Jennifer Roth, Dede Bandaid, and Nitzan Mintz
The Kidnapped Poster Campaign: Graffiti Artists Dede Bandaid and Nitzan Mintz in Conversation with Jennifer Roth
The Kidnapped Poster Campaign - Graffiti Artists Dede Bandaid and Nitzan Mintz in Conversation with Jennifer Roth
- I’m very happy and honoured to have my very good friend Jen Roth on today. Jen and I have been friends for many, many, many years, and we both were at an IsraAid event which was initiated by my nephew, Adam Morales, and he had, it was a fundraiser for them, and at this event, we met the kidnap poster campaign graffiti artists, Dede Bandaid and Nitzan Mintz, and we started talking to them. Both Jen and I spent a lot of time speaking to them, and then I thought it would be a very good idea for them to come and talk to you and talk about themselves. So I’m going to introduce Jen and then she will introduce the artists. So, as I said, Jen and I have been friends for many, many years. She heads her own art advisory company, JVR Art Advisory LLC, specialising in estate and collection management and planning. Prior to founding her own company, she was a senior vice president at Sotheby’s, New York, specialising in fine art, including Israeli art and Judaica.
Video and photos are displayed throughout the presentation.
She is a board member of Artiz, we’re both board members of Artiz, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting Israeli contemporary art abroad. She’s also a board member of Friends of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and serves on the Judaica Acquisitions Committee at the Jewish Museum in New York. Jen was born in South Africa and obtained a BA from the University of Retz in Johannesburg and an MA from Columbia University in New York. Jen, thank you very, very much for doing this. And as I said, Nitzan and Dede, many, many thanks. We are all looking forward to hearing from you. Thank you. Over to you, Jen.
Thank you so much for that lovely introduction, Wendy. Dede and Nitzan are both urban artists based in Tel Aviv. Dede was actually at Bezalel as he was finishing his military service and mainly working on walls and outdoors, as I understand it. Nitzan, as well, was working in the streets of Tel Aviv and they met, and Nitzan is particularly interested in the visual quality of words and having words appear in outdoor spaces. Dede and Nitzan, it’s just wonderful to be speaking with you here. Tell us a little bit more about your early art and where you found yourselves on October the 7th.
Okay, hello, everyone. Thank you so, so much for having us. Usually I’m without this COVID mask. I just, I’m not at my best today, and because I’m sitting next to him, I want to protect him, so this is why I have to wear a mask. Otherwise, you would see me smiling and you would see my face next time, I promise you, but-
And I am keeping my identity as a secret for over 15 years. I keep my art separated with my identity. I want people to find my art and don’t know who’s behind it so they can tell their own story. So that’s why I’m anonymous. I keep my mask at all time.
Yeah, we are very different. I’m usually the face of the two of us, but unfortunately today, I can’t. Yeah, and he is a very shy, hidden guy. Okay, so I’m going to share screen. Let me know if you can see. I’m opening a folder now. Can you see the pictures?
Yes.
[Nitzan] Okay, so let me start by just introducing ourselves. This is a picture that shows both Dede and me working on a very, very large scale mural in Prague. We actually met as a couple when we were teenagers. We both started, like, creating as graffiti artists more than 12 years ago. Dede started two years before me, so I had actually two years of admiring his artworks before I started writing my poems in the street. And he was such a crazy graffiti artist, very impressive, and that I became his groupie. And because Dede, he is an anonymous artist, he attracts many, many, many questions and I wanted to find out who he is. So basically what I did, I started writing my poetry next to his artworks so maybe he would notice me. I did it for two years, and two more years I sent him messages on Facebook and we became pen pals. So in total, it was me trying to reach this man for four years before he allowed us to meet face to face and we became a couple.
Yeah, I was much worse back then. I didn’t meet anyone, didn’t tell anyone what I’m doing, not even my friends. So it took us some time to meet, but once we met, I think after one week we already shared a studio, an apartment, friendship, everything.
Yeah, and-
So since then, we’re travelling and creating together all over the world.
Great, so tell us where you were on October 7th.
[Nitzan] Yeah, so on October 7th, we actually were here because we came to New York.
