Thirty Years After Yona Wallach's 'Tefillin' Was Published, the Poem and Photo Remain as Provocative as Ever

Before the photograph there was the poem. In the spring of 1982, in the monthly literary journal Iton 77, edited by Yaakov Besser, Yona Wallach published the poem "Tefillin."

"Come to me / don't let me do a thing / you do it for me / what I even start doing / you do instead of me / I'll put on tefillin / I'll pray / you put on the tefillin for me too / bind them on my hands / play them in me / move them gently over my body / rub them hard against me / stimulate me everywhere / make me swoon with sensations / move them over my clitoris / tie my hips with them/ so I'll come quickly ..." Wallach goes on to give operating instructions - "turn me over on my belly / and put the tefillin in my mouth bridle reins / ride me I'm a mare." Then, in a reversal of roles, she passes the phylacteries - the leather boxes containing scriptural verses worn by observant Jewish men on the forehead and forearm during weekday morning prayers - over the man's body, choking him with the straps of the tefillin: "that stretch the length of the stage / and among the stunned crowd" (translation by Linda Stern Zisquit, from "Let the Words: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach," Sheep Meadow Press, 2006 ).

In addition to threatening letters and quite a number of phone calls to the editorial offices of the journal in response, there was also a letter from the ultra-Orthodox poet Zelda (Schneersohn Mishkovsky ), who in the past had been friends with Wallach. "When I saw Yona's poem," wrote Zelda to Besser, "I thought that I wished I were dead because I could no longer hold in my hands a magazine that published a thing like that."

It was only a year and a half later that the blunt reaction by then-Deputy Minister of Education Miriam Tassa-Glazer was published in a newspaper interview. Asked about Wallach, the Likud deputy minister replied: "Wallach is simply disturbed. An animal in heat who writes a poem like this and then publishes it ... It is a dark wave ... anarchy."

In his 1993 biography "Yona Wallach" (Keter ), veteran journalist Yigal Sarna writes that the Hebrew Writers Association sent a letter to government ministers protesting Tassa-Glazer's remarks, and MK Yossi Sarid submitted a parliamentary query to Education Minister Zevulun Hammer: "The deputy minister's world is awash in sex and carnality. What does the minister intend to do so the deputy will be able to find full satisfaction in the work of education?"

In 1983 Dani Dothan, the soloist of the rock band HaClique, published the interview he conducted with Wallach in issue No. 59 of the now-defunct monthly Monitin. The photo accompanying the interview was taken by Micha Kirshner: Today people associate it, however, with "Tefillin."

In that photo, Yona Wallach, who two years later was dead, at the age of 41, stands with her arms criss-crossed over her chest, while the head and arm of a young man are seen entering the frame of the photo, the flexed arm laid along the length of her body. The young man is Dani Dothan's younger brother, Uri Dotan, who later became an artist himself.

Other studio shots that Kirshner did were far more daring. Filmmaker Yair Kedar, who is currently making a documentary entitled "Yona Wallach's Seven Reels," received from Kirshner the series of photos that he took at the time. These, along with other new revelations, will appear in the film, due to be released this summer.

In his book, Sarna wrote about why the least provocative of Kirshner's photos was selected: "When the prints arrived at the Monitin graphics room, the deputy graphics editor, a religious fellow, threatened to resign if they chose the erotic tefillin photo. They cut out the fellow's body and the tefillin, leaving only the boy's hand on Yona's belly as a kind of hairy organ."

Editor and translator Halit Yeshurun writes about Wallach in an afterword to a 2009 revised edition of Sarna's biography: "Belief and heresy, but not total abandon. She declared she was free of good and evil, but that is the base: good and evil. And to do evil is also a value, in that it resembles the Frankist [referring to followers of Jacob Frank, who led a messianic 18th-century sect that among other things promoted "purification through transgression"]: to sin as only a believer can. She fomented a huge ruckus with 'Tefillin.' But despite her wild life, and as her image recedes, she comes across to me as a nun : 'I sit at home. Quiet, resting and writing. And I follow processes of the soul as I myself am the laboratory and the laboratory assistant.' Laboratory and laboratory assistant. Because a poem is an experiment ... She puts herself on the table and performs experiments on herself, with a comb that goes from the sturdy to the fine-toothed."

'Hit and run'

"At this stage of the conversation the magazine's photographer Micha Kirshner joins her. He has formulated a conception of the shape of the photograph he has chosen for Wallach, a photographic illustration for 'Tefillin.'

Kirshner: 'I don't want you naked, but I want to get a nude image.'

Wallach: 'I don't feel like it, I love clothes, I am really crazy about clothes. Nude needs a lot of experience, professionalism, theatricality."

