Tag: graffiti

Removing graffiti full-time

Corey Fleischer volunteers most of his time to removing hateful graffiti. (photo from Corey Fleischer)

When Montrealer Corey Fleischer finished university, he was unsure of what career path to take. In the interim, to pay the rent, so to speak, he started Provincial Power Washing.

Reflecting back on those days, Fleischer said, “I hated what I was doing – washing a lot of trucks, houses, decks, residential and commercial – zero substance. I’m a person who thrives off substance.”

One day, while heading to a job, Fleischer happened to spot antisemitic graffiti out of the corner of his eye.

“I was driving downtown here, in Montreal, and I saw a swastika on a cinderblock in a very busy part of town,” he said. “I had the equipment needed to remove it, so I got out of the truck and did just that. I got back in my truck, not thinking anything of it.”

From that day on, whenever Fleischer came across such graffiti, he would stop and remove it. As well, in the evening, after returning home from work, he would grab a bite to eat, shower and go out to look for racist, antisemitic and homophobic graffiti to remove.

“I would scour the city for hate crimes – back alleys, on walls, anywhere,” said Fleischer. “I found another one (swastika) and then another one. And then I started noticing, as the graffiti-removal side of my business began growing … I realized this was a real problem around town. It became my pastime. I quit hockey and softball and everything. It’s what I spent all my time doing. It fulfilled my life.”

For the first several years, it was only Fleischer’s parents and close friends who knew what he was doing. Then, he received a call from the local B’nai Brith Canada office to confirm his address, as they wanted to include him in a community newsletter mailing. While Fleischer refused to give out his address, he told the BBC that he had pictures of 40 swastikas that he had removed over the past five years, if that was of interest.

The BBC representative, said Fleischer, “literally couldn’t understand what was coming out of my mouth. She couldn’t believe that’s how I was spending my time. So, I sent her the pictures. They sent out a blogger to come and follow me, to do a story on what I was doing.

“Lo and behold, my life at that moment completely changed. People started seeing what I was doing and wanted to get involved. It went from removing 40 to 50 hate crimes in five years … [to] a couple hundred last year alone. The increase was pretty crazy.”

Fleischer now has thousands of followers wanting to get involved, so he has many more reports coming in, asking for free hate-graffiti removal. He said he has gone from spending about 10% of his company time removing hate graffiti to 95%. And, thanks to social media, the movement Fleischer started has gone global.

“People are calling me from all over the world, trying to figure out how to remove hate crimes in their area,” said Fleischer. “And, I basically put it together and have the removal done – wherever the people are calling from – with a local company.

“For most people dealing with hate crimes, it’s not a comfortable situation. People don’t know what to do with them or how to act when they see them. I happen to thrive in uncomfortable situations. I’ll go and organize. If I can’t find a local company to remove it, I’ll contact the local government, mayors, statesman, whoever, to get it done.

“For example, there was an attack on a Jewish cemetery in New York state. Their whole cemetery was defaced with swastikas and hate symbols. And somebody called me up from the town, saying they’d seen my videos and they’d been staring at these swastikas on their cemetery for two weeks – right around Yom Kippur. So, they called me to find out what could be done.”

After Fleischer hung up the phone, he began calling power washers. As it was a small town, it was hard to find someone, so Fleischer called the mayor and the local government. Within two days, all the graffiti was gone.

“When people figure out who I am and what I’m doing, they tend to spring into action quicker than if it was another situation,” said Fleischer. “Although I started the movement, it’s not just me getting it done. It’s people in the community, that I like to call ‘my army.’ I’m just a tool that was given to these people in order to remove these hate crimes. I’m just the instrument.”

While removing the hateful graffiti is, of course, good, Fleischer pointed out that it does not deal with the root of the problem. So, he decided to collaborate with Montreal-based Overture with the Arts, a not-for-profit that provides mainly after-school art classes to high school students. One of its programs is targeted at educating students about the Holocaust through a series of spoken word workshops about Anne Frank. OWTA opted to include a talk by Fleischer in the program.

“Instead of thinking about the actual guys who are putting on the hate crime, I had to find another way to make a difference in our society and in our communities,” said Fleischer of his speaking role. “I had to think of a way to make another difference by educating our youth, our future.

“When I was growing up and was going to high school, I was never taught about the Holocaust. I was never taught about the biggest massacre, the biggest tragedy, in human history.

“Before I started this whole movement, I didn’t even fully understand…. I knew what a swastika was, I knew it was bad, but I didn’t understand everything that was going behind it.”

