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METZ
Photos of modern Metz - as unchanged, elegant and spiritual as it has been for hundreds of years. With meandering pathways, and fascinatingly interesting alleys with a feeling of walking through a spiritual history of hundreds of years. All the Rabbis have always felt that METZ has a special spiritual blessing, and only being there, feeling, seeing and sensing this historic town on the River Moselle, can you really feel the spiritual energy of this place.
Photo of the inside of the amazingly beautiful Synagogue
Photo below is of the Town Hall, the Cathedral St Etienne and River Moselle. It was in Metz, that Reb Yehonossan Eibeschitz had exceedingly good relationship with the Catholic Cardinals.
The River Moselle on a freezing day in February !
The River Moselle
The "Place Du Comedie" next to the Moselle
The elegance of the Cathedral, which was indeed bombed by the Germans in the war, some of the new stain glass windows were replaced and designed by Marc Chagall after the war. Just another sign of the closeness of the Jewish and Catholic communities who live in harmony in Metz.
Marc Chagall was Russian-born Jewish French painter. Born to a humble Jewish family in the ghetto of a large town in White Russia, Chagall passed a childhood steeped in Chasidic culture. Very early in life he was encouraged by his mother to follow his vocation and she managed to get him into a St Petersburg art school. Returning to Vitebsk, he became engaged to Bella Rosenfeld (whom he married twelve years later), then, in 1910, set off for Paris, 'the Mecca of art'. He was a tenant at La Ruche, where he had Modigliani and Soutine for neighbours. His Slav Expressionism was tinged with the influence of Daumier, Jean-François Millet, the Nabis and the Fauves. He was also influenced by Cubism . Essentially a colourist, Chagall was interested in the Simultaneist vision of Robert Delaunay and the Luminists of the Section d'Or.
"Chagall returned to Vitebsk in 1914, where he was caught by the outbreak of the First World War. He married Bella there in 1915. He was appointed provincial Commissar for Fine Art in 1917 and became involved in ambitious projects for a local academy, but he left after two and a half years in order to escape the revolutionary dictates of Malevich . After a stay in Moscow, where he worked in the Jewish theatre, then in Berlin, where he studied the technique of engraving, he returned to Paris in 1923. For the publisher Vollard he illustrated Gogol's Dead Souls , La Fontaine's Fables and the Bible. Breton, who admired the 'total lyric explosion' of his pre-war painting, tried to claim him for Surrealism but Chagall only flirted with it briefly during his exile in New York (1941-48). His emblematic irrationality shook off all outside influences: colour governed his compositions, calling up chimerical processions of memory where reality and the imaginary are woven into a single legend, born in Vitebsk and dreamed in Paris.
Back in France, Chagall discovered ceramics, sculpture and stained glass. He settled in the south of France, first at Vence (1950), then in Saint-Paul-de-Vence (1966). Commissions poured in: for the Assy baptistery in 1957, the cathedrals of Metz (1960) and Rheims (1974), the Hebrew University Medical Centre synagogue in Jerusalem (1960), the Paris Opéra (1963). The Musée Chagall in Nice dedicated to the 'Biblical Message' set the seal on his fame in July 1973. A painter-poet celebrated by Apollinaire and Cendrars, Chagall brought back the forgotten dimension of metaphor into French formalism."
The photo of the famous Chagall Windows in Jerusalem's Hadassa Hospital
Please see here for the official tourist website of Metz Town with photos
On the website of "METZ MARIE" there are photos of the chagall windows inside the cathedral St Etienne .
Below the Town Square - Place St Jacques
More photos and history of Metz coming soon in 2008
As always, we thank the Marie of Metz for the kindness and help they have given us in our websites . In appreciation for the kindness of the people of Metz have given to the most famous of Rabbis and the Jewish community over the past 900 years .
With special thanks to the Marie & people of Metz for saving as many Jewish people as psossible during the War, erecting memorials in memory of the Jews who were deported to the nazi death camps . And for renaming a road in Metz after Rabbi Elie Bloch ZTL Rabbi of Metz murdered by Nazis in 1943
See more of our "Photo Galleries"