- from the 1983 interview by Dani Dothan, in Monitin

Kirshner recalls today that he was asked by Monitin to photograph Wallach. "At the time there wasn't any dictate as to what to photograph, only whom. It was my mandate to decide where, when and how to take the pictures, which was very pleasing - it was an extraordinary privilege."

He was familiar with Wallach's writing then, he says, "but just to make sure I picked up one of her books again and leafed through it. The poem that jumped out immediately was 'Tefillin.' I connected with it very easily and it seemed to me that this had been preceded by some incident in which some cabinet minister from the Alignment [the precursor of today's Labor Party] had torn Yona to pieces. I decided to read it again and see how it was possible to create an illustration of this situation. Before that I had met Yona in a brief and entirely esoteric incident. I thought about the idea of tefillin and a man who would be naked.

"Yona came into the studio with bells on and a miniskirt, making definitely flirtatious moves - and I say this not because I am such an attractive man but because that was part of her nearly everyday conduct, I assume. I explained to her what we were going to do and she cooperated immediately. She came into the studio with so much sexual energy that it was almost embarrassing. In the photos she is wearing the clothes she came in with, which were the mini you see her in and the red hat. Yona got into it and more - there were no inhibitions.

"The shooting itself took maybe 15 minutes. The process involved trying to think of the right photo to accompany that specific article. I try to keep my subjects in the studio for a very short time, lest they suddenly start to feel an obligation to express too many opinions. Usually I do all the tests and lighting adjustments beforehand with the assistants who are working with me. I check everything and all that is left to do is to get their agreement and to pose them, photograph angle A, angle B, angle C, angle D and that's it. Hit and run.

"This is a method that has proven himself, because often a person gets swept up in the general atmosphere of the studio and then starts worrying about whether the process is correct from the publicity perspective or [in terms of] his self-image. All those feelings always exist. In Yona there was no regret, she was very happy, and I even got a phone call from her afterward saying it had been very pleasant and well done. So there wasn't even regret in retrospect.

"Eventually the photo was shown at the Museum of Israeli Art in Ramat Gan in the 'Photo Yona' exhibition. That was in 2002: Everything was already hanging on the walls along with other works and someone from the [local municipal] coalition, from one of the religious parties, informed the mayor, Zvi Bar, that if that work didn't come down they would break up the coalition.

"Meir Aharonson, the curator, was scared and said we would have to take it down because, after all, we weren't going to topple the city council. I was opposed and shared this with some of the other participants and most of the exhibition was taken down by other artists as a sign of solidarity. The main hall remained empty with a few works on the wall. Later there was also a demonstration - a kind of childish affair at the Cinematheque plaza in Tel Aviv with the backing, self-serving to some extent, of [politician] Tommy Lapid, who of course discovered a huge treasure from his perspective."

How was the photo that was published chosen?

Kirshner: "I would usually choose about three frames and leave the decision to the graphic designer. At Monitin we worked like a very tight crew. I assume I submitted about three photos, all of which were similar. I will always create a number of different situations, because some of the insight comes to you only later and then you say, 'Wait a minute, why didn't I also photograph her left profile?' Thus the range was wide and was narrowed down to three or four pieces."

Today, he goes on, "We are in total regression. I have no doubt that there is no newspaper - and I am completely certain about this, even though I haven't tried it in person - where it would be possible to publish a photo like that now. It isn't that the situation has remained static, rather that it is definitely regressive. There is not a chance. Not Haaretz, not Yedioth Ahronoth, not Maariv and not even in local weeklies, where sometimes the feeling is more permissive. Nothing like this would get past the editor."

'Traumatic' interview

In the Monitin interview, after Wallach says she doesn't feel like being photographed in the nude, Dothan is quoted as saying to Kirshner: "Maybe she has a terrible scar on her body."

Wallach: "I have a small mark, but it isn't that. I'll buy myself a video camera and I'll film myself naked all day at home.

Kirshner: "That would be a waste of time. In her poems there is more voyeurism than sharing - maybe think in that direction."

Wallach: "To observe. Voyeurism is something important."

Says Dothan, a journalist, musician and filmmaker, today: "The whole interview with Yona was traumatic because before then she had been a liberated person and in this interview there was the revelation that she had cancer. All the interviews I had done until then were with marginal people. Today, Yona Wallach is a goddess. The truth is that then too she was a goddess, albeit on the margins. She was pretty amazing. A very free person.

"In any event, suddenly she became more low-key. She had usually been ... sort of naive, but free and mature. She was no child. I said to her: 'You sound terribly accepting.' Before that I had had the feeling she was a frenetic person and suddenly she had a kind of acceptance. And she said, 'Yes, I have cancer.' We didn't make an issue of it. In the article I didn't make it central.