In New York, right? ‘Cause we’ve got people from all over the world with us today.
[Nitzan] Okay, okay. Yes, sure. We are in New York. We came from Tel Aviv to New York because we got accepted to an art residency, which was planned many months ahead. So this was the plan, and we created in that studio, we had an entire programme that was supposed to connect us with curators, with very important people and to upgrade our careers as artists. And then 7th of October happened and we woke up in the middle of the night.
Receiving phone calls from our families, friends. And we heard, at the beginning, we didn’t know exactly what’s going on. There was a total chaos in Israel too, of course. And only around morning we understood exactly the scale of the event, exactly what happened, the-
[Nitzan] The phone calls were in the beginning. They told us, our family told us that it’s the largest rockets and missile attack they ever experienced. And then after a couple of hours, we discovered that it’s not about rockets and missiles. This was just a distraction from the real attack that happened. And I will never forget those phone calls because my aunt specifically, my aunt told me, she told me, “Nitzan, don’t you ever dare to return to Israel because there is no country to return to.”
Oh my goodness. But you heard that there were hostages that day or later, the next day?
Yes, yes, yes.
And how, what was your reaction to hearing that people had actually been taken hostage?
Yeah, so we were shocked, of course, and scared and didn’t know exactly who is safe, who is not. We have many friends all around Israel and of course our families. And we felt so helpless. We couldn’t understand exactly what’s going on there. We were scared for the life. We knew that we have to do something. We just couldn’t sit and do nothing. So we try to figure out how we can help from afar, because New York, it’s not really our home. We are visitors and we are far away from home and we can’t feel it. We really want to help, so-
[Nitzan] So luckily we came up with the idea of the posters. So we had, like-
We’re actually looking at one of your late slides here. I don’t know if you can see it. Can you go to the beginning of the posters?
[Nitzan] Yeah, I just wanted people to have the context so they can understand what we are talking about.
[Jen] Okay.
[Nitzan] And so, yeah, this is the beginning. So basically the idea of the posters came from the idea of milk cartons.
So in the beginning, you know, we are here in the US and we wanted to talk with the locals in the language and catch their eyes in the language they know, and we brainstormed how to do it, and we found the milk cartons that used to be in the '80s, in the '90s, in supermarkets in the US. And in the beginning we wanted to reach every milk cartons in every supermarket in the country, but we knew it’s going to be impossible and too complicated. So we searched for the designs on the milk cartons, and we decided to adapt it to the street to make posters that will fit in the public space based on this design.
[Nitzan] So the design of the poster was ready and Dede and I posted, we printed, I’m sorry, 2000 copies and put them in a box and carried it all through Manhattan. And we crossed many, many neighbourhoods just taking duct tape, posters, and putting them everywhere. And in that day when we crossed Manhattan, we not only put the posters up ourselves, but we also approached many, many people in the street, just, you know, random strangers.
And we offered them to take some posters with them to take it next to their houses, in the streets that they know, they feel comfortable with. Maybe they want to help us and put the posters around.
[Nitzan] We even bought a lot of duct tape so they wouldn’t, like, have to do anything other than take a bunch of posters, a duct tape that was prepared for them, and just put that. They didn’t need to buy it, even. So, you know what was their reaction? I mean, you know, but the reaction-
Tell us what the reaction was of people those first few days.
[Nitzan] The reactions were horrible, actually. People didn’t want anything to do with it. People refused taking the poster from us. And even the ones that knew about the hostage situation, some of them were very, very cruel towards us and very unsensitive. I will never, never forget one woman looking at a poster that I was holding with a woman printed on, and she looked at the woman and she said, “Why are you even bothering doing that? They are probably all murdered by now.”
Well, as we know, they were not all murdered, thank God. We had that pause and got a number of hostages back, but sadly, there are still 137 or so still in captivity. But how did the word spread about these? Because all of a sudden, as a New Yorker, I started seeing these appearing on the streets. So obviously it wasn’t just your 2000 posters. You got lots of other people starting to put them up.
[Nitzan] Exactly.