The first two schools at which Fleischer spoke were classroom-sized talks, but this quickly expanded into full auditoriums. Schools now flood him with requests to come and speak.

“I had two calls this morning from schools calling me, out of the blue, trying to figure out how I can come to their schools,” said Fleischer in his interview with the Jewish Independent. “The school tour is called Erasing Hate.”

Fleischer received a peace medal last year from the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) for his efforts with Erasing Hate, along with 30 Auschwitz survivors.

“To think I’m even in the same bubble with people like that, with something I started doing as a pastime, because I followed my heart, is mind-blowing. It’s really something else,” he said.

“Hopefully, we won’t, in the future, be ignoring hate crimes on the street and the future – our kids, the kids in schools – will understand that you don’t need to be silent. You can wake up, open your mouth and you can make a difference. That’s what this has turned into.”

For more information, Fleischer is on Instagram (@ErasingHate) and Facebook.

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

Writing is really on the walls

An inscription on a water fountain built by Suleiman the Magnificent. (photo by Ariel Fields)

When it comes to Jerusalem, the writing really is on the wall. The problem is, some people (easily recognized, as they go around saying “it’s like talking to a brick wall”) will try to convince you walls can’t tell you anything. Don’t listen. If you ignore Jerusalem’s walls, you’ll miss out. The following matryoshka/babushka story (or story within stories) shows that “walls are the skin of the residents,” as the muralist cooperative CitéCréation is fond of saying.

Admittedly, you might initially doubt whether writing on the wall matters. To quell your uncertainty, here is what Tel Aviv University’s Prof. Jonathan Price has to say: “Inscriptions are an important and unique historical source. They provide information in many areas no other source can provide.”

Thus, while there’s no CD of the trumpet/shofar playing, we know that trumpet blasts from the southwest end of the Temple Mount indicated the beginning and end of the Sabbath. How? In his extensive history, The Wars of the Jews, Flavius Josephus writes about this practice.

The truly astounding physical evidence, however, is a stone carved sign now located in the Roman/ Byzantine section of Jerusalem’s Israel Museum. The inscription on this first century CE stone reads, “‘To the place of the trumpeting.” The stone directed the Temple kohain “trumpeter to the high point on the Temple Mount, where he would announce the beginning and end of the Sabbath.”

An archeologist described its discovery. It was found in the “debris from the dismantled walls, engraved on an eight-foot-long piece of limestone. The stone has a rounded top indicating it was a kind of parapet situated on top of the wall or the tower at the southwest corner of Herod’s giant Temple Mount. Unfortunately, the clearly readable inscription is broken off, so we only have the beginning of it.”

The trumpeter’s corner had a distinct vantage point. From his post, the trumpeter looked out over ancient Jerusalem, from the City of David to the Upper City in the West. When he gave a blast, even the merchants and shoppers in the markets heard.

Moving slightly away from the Old City, we come to an ornate Ottoman inscription just above the southern end of Sultan’s Pool. It reads: “[There] has ordered the construction of this blessed sabil, our master the Sultan the greatest prince and the honorable Khaqan, who rules the necks of the nations, the sultan of the [land of] Rum, the Arabs and the non-Arab [’ajam], the Sultan Suleiman, son of Sultan Selim Khan, may God perpetuate his reign and his sultanate. On the date of the tenth of the month of Muharram the sacred, in the year of 943 [29 June 1536].” (Ottoman Jerusalem, Auld and Hillenbrand, eds., 2000)

This sabil (drinking fountain) served the many passing pilgrims. The Ottoman ruler Suleiman the Magnificent built five more sabils inside the walls of the older city. Moreover, several other sabils (the earliest dating back to the Byzantine period of the sixth/seventh century) have been excavated at this same location.

The drinking fountain’s water came from an aqueduct originating at Solomon’s Pools, near Bethlehem. Importantly, this aqueduct primarily serviced the Temple Mount area. To insure an adequate water supply, Sultan’s Pool (today an outdoor concert venue) was a floodwater reservoir. Just a few years ago, archeologists uncovered a Second Temple period bridge that stood over the adjacent ravine of Ben Hinom Valley. The original bridge maintained the elevation of the path along which the water coursed. In 1320 CE, the Mamluks rebuilt the bridge. Two of the original nine arches supporting the bridge were excavated to their full three-metre height.