"Micha's studio was on Rothschild Boulevard or nearby. I lived on Sheinkin, and Yona came to my place several times for this interview. She really loved extreme music and wanted to be a singer herself. Micha always had great ideas, sort of delinquent ones that went all the way. I remember he said; 'Would she be prepared for someone [else] to strip?' I asked and she didn't have a problem. So Micha said, 'Okay, so who will strip?' So I said, 'I think my brother would - how much is the pay?' I think it was $100. Uri was young then and $100 was a lot of money for him. It was what you paid a professional model.

"We got to the studio with Micha - he was very organized. Uri stripped; he was a hunk then. She sat in a corner, in a careful posture. It's funny, because in fact there was a kind of reversal of roles. She had this kind of look of a mature woman, and in Yona Wallach there had always been something of a defiant young woman.

"It was a kind of dance. Uri danced around her more than she danced around him. She was more passive and he was more active and that's also beautiful. There was something poetically erotic in it; it was excellent. Yona was a beautiful woman, interesting, very smart, very opinionated and a 'collaborator,' as Uri put it. Cooperative. And also artistic and cultured and charming and utterly unique, and this photo is a result of that. And it is also of the fact that Micha is an extraordinary photographer and he loves the people he photographs. "

Did you know there would be reactions like that to this photo?

"We hoped there would be reactions like that. I am very much against religious coercion, against anyone determining what I should wear, what I should eat, what is sacred and so forth. She wrote a poem, and the whole business centered around how that minister attacked Yona Wallach and ridiculed her. It's pretty repulsive that ministers meddle in poetry. There is something that is called art. Yona Wallach was a very moral and pure person in her way. She had opinions and I thought her opinions were interesting. I thought it was the right narrative, that it would be a wonderful photograph and that the reactions would be like that."

Was she pleased?

"In my opinion she was very happy. There are poets who are diffident but she was someone else. Had she been born a few years later she would have been a punk vocalist. She had a provocative way about her, she pranced around like a mare on platforms and with hats. And she had hallucinations about getting laid."

Hallucinations? She got laid.

"Great. I don't know who she screwed, but everyone screwed in the '80s - it's only now that this has become news. She had something provocative about her, but also very human and feminine and beautiful ... She wrote the most profound poem possible. She hoped people would go into shock. Clearly. What's the point of writing a poem no one reads and no one relates to? She wasn't the way people depict her, not a mythical figure. She was a warm, nice, chatty human being. It was easy to talk to and interview her. She left me about 100 poems but I have no idea where they are. I remember they were on pink paper."

'Male topics'

Some of your poems look more like male topics of conversation than like a woman's poems.

Wallach: "I don't think I deal with male topics. When I sang I also always sang in a bass voice and not a thin voice."

You are allowing yourself now what men were writing 20 years ago.

Wallach: "Twenty years ago I wrote totally pornographic stories."

Nevertheless, as a woman, you are out of the ordinary.

Wallach: "I am not at all certain. I believe that as a man I am quite out of the ordinary. I believe I am an extraordinary man."

- From the Monitin interview

Uri Dotan, speaking today: "They told me to come, to lay tefillin, so I came and I laid tefillin.' Then that was natural, it looked terribly normal to me and it was only years later that they told me 'your butt was together with Yona Wallach.' When Yigal Sarna suddenly wrote a book about her, this came up again and I recalled it. It was a Zionist thing, it was Zionism at its best: to show your butt and to show the poems and to show the nudity and her and that tension. It was powerful but it was normal. Not being normal was normal."

Did she come on to you?

"Of course she came on to me. This is Yona Wallach; there were no inhibitions. I talked to her and she was an amazing girl, one of the most amazing women I met in Tel Aviv. The provocative bit was fine with me - I loved provocations. In fact it didn't look to me like something provocative - it seemed like something perfectly natural then.

An installation by Dotan, entitled "Trans-Tel Aviv," is on exhibition at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, and his work was also on display in a recent exhibition entitled "Not a Word" at the Shay Arye Gallery in town . In one of his drawings, "Laying Tefillin in the Garden of Eden," Pinocchio is seen putting on tefillin.

Is this an homage to Yona Wallach?

"Could be. I am certain that her influence and the influence of Kirshner's photograph are there somewhere, but it is also an icon in its own right: There is something about laying tefillin - you wrap yourself in religiosity and lots of self-importance - it's not simple."

In the afterword to Sarna's biography, Yeshurun quotes from Wallach's diary: "The inner self is made of the most delicate materials, the most torn materials, the most melting ... I don't want my personality to change. I am crude and wild and that is how I am ... I, Yona, wanted to know everything. I wanted to be a complete person."