Yeah, so after walking really all the way from Central Park to lower Manhattan, crossing every neighbourhood, trying to cross every street, every main street, and distribute the posters, we came back home very late at night. We were devastated, we were broken. We felt like nobody in the world want to help us. And we decided to rethink how to do this project. We reached out to our third partner in Israel. Her name is Tal. And we thought together what we can do to distribute the posters. And we decided to upload all the posters that we have to the online to a Dropbox folder and post about it on our social media just to ask people everywhere to download, print, and post as many posters as they can. And we went to sleep. It was very late at night and we were already gone by then. And the next day, to our surprise, we found that the few posts that we made on social media became viral, super viral overnight.
And the day after, the links and our posts were in every Israeli group in New York and other group, just ran like a fire in a field from word to mouth, from social media, Instagram, Facebook, and it covered all over New York and other cities. We went out to walk in Manhattan, we saw the posters everywhere. And the next day we got many photos from different places around the world, from Europe, from South America, from Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Korea, everywhere.
And you actually decided to translate the posters into different languages. Who helped you with that?
[Nitzan] So basically after it became viral in 24 hours, we suddenly found ourself running this campaign. We gathered an amazing group of volunteers that worked closely with us. So basically it was Dede and me and Tal Huber, who sits in Israel. She’s our third partner. And with her, we gathered more people that will work really closely to us, and they served as-
Headquarter.
[Nitzan] Yeah, we serve as a headquarter. So we reached out volunteers that could translate it to more than 33 different languages. We reached out people that could build us a proper website because the original Dropbox file collapsed because so many people downloaded the files. And we just found ourself running a campaign from being artists to be heads of this campaign without even knowing what we are doing. And because it got really so viral, we had so much work to do, so many volunteer to coordinate between, and this was like a miracle, so-
Tell me where did you get the information from? How did you get in touch with the hostage families to get a photo and an age? You put on where the hostage was actually from, whether it was Israel, Argentina, some of them were from Germany or the United States. How did you gather that information and were you actually directly in touch with the hostage families?
Yeah, so in the beginning we knew that we have to do it, to act, to go outside very, very fast. So we used Facebook, all the posts of people in Facebook talking about their missing relatives, loved ones, and we just took photos from Facebook. That was for our first 20 or so posters that we knew that have to be outside immediately. But after a couple of days when people started to notice and see this campaign and see how viral it is, the families themself of the hostages started to reach out to us slowly, or their relatives or representative of them tried to reach out to us on our social media, on WhatsApp, on email, and ask to add their loved ones to the campaign. So we replaced all the photos that we had from the beginning. We changed it to the photos they want to put there. We confirmed the details, the age, the names, the-
[Nitzan] The nationality.
Nationality, everything, and-
[Nitzan] And every day more and more families approached also by phone. We received the most heartbreaking phone calls. And when I say we, it’s not only Dede and me. It’s also Tal. It’s also the other people who run the campaign and work closely with us. And yes, we did it all together. We have one volunteer which her work is to update the website as many times a day as she needs according to all the information we send her. And it’s all about being close to the families and receiving the information they want to show to the world.
Right. There was a tremendous dignity I found in looking at the images. To me, they really spoke to me. I identified with the people. And of course then after a week or two, maybe very, pretty soon, I can’t remember the exact timeframe, but we started noticing, those of us who were putting up posters, we were downloading them ourselves and putting them up around town, we started noticing that people were scrawling other things on them or were even starting to tear them down, and this was a tremendous shock.
[Nitzan] Okay, so just before that, I have to say that it took people two days to rip our posters down, even before our army thought about entering Gaza. It took the army about a week or even more.
Almost two.
Almost a week to enter Gaza. But it took two days for the people in the public sphere to rip down our posters. Let me show you one video. I’m just jumping ahead a little bit and then we can go back. This is one case.
No comment.
No comment?
No comment.
[Cameraperson] I know those people in person because we are going to recognise you as someone who really supports Hamas.
Yeah.
Yeah, you support Hamas.
Yes, I do.
[Cameraperson] Okay, you support terrorists. What you do is unacceptable.
[Nitzan] Could you hear what he says?
