Artist Yitzchok Moullyhas upped his message: to make the Jewish flame visible in the public sphere
With public menorah ceremonies grabbing headlines, especially after a local council in Melbourne, Australia, actually thwarted the installation of a community-funded menorah display in time for Chanukah, Australian-born artist Yitzchok Moully’s public art menorahs have become more than just a symbol of religious function. Especially now, those massive Chanukah icons are a beacon of light and shared human connection in a world that has become frighteningly divisive.
With his trademark pink yarmulke and colorful psychedelic socks, Moully, an ordained rabbi and former Chabad shaliach now living in Hillside, New Jersey, has made it his life’s mission to infuse the world of pop art with Jewish themes and messages.
Moully is best known for his murals and photo silkscreen works on canvas, vibrant colorful images from Jewish and chassidic culture — dreidels and chassidim dancing, kiddush cups and rabbis praying.
When he was five years old, Yitzchok Moully made a trip with his mother from the Australian outback to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where they wound up staying and becoming part of the Chabad community there. Moully, now in his forties, later studied at Chabad yeshivos, married Batsheva, a preschool teaching supervisor, raised a family, and became the assistant rabbi at the Chabad Jewish Center of Basking Ridge, New Jersey. He began his art career experimenting with a silkscreen technique in the early 2000s, creating playful pop-art-style images of Jewish life that included his iconic “Orange Socks” — a line of black chassidic figures on a yellow background, looking rather somber until you notice one of them is sporting the same orange socks Moully claims he wore to his own wedding (it goes together with the pink yarmulke).
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