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In September 2002, in Jerusalem, the Israel Museum in collaboration with the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, presented some 80 paintings by Marc Chagall, drawn from different collection. The exhibition, curated by Stephanie Rachum, highlighted the paintings that have made Chagall such an important figure in the history of modern art, with a special emphasis on painting inspired by his Jewish heritage.

Marc Chagall has a unique position in the history of modern art. He was influenced by the major styles and movements of the early 20th century but Chagall's poetic art remained distinctively his own.

His paintings are characterized by the confluence of his Russian and Jewish background and modern European art trends. These variant strands were then woven into a very personal mode of expression. In part this individual language was the result of the Hasidic traditions that was part of his home life in Vitebsk, the town where he was born and spent his youth.

The breakdown of the barriers that separated visions and reality in his paintings was a natural extension of the mystical milieu around him.

The use of symbolic images was inherent in his Jewish heritage. Very often his subjects included, portraits of Jews, aspects of Jewish life and everyday life in the shtetl. He translated these into visual metaphors, flights of fancy unbounded by the laws of logic or gravity.

Together with the fantastic aspects of his painting, Chagall was also a realist. The majority of the people and places he painted were grounded in his immediate surroundings, and much of his poetic imagery proves to be an expression of a concrete reality.

Biblical subjects as well, tended not only to retell ancient stories but have also often additional meanings that reflect the artist's world view and hopes.

Yiddish sayings take on concrete form and intermesh within overall motifs.

Chagall invents his own language through his painting somewhere between realism and visual metaphor.

Marc Chagall visited Palestine for the first time before the State of Israel was founded and maintained a continuous connection with Israel throughout his life. He conceived and executed important projects in Israel, particularly in Jerusalem, and made significant contributions to several institutions.

Among his friends in Israel were politicians,artists, art historians,businessmen - people from many walks of life. During his life, Marc Chagall visited Israel 8 times, extending the depth of his involvement each visit.

With his daughter Ida and his wife Bella, Chagall came to the country first in 1931. The main reason for this visit was a commission he had received from the Parisian art dealer, Ambroise Vollard, to do a series of illustrations to the Bible.

He travelled a lot, drawing and painting in Tel Aviv, Safed and Jerusalem . The country left an impression on him, and back in Paris the light and landscape he had seen were echoed in many of the etchings for his painting, The Bible.

In 1951, the opening of large retrospective exhibitions of his paintings, in Haifa, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, prompted Chagall's second visit, and in 1957, again he went to Israel after the publication of his paintings to the Bible.

Vollard had died shortly before World War II and Tériade published the commission that had finally been completed in 1956. Verve published a second book of Bible illustrations, also in that year. Ida Chagall Meyer, Chagall's daughter, gave the Israel Museum 11 original drawings for the lithographs in that work.

The inauguration of his 12 stained-glass windows for the synagogue of the Hebrew University's Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem in 1962 brought Chagall to Israel again.

A year later, he came again in order to discuss the iconographic themes for a large-scale decoration for the new Knesset building.

When he was 90 years old Marc Chagall, for the last time,visited Israel in October, 1977. During this trip he accepted two distinguished honours: the city of Jerusalem conferred on him the title "Worthy of Jerusalem" and the Weizmann Institute of Science awarded him an honorary doctorate.

Chagall's connection to Vitebsk may have been due in part to the security that the shtetl provided its Jewish citizens.

Elsewhere a Jew was an alien, a foreigner to be treated with hostility. In Vitebsk, though subject to certain restrictions, Jewish rituals could be practiced openly and Jewish inhabitants formed a significant part of the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie.

Being a very sensitive youth, Chagall absorbed all the sounds, sights, customs, and festivals that made up his environment.

The surrounding countryside, the people and the culture of his hometown, steeped in the traditions of Hasidism, left an indelible mark on him.

Marc Chagall painted his family, churches, the houses, streets and synagogues that his eyes recorded, and his memory preserved. Jew and non-Jew, teacher and peasant ,poet and beggar all found their way into his paintings. Everyday life and the characters that peopled his world were recalled in paintings replete with wit and humour.

Thus he revealed the myths, the traditions and the faith of the local people. Memories from his early years and his Russian-Jewish background proved to be a source that continuously inspired his work.

Chagall's paintings of his shtetl pay homage both to the values it propagated and to a lifestyle that has disappeared.

In the 1930s and early 1940s, when the world that Chagall remembered was being brutally crushed, he chronicled the disasters that befell the Jews of Europe in symbolic images, against the background of Vitebsk.

This terrible destruction did not, however, prevent him from continuing to include Vitebsk scenes in his paintings until the end of his days.

Absent from his early work, religious themes appeared in Chagall's painting only around 1912, and were probably the artist's answer to the much-discussed problem of how to create a modern Jewish art form.

Among these religious themes, one of the most prevalent images in his painting at that time and thereafter was a Jew holding a Torah scroll or a prayer book. The figures in these paintings were always male, and the human presence is confined to only one person.

Often they donned the accoutrements of prayer, the tefillin (phylacteries) and the tallith or prayer shawl attached to the left arm and forehead that contained verses from the Pentateuch. Perhaps it was the memory of his devout father that inspired many of these images.

In his autobiography, Chagall recalled: "Day after day, winter and summer, at six o'clock in the morning my father got up and went off to the synagogue." In 1930, Chagall was invited to participate in the Parisian Colonial Exhibition as a guest in a pavilion devoted to art from Palestine. Though the planned pavilion failed to materialize, the invitation led Chagall to a renewed consideration of the question of the creation of contemporary Jewish art.

In that same year, Meir Dizengoff, Tel Aviv mayor, visited Paris and invited Chagall to come to Palestine for the Purim festival and the laying of the foundation stone of the Tel Aviv Museum.

The new museum was to include a collection of reproductions and prints of paintings depicting biblical heroes and events.

Also, it was in 1930, that Ambroise Vollard had commissioned Chagall to create his Bible illustrations. All these events contributed to the artist's decision to undertake his 1931 voyage to Palestine, to see first hand the Land of the Bible.

The stained glass windows representing the 12 Sons of Jacob from whom descended the 12 Tribes of Israel, in the synagogue of the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Centre in Ein Karem, Jerusalem, were dedicated on February 6, 1962. Chagall and his assistant Charles Marq, worked on the windows for two years.

Charles Marq developed a special process of veneering pigment on glass, which allowed Chagall to use as many as three colours on a single uninterrupted panel, rather than being confined to the traditional technique of separating each colour by lead strips.

Chagall was present at the dedication and spoke of the joy he felt in bringing this gift to his people, the Jewish people.

"All the time I was working," he said, "I felt my father and my mother were looking over my shoulder, and behind them were Jews, millions of other vanished Jews of yesterday and a thousand years ago."

In the summer of 1960, Kadish Luz, then the Speaker of the Knesset, was introduced to Chagall, and an agreement was reached regarding the artist's participation in decorations for the projected new Knesset building.

Chagall was enthusiastic about the work, which became a gift from him to the Jewish people and Israel. For Marc Chagall, this was an opportunity to express his interpretation of the entire history of his people, and its focal point - the Land of Israel and Jerusalem.

Upon the completion of the work in 1969, Chagall declared: "I have visited this land many times and each meeting with it deepened in me my ties to it, so that I wished to leave here some sign of this bond.... Now I and my creations have entered the Parliament of Jerusalem, the Knesset - in its hall, on its walls and floor..... Thus I became close to the land.... I felt as though I had been born anew. No longer am I as I was."

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