Bezalel's silver works

The Bezalel School of Art and Craft is the first school of art in the land of Israel. It was founded in 1906 by Boris Schatz, a Lithuanian Jewish artist and sculptor who settled in Israel. Schatz envisaged the creation of a new distinctive national style of Jewish art, blending classical Jewish, Middle Eastern and European traditions.

In addition to traditional sculpture and painting, the school offered workshops that produced decorative art objects in silver, leather, wood, brass, and fabric. The artists of Bezalel developed a distinctive style of art, known as the Bezalel school, which portrayed Biblical and Zionist subjects in a style influenced by the European art nouveau and traditional Persian and Syrian art.

Bezalel's silver works were done by several groups; The Silver Department at Bezalel, which opened in 1908 and was headed by Shmuel Persov, the Yemenite goldsmiths' colony in Ben Shemen, which operated from 1911 to 1914 and was run by Ben-Zion Ben Aharon, and by independent groups such as Keter and Sharar. Bezalel's silver objects were made in various techniques, including filigree.

The works created in the Bezalel School of Art and Craft are considered the beginning of Israeli visual art.