Some artists tell their stories in written or spoken words, others in dance, music, pantomime, clay or photographs. But Ilana Yahav channels her memories, her dreams and her feelings through the more ephemeral medium of sand.

As we mark the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Temple Emanu-El welcomes her to sift and paint a tale not about the dreadful moment in 1973 when the stillness of the holiest day in Judaism was broken by the blaring of air raid sirens, the news that Egyptian troops had swarmed across the Suez Canal and that a handful of Israeli soldiers were desperately fending off Syrian tanks moving across the Golan Heights.

Rather, her memory is of being a 20-year-old pregnant woman terrified because her fighter pilot husband Itzik was in the air defending their country; of answering the knock on her door in the middle of the second night of fighting and an IDF officer informing her that Itzik had been killed; of sitting shiva and mourning him even while the delivery of their child approached; and then of seeing a photograph of Itzik dressed in a Syrian prison uniform on the front page of a French magazine.

Please join us to watch the wonders Ilana creates, meet her son, Dan Yahav, who served with Unit 669 – a Combat Search and Rescue Unit of the Israeli Air Force – to hear and feel their story . . . and to remember.

A world-renowned Israeli sand artist, Ilana Yahav has performed in the Vatican, the Kremlin and in front of the kings of Spain and Belgium.