Yes, yes, we could.
Unfortunately. So yes, we had to deal with so much hate from the beginning. And what is very special about this video is that the woman who you heard speaking to him, she spoke with such dignity. She was very, I wouldn’t say nice, but she didn’t lose-
Respectful.
[Nitzan] Respectful. She was not losing her temper. She was not out of control. But what you don’t know that this guy ripped down poster of people that she knows personally. Can you imagine?
Very shocking. It’s very shocking.
[Nitzan] So this is the people we are dealing with. We are trying to be respectful. We are trying to do the right thing. This really represents how the world sees us, and-
And on top of that, of course, you could hear that this person says he supports Hamas. He probably doesn’t even know what’s the difference or what Hamas actually do.
[Nitzan] No, no, of course not.
It was a very traumatic period. And I remember when we first met, the posters were already widespread around the city. And when I asked you and my friend Laurie asked you whether you’d come and speak uptown somewhere for a change at somebody’s home and tell your story, you said sure, you’d be happy to, but what you really want and what you need is to put these images and these posters somewhere where people can’t tear them down. And that’s how the idea evolved of projecting them onto buildings, right?
[Nitzan] Not only projecting. We jumped from, in early stages of the campaign, the moment we saw that people are really tearing down our posters, we were approached by many, many, many people with many initiatives such as the posters are on trucks, like you can see here. It’s digital signs on trucks.
Billboards.
Billboards. This is, for example, in Buenos Aires airport. This is what welcomes you when you land. Taxis with the digital signs. Huge billboards all over the world. This is in the Netherlands, for example. Thank God Amelia is safe with her mother at home, thank God. This is a projection in New York you can see on the tall building. Another one.
On the Empire State, you know, and in Paris.
Yeah.
Yeah, all over the world. I’m just giving you few examples. And this one you know especially, right?
Yes, this is one of the ones I was involved in on the Frick Madison, which is the famous Breuer building in New York. Some friends and I felt that it was a good idea to perhaps project the images on iconic New York locations such as this one. And the other one that I was involved in was on the new museum downtown. And yeah, we had very interesting comments from people walking by in the street. Many people actually thanked us. Some people just walked by with their heads down and did not engage. But it was interesting that at the new museum, after about two hours, somebody in the museum, one of the guards must have reported it to their superiors and all of a sudden a police car arrived with lights flashing and basically closed it down. And we moved the projection to a different wall. We had not asked permission of these art museums. We did it in what’s called guerilla marketing style, which is done by lots of companies, Nike sneakers, when they want to get a lot of eyes on a new campaign. So we thought, well, if advertisers can do it, why can’t we? And that’s exactly what happened. At the Met Breuer, we-
[Nitzan] This is the spirit of our campaign. Our entire campaign is guerilla style.
Right.
Mm-hmm.
The other one at the Breuer building was a little bit more fortunate in that a guard did come out to speak to us and said, “No, no, you’re not allowed to do this. You don’t have permission to do this.” And we actually managed to engage with him and talk to him about it and said, “Who’s telling you to stop this? Can we speak to them? Because we want to explain that this is a campaign to free innocent civilians, people who are not involved in the military. These are women, children, men, elderly couples, elderly seniors, even a holocaust survivor, who are being held totally against every, it’s a violation of every rule of war. It’s a war crime to hold innocent civilians hostage. And we’re prepared to talk with your superiors about it. Can you bring them out here or we’ll come in and talk about it?”
And he obviously softened and felt a little bit sympathetic and then turned around and walked back into the building and we never saw him or anyone else for the rest of the evening. We just continued to project the whole night. And fortunately for us, some influencers happened to walk by after having a splendid dinner somewhere uptown and took photographs and posted it on social media, so we got a firsthand taste of how viral this campaign was and what an extraordinary effort it had been on your part to gather all these testimonies and photographs of the hostages. Tell us a little bit about maybe the second campaign and also what you did in Miami. By the second campaign, I mean after the pause in fighting when some hundred hostages were, in fact, thank God, released. There were still so many more, and you came up with what I think was a very brilliant idea for your second series of posters.
