feel her emotions and her connection to different people, places and things that meant a lot to her,” said Julia Levine, who organized the New York event and displays in her apartment a copy of another of Eden’s elephant paintings, this one Indian-themed.
Eden painted, sketched and drew. She made tattoos for friends. She seemingly was everyone’s friend, someone who lifted spirits and freely complimented others, who loved to dance and sing and smile — that’s the consensus of the film, After Eden.
The film was made by young Jews in Greece, the ancestral homeland of Eden’s father Uzi’s family. She traveled to Greece most summers to attend a Jewish camp, where she later worked as a counselor. When Meirav and Uzi visited the Acropolis last Passover, a cashier recognized her as Eden’s mother.
“I’m not like everyone else. That’s clear. As a result, I’ll succeed,” Eden said in a clip included in the film.
Keren Weisshaus, the curator of the Rishon Lezion exhibition, said she’s struck by the movement of Eden’s brush strokes, her utilizing lots of color and the cheerfulness conveyed. Approximately a dozen of her works appear in the exhibition, all of them sketches and drawings but for the elephant painting.
The display “testifies to her personality, that she saw brightness in everything,” said Weisshaus. “We see she’s bubbly, like sparkling water. Just like everyone has a unique handwriting style, so with an artist we can learn about the person’s personality and style. [We] can see that she’s energetic, upbeat and optimistic. You can see by the subjects she chooses that she sees the beauty in the world and in people.”
That is apparent, too, in Eden’s paintings that Weisshaus didn’t include in the exhibition — “very colorful, saturated with color, [like] of sunsets,” she said. “You see her passion for life.”
Most astounding about the works and the exhibitions is this: Eden never studied art.
“Everything came from her head, her imagination,” Meirav said.
People continue paying tribute to her. A yoga event is being organized in her memory in Miami, and a wine-tasting night in Israel. Acclaimed chef Moshe Segev added an Eden’s Sunsets Cocktail to the menus of his restaurants in Petah Tikva and Hod Hasharon.
“Whoever does something recalling [Eden] really strengthens and excites us. The pain is there, but it helps. It says, ‘Look, they’re not forgetting her,’ ” Meirav said.
“Every time I memorialize her, I feel her close to my heart.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at hk@HillelTheScribeCommunications.com.
Read more at: Lives Lost: The Works of the October 7 Fallen – A Special Project
