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Early July, about a year after we returned to Israel, I was shopping for a present that had me somewhat stressed. My site for selling handmade art was still on the drawing board back then, so I was traipsing through galleries on a hot Friday morning, looking for something impressive. Our hostess for that evening’s dinner was the sister of my close friend from Baltimore, and I wanted to bring something special. I always like to put thought into gifts, but knowing that this woman was a successful interior designer, and that she had just redone her own living room, made finding a gift for her home all the more challenging.

Finally something caught my eye—a red dish, in the shape of a leaf, great to hang on the wall if it matched her new color scheme, perfect for serving nuts or candy in another room if it didn’t. Compared to the other pieces in the upscale gallery, I found this one to be the most lovely—with brilliant form and depth of color, and a unique style of craftsmanship.

The reason it hadn’t caught my eye right away was because it was somewhat hidden under a layer of cellophane wrapping, actually two layers, and tied with a few feet of raffia for good measure. Only on my way out the door that evening did I notice a small blue sticker buried amidst the wrapping that said (loosely translated): “Something Special—Made by people with brain disabilities.” Thus began my acquaintance with the Mercaz Cochav (the Star Center) and the artists of
Mashu Meuchad (Something Special).

Given my new venture into the arts, and the fact that I’m the proud aunt of a handsome 15-year-old with severe mental retardation, I was intrigued. I called the number on the sticker, and was eventually directed to a website which had yet to be translated into English, but did have a few photographs of some home décor pieces and judaica, without prices, and without much in the way of explanation, particularly for a lazy Hebrew-reader like myself.

I wanted to find out more about their cause, and I already knew I loved their work, so I persisted for a few more calls with my usual questions about wholesale pricing and shipping costs, and time after time I’m told by whoever answered the phone, “Just Come. You really have to come here to understand this place, to understand our art.”

A month later, my husband Zvi and I are on our way North to Ma’alot, a small town in the mountains of the Western Galilee. Ma’alot was established as a development town in 1957. Like most cities in Israel, its history is wrought with tragedy as well as accomplishments. In 1963, the city merged with the neighboring Arab town of Tarshiha to form the mixed city of Ma’alot-Tarshiha, in an effort to improve services for the Tarshiha residents.

In 1974, Ma’alot’s elementary school was the site of a Lebanese terrorist attack in which 28 people, of them 21 teenagers, lost their lives. Three summers ago, nearly 700 Katyusha rockets landed in Ma’alot’s vicinity during the Second Lebanon War.
Residents would prefer that their town be known, however, for its hillside rehabilitation center known as Mercaz Cochav, whose motto is “Helping persons with special needs reach for the stars.”

After getting lost in the hilly neighborhood, Zvi and I arrive at the center to be greeted by a woman sleeping on the floor of the patio of the building’s entrance. “I’m pretty sure we’re at the right place” I think. We’re not quite sure whether to step over her or to call someone. Another woman, this one with a Staff T-shirt, gives us a glance that says she’s keeping an eye on our greeter, and also that this is all part of a day’s work for her.

We enter into a hub of activity, and many participants come out to meet us, some speaking to us in Hebrew, some in Arabic, and some who simply want to shake our hands or see us. Many people are in wheelchairs or with walkers; one man has casts on both of his arms. The center itself is beautiful, and the atmosphere is more resort than rehab, and we’re anxious to have a tour around.

We’re then met by Tamar Schvartzman, the center’s occupational coordinator, who goes by “Tami”, to give us a brief history of the center. The Mercaz Cochav Association of Ma’alot-Tarshiha was founded in 1999 with the principal goal of offering services and support to people with special needs who live in the Western Galilee. Until then, area residents with intellectual and developmental disabilities could enjoy similar services only far away from their homes, putting added strain and expenses on them and their families.

The center provides a large network of services for treating people of all ages and levels of functioning, as well as offering counseling and other support for families. The center currently functions as day-care for adults with severe mental retardation and physical disabilities, as after school care for children with autism and severe mental retardation, and as a clubhouse for social activities and community integration for participants of all ages. Mercaz Cochav also provides respite care for participants to stay over for a weekend of fun activities, enabling family members to take time out from the intensive care they provide.

Tami shows us some of the recreation rooms and then the kitchen, all the while introducing us by saying “These are the guests I told you about, who came to meet you.” She introduces an apron-clad woman with Down Syndrome as their kitchen manager, and another woman, who appeared to have difficulty speaking, as their carpentry expert. Everyone is busy, so much that it’s not quite clear who is staff and who are participants, if not for the few workers with Staff T-shirts.

