Gil Yefman

 ”El Maleh Rehamim” (God Full of Wombs) 2018, Felting, 190x240cm

On Mother’s Day of 1944 bereaved German mothers and women received an illustrated card produced by the culture department of the Nazi Party central propaganda office. The card consists of quotations from Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Herbert Sailer, and the words of an anonymous bereaved German mother. The text is simple Nazi nationalistic propaganda: the dead did not die in vain and, although there was no afterlife, the dead continue in the life that followed them. In the center of the card is a delicate drawing of a bunch of flowers in different stages of blossom and decay. 

The card, which Yefman bought at a German flea market, generated a conversation with the women of Kuchinate collective on the role of women as breeders of soldiers; on the womb as an internal, but not necessarily private, organ; on bereavement that brings about a personal mental and physical struggle to survive. Later the artist worked on the image of the flowers from the card. It was enlarged and copied from the paper onto the soft woollen sheet and the range of colors was reduced to a military-green monochrome. 

The support is made with wet felting: a process of rubbing and compressing wool fibers with soapy water until they form one piece. The image was made in dry felting: inserting wool fibers into the felted support by pricking them with a needle until they blended into the felt fabric. The image of the memorial flowers, the artist’s handiwork, is tattooed on the felted support, a product of the collective work.

The name of the work, God Full of Wombs, is a play on words on the name of a prayer for the soul of a person who has died, usually recited at the graveside during the burial service and at national memorial ceremonies, Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day. The conceit – depending on how they are vowelised, the Hebrew letters of the word rechem can mean either womb or mercy – lends God a motherly essence and fills him with wombs.