Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Tickets to Jerusalem: From Russia With Design (via Brooklyn)

Radik Shvarts’ idea was simple enough: design your ideal plane ticket to Jerusalem and mail it to Shvarts care of a PO Box in Brooklyn.

A highlight of the 120 tickets he has received from around the world over the past year form the basis of a new exhibition, Ticket to Jerusalem, which opened last night at the JCC in Manhattan.

Not all of the 84 tickets on display are by Russian-speaking artists. But there’s a distinctly post-Soviet feel. The results range from the whimsical Chagall-esque image of a man flying towards Jerusalem, by the painter and theater designer Yevgenia Nayberg, to a hint of the Russian avant-garde in the form of the Russian word for ticket printed backwards by the Russian painter Vagrich Bakhchanyan who died at the end of last year.

Shvarts, a graphic designer who was born in Ukraine, says the idea for his mail-art project was born after he became more interested in Jewish history. “Modern man is supposed to be cosmopolitan and not attached to national roots,” Shvarts told me, as about 60 Russian-speaking New Yorkers, mainly in their twenties and thirties, chatted and sipped red wine while examining the artworks nearby.

By introducing this subject I hope to bring people closer to this idea that you can do something that can be a form of Jewish activism that can be fun and different at the same time.

Shvarts is still accepting entries for his project. Once he has about 250 tickets he intends to gather them together in a book.

The Ticket to Jerusalem exhibition runs through June.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.