A relatively short walk from the fountain, but with a significant leap in time, we arrive at the Hebrew year 5694 (corresponding to 1933-1934). At that time, builders completed work on a structure at 6 King David St. As the country was still controlled by the British (the Mandatory period lasted from Sept. 29, 1923-May 14, 1948), the Hebrew stone dedication might be termed both prophetic and Zionist. The inscription from Psalms 102:15 reads: “Your servants take delight in its stones and cherish its dust.” Heads up, however, to view this stone, as it is high on the right side of the entranceway.

photo - In 2001, the French art group CitéCréation painted a mural depicting the Jerusalem Light Rail system, which didn’t start running until 2011
In 2001, the French art group CitéCréation painted a mural depicting the Jerusalem Light Rail system, which didn’t start running until 2011. (photo by Ariel Fields)

No matter what you think of the Mandatory period, most people will agree that the British constructed attractive and made-to-last Jerusalem streets and boulevards. Although King George Street has changed tremendously since Israel gained independence, the stateliness of the road’s 1924 commemoration is visible in the dedication stone on the side of what is now a woman’s clothing store. The esthetically pleasing inscription is carved in the languages of the time: English, the official language of the British Crown has a central spot on the stone. It is flanked by slightly smaller Hebrew and Arabic translations.

They say a picture is worth a 1,000 words, so here goes: Across from the above inscription, where King George, Strauss and Jaffa Road intersect, look up to see what was for 10 years regarded as a “time-warp” fresco. In 2001, the French art group CitéCréation painted a long exterior building wall depicting the Jerusalem Light Rail system. Since the light rail only began running at the end of 2011, for years Jerusalemites considered this painting a bad joke. Like many other Jerusalem projects, this one finally came into being years after its original promised inauguration.

Despite a violent summer and fall, the Jerusalem Light Rail demonstrates that the city’s ethnic and religious groups can – and do, literally – come into close contact. Jerusalem’s train is an example, albeit a fragile coexistence.

photo - Gavriel Cohen’s 1976 mural on the Gerard Behar building
Gavriel Cohen’s 1976 mural on the Gerard Behar building. (photo by Orli Fields)

In sharp contrast to the slow development of the light rail, the wall project on the Gerard Behar Theatre (its address is 11 Bezalel St.) shows how quickly things can get done, if one really works at it. In 1976, Gavriel Cohen painted a huge building mural in just 92 days. Humorously, this 18-metre-wide painting is entitled “Around the World in 92 Days.” When you see the painting, you will understand its “play” on the title of Jules Verne’s famous adventure story.

Like Verne, Cohen was born in France. Moreover, the Jerusalem Foundation donor who underwrote the building’s renovation was himself a millionaire French Jew. He named the building after his son, Gerard Behar. Today, the wall has added significance, as many French Jews are making Israel their home. The Jewish Agency reported nearly 7,000 French Jews made aliya in 2014, doubling the number of the preceding year.

We now move back in time to the Hebrew year 5632 (1872). In the tiny Jerusalem neighborhood of the House of David – the fourth neighborhood built outside the walls of the Old City – there is another inscription above the doorway of what (with controversy between different religious blocs) has recently become a yeshiva. David Reiz, a Jew from Jonava, Poland (today the Republic of Lithuania) donated the money to build this area. The Hebrew stone dedication contains a description of the 1872 purchase of the lot and the subsequent building of the apartments and a study house (bet midrash). The home of Rav Kook (first chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Mandate Palestine) and the popular dairy restaurant Ticho House (currently undergoing repair) are a few steps away. The square courtyard in which the inscription is found still has the wells residents used for their household needs. Reportedly, today’s residents are a mix of doctors, artists and yeshiva students.

Even if they never took up residence in Israel, over the years people of different denominations have considered Jerusalem to be their centre of the world. Thus, in front of Jerusalem’s City Hall, there is a large reproduction of Heinrich Bünting’s 1581 map of the world. Bünting (1545-1606), a German Protestant pastor and theologian with a strong interest in cartography, created a map (included in his printed map book) featuring a three-leaf clover (which to this day is still part of his native Hanover’s coat of arms). Europe is the western leaf, Asia is the eastern leaf and Africa is the southern leaf. Jerusalem lies at the centre of the clover.

As Hebrew University’s Prof. Rehav Rubin (1987) wrote: “These maps do not teach us anything about the appearance of the city in ancient times, but from them we learn how Christian Europeans and the map-makers themselves saw sacred texts and the place of Jerusalem in the sacred texts.”

So much of Jerusalem’s history is laid out on its walls; come visit to discover it.

Deborah Rubin Fields is an Israel-based features writer. She is also the author of Take a Peek Inside: A Child’s Guide to Radiology Exams, published in English, Hebrew and Arabic.