Participants come from all over Northern Israel and from all backgrounds including Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. Tami adds that families and staff from all walks of life work together to make the center a success, and comments that if “decisions were made in a place like this—we’d never have had any wars.” In the short time we are strolling around, Tami checks one boy for a fever, gives out several hugs, explains to a staff member how to remove sticky labels from terracotta planters, and assigns tasks to at least five participants, most of whom start clapping in anticipation.

Tami joined the organization in 2003, after 11 years as a public school art teacher. She got a call from the director of the center not long after her eldest son was killed in a car accident. She told the director thank you, but she was not interested, as at that point in her life she was pretty sure that “she was never leaving the house again.”

He persisted, and she finally agreed to teach an art class for four weeks. By the end of the course, she was hooked, and she credits those first students with having saved her life. After teaching in a mainstream school, which she also loved, the eagerness at which the center participants approached their art was astounding. Before long, her artists were waiting for her at the gates every morning.

In Tami’s initial enthusiasm there, she fantasized about creating a project or two and then training all of her students to work in that medium. This approach was challenging, given the wide variety of skills of the artists, and given the fact that each person would get attached to one part of the artistic process and then not want to abandon it. So Tami quickly changed her focus, designing projects to meet each participant’s abilities.

Any one of the Mashu Meuchad creations may have been worked on by 10 or more artists. One person shapes the clay, another stamps a relief design, another paints the glaze, and so on, all the way up to the wrapping stage. “Everyone here loves to wrap,” Tami explains, “We have the best-wrapped art on the planet.” Tami’s method of adding new art forms as needed worked great, except for the fact that the artists, now proudly working according to their respective specialties, were creating at such a rate that Tami was running out of places to store their creations—and the idea of selling them commercially was born.

In the beginning, they worked in one small studio with one small kiln, and they sold their products at ridiculously low prices. They had two goals at the time: to cover their expenses for the materials; and to clear out the pieces fast enough to make room in the studio for the artists to continue doing what they loved.

Today, the art is still produced at Mercaz Cochav, plus at an additional center in Ma’alot, as well as at two other centers in the North. The association has expanded to serve a wider range of people with various types of problems and various levels of ability, including people with mental health disorders. The stickers on their products now say “Something Special. Made by people with special needs.”

The association now also includes an independent living hostel for people with slight to moderate mental retardation. More than 200 people create art for Mashu Meuchad.

Among their four centers are a carpentry workshop, a nursery, a candle factory, and an orchard where they grow Kozo trees (brought from Japan) for their handmade, eco-friendly paper. They produce: candlesticks, plates, bowls, sculptures, mobiles, wall hangings, clocks, tables, chairs, greeting cards, placemats, coasters, holiday goods, purses, tablecloths, and I’m sure, several new creations just in the time it’s taken to list these.

Tami drops us off at a small wooden cabin near the entrance to the center. The structure, a donation, serves as the Mashu Meuchad store. Two mothers of participants come in to choose some gifts for Rosh HaShanah, and have trouble deciding. A few participants pop in to say hello to us again. On the day that Zvi and I visited, two young Arabic women from Tarshiha were attending to sales.

One explains that she has been working at the center as part of her Sherut Leumi, or National Service, an alternative service to the Israeli army. She tells us that she is moving to Jordan soon to study pharmacy there, and that she’s enjoyed every minute of her one year of service at Mercaz Cochav.

She explains that she’s an artist too, and then adds that the people there taught her ceramics, as she’s spent part of her year working with them in the studio. The other saleswoman is buying one of the products off the shelves to bring home to her own family in Tarshiha as a present. Clearly, everyone involved here has immense pride for the artists and their creations.

Tami comes into the store with a round of cold drinks and brings along her eight-year-old son, who is about the same age as my middle child, and we get to talking again. She often brings him to the center on his days off, and he recently asked her if any of the participants there would ever get better. “No” she answered him, “probably not.”

“So why do you keep trying?”

“Ki magia la’hem,” (Because they deserve it) she told him. She tells us how the artists have such pride in their work, how they wait for the trucks to pick up their creations, how they wait for the checks to come in and plan how they are going to spend the pocket money they receive from the profits.

Tami pauses and then assures us, “They do deserve it. They deserve to be productive, to live a life worthy of respect.” Her eyes become sad for a moment, “They saved my life.”

And every day, in her own special way, she’s saving theirs.

Sharon Geva is a writer living in Beit Hashmonai, Israel, with her husband and three sons. She was born and raised in Maryland and immigrated to Israel in 1993. She and her family spent six years living in Reisterstown and being active in the Baltimore Jewish community before retuning to Israel last year. Sharon owns http://www.ShopIsraelArt.com, a site selling handmade art and Judaica from Israel to the United States.