In her own home in Hermon Street in Kfar Vradim the artist Rachel Polas receives here guests in a living room decorated with paintings and orchids. The guests are invited to Yemenite refreshment of kubaneh, homemade cookies, tea, coffee and water.
The guests then sit with Rachel who tells them her amazing life story. Rachel was born to a Yemenite family from Shaarayim and taken out of school by her parents after four years of study and sent to work in the fields. Notwithstanding the fact that she didn’t finish school, she enlisted in the army and was sent to an officers’ course and was even the commander of the major-general’s office. Furthermore she worked in the Dimona nuclear reactor in a senior position and all this although in her CV she only had 4 years of schooling.
Alongside her fascinating private biography, the story of meeting her “Ashkenazi” husband whereby her marriage to him allowed her financial freedom for the first time in her life, which in turn allowed her to study art and to become an artist; the story of her special artwork, one of which is particularly amazing and includes a mystical story of an Israeli intelligence agent who was hung as a spy in Jordan and who she adopted as a family member and ensured to memorialize him, and many other stories as far as her imagination will take her.
After sitting with Rachel who is 81 who looks and acts like a much younger person, you will go up to the gallery to look at her paintings including portraits of the Yemenite community and landscapes, while she explains about the inspiration that caused her to paint her pictures and their stories.
