Israel Museum in Jerusalem

“He had a vision in a dream. A ladder was standing on the ground, its top reaching up towards heaven as Divine angels were going up and down on it.” (Genesis 28:12)

The preeminent biblical commentator Rashi teaches that the angels in Jacob’s dream go up from the Land of Israel and go down throughout the world.

As a tribute to Rembrandt on the 350th anniversary of his death, artist Mel Alexenberg is launching cyberangels from Israel where he lives to thirty museums on five continents. These museums have Rembrandt inspired artworks by Alexenberg in their collections.

The serigraph above “Angels Ascending from the Land of Israel” that Alexenberg created at the Israel Museum affiliated graphics center in Jerusalem is the prototype of the artworks in the Global Tribute to Rembrandt and on the cover of his book Through a Bible Lens: Biblical Insights for Smartphone Photography and Social Media. His serigraph is in the collection of the Israel Museum.

The Rembrandt inspired cyberangel was sent on a circumglobal flight passing through the Israel Museum in 4 October 1989 the 320^th anniversary of Rembrandt’s leaving his artistic legacy to posterity. This faxart event orchestrated by Alexenberg began from the AT&T building in New York.  It flew to Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam to Israel Museum in Jerusalem to Tokyo National University of the Arts to Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, returning to New York on the same afternoon. 

Amalyah Zipkin, Curator of European Art at, wrote a description of the angel coming from Amsterdam to the Israel Museum and then flying on to Tokyo.  She wrote:

“There is something appropriate in the illogic of the event: here we were in Jerusalem, the Holy City of 4000 years of turbulent history, huddled next to a fax machine in the mail room of the Israel Museum.  It was a few days before Yom Kippur.  Somewhere out there in technological space, a disembodied angel – computerized, digitized, enlarged, quartered, and faxed – was winging its way towards us from Amsterdam.  This angel had been drawn in the 17^th century by a Dutch artist with the instantly-recognizable mass-media name of Rembrandt van Rijn, and had undergone its electronic dematerialization 320 year after the artist’s death as the hands of a New York artist and technology freak who had the audacity to make the connections: Rembrandt, the Bible, gematria, the electronic age, global communications, the art world, and the fax machine.  Like magic, at the appointed hour the fax machine zapped to life and bits of angel began to materialize in Jerusalem.  Photographs and the attendant PR requirements of contemporary life were seen to, and the pages were carefully fed back into the machine. We punched in the Tokyo phone number and the angel took technological flight once more.”

The Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem

When it arrived in Tokyo, it was the morning of October 5^th. It was then sent from the Land of the Rising Sun to the City of the Angels in California. The line printed out on the top of the fax “Tokyo National University of the Arts, 5 October 1989” was followed by the line “Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 4 October 1989.”  Cyberangels can not only fly around the globe, they can fly into tomorrow and back into yesterday. They reshape our concepts of time and space.