[Nitzan] Yeah, so basically what we experienced after two months of fighting with the posters and trying to think about creative other solutions that, I mean, this picture represents our struggle so well. You can see layers of posters that we, I mean, when I say we, our entire volunteer community is trying to put time after time after time, and it’s an endless struggle against people who their only purpose is to tear down our spirits. So we thought after two months, what else can we do? Because there is a limit for people’s patience to something that is a very repetitive campaign and you need to make a change, otherwise people lose their patience. So we thought about our original idea, which is the milk cartons.
Right.
And what we wanted to do is, I mean, Art Miami obviously was approaching. It’s event that happens every year and we know many people from the art world, from all over the world are coming to-
[Nitzan] Especially for us .
To Miami and going to spend there couple of weeks. And we wanted to react in a form of artistic, continue with the guerilla campaigns, but making, like, street installations that will involve the people. And we talked with a group over there, amazing group that helped us to build these installations of enlarged milk cartons and we spread them all over the city, so-
[Nitzan] During Art Basel, which was the purpose of that.
The premier art event of this whole season, yes.
[Nitzan] Exactly.
So we tried to find locations close to the art fairs, close to busy streets that going to be busy during this time. And we placed milk cartons, these huge ones with four different people on the different panels and also, of course, text that explain what happened and why this installation is there. And we wanted to remind everyone that are coming for their art purpose that these people are still there, they are still kidnapped, they are still held captive in Gaza, and we want them back home.
[Nitzan] So this is basically an extension of the process. It’s an extension of the campaign. And this was phase two. We are continuing building more and more milk cartons and we are also doing another thing with the milk cartons. Our purpose now is not only to put as many as huge milk cartons in the public sphere around the world, but also to create mini versions that can be brought to politicians and decision makers so they will never forget, so it will be always in front of their eyes. For example, this is Senator Rick Scott, which was actually the first one to receive it. But right now we are working on creating 150 mini versions, and we have volunteers travelling to Washington to meet with as many politicians possible and to bring them those mini milk cartons. We will need a lot of connections to politicians and a lot of connections to people who have private properties that we can place our milk cartons in the public sphere, but it has to be also on a private property. We want to spread them as far as we can.
Your campaign not only was about the news of the hostages, but it also sort of became news in and of itself in that people started noticing that this was happening. For example, New York magazine actually ran an issue on November 20th to December the 3rd called “Torn Apart.” I don’t know if you can see this magazine torn up and apart which actually spoke about the fact that this campaign has made such an impact on the story. And this one that you’re showing now, an international summary of the week’s news, and she’s actually tearing, she’s shown tearing the poster.
Yeah.
The woman in the front.
Yeah.
Where did this come from and have you been able to track the sort of reaction to the posters around the world, not just in America?
[Nitzan] Yeah, of course. I mean, we are talking with so many volunteers. We are connected with so many groups that took upon themselves to organise mini groups that their only goal is to spread the campaign. So we know exactly what’s going on in every country and we know their struggles and we know their successes, and they are struggling a lot with antisemitism since, as I said, the first two days. It didn’t take a while for people to just rip down everything we are trying to do. So yeah, we follow everything and we see, but this is our fight. This was always our fight since the beginning of Judaism, unfortunately.
Yes, yes. What is your new campaign of the torn posters about, the ones that actually say torn from their family or torn from their home, and then it says a father, a son, a grandfather. That I thought was a very smart way of actually making people stop and think before they tear down a poster that actually says, that has the word torn on it.
[Nitzan] Yeah, I can open the website now so you can all see how to enter the website and then we can check out the new poster designs.
So yeah, of course, what we thought about is people tearing down posters. They don’t even see the faces, they don’t understand, or maybe they do. They tear down posters of kids sometimes, photos of elderly people, and they actually tear down people. They tear down us. So that’s what we did with the second phase of the posters. We used the language of tearing down.
Yeah, tearing down.
The posters looked like they were tear down. And we compare tearing down the posters with tearing the families apart, because after this temporary cease fire when some of the people being released, especially women and kids, many of the fathers stayed there. Many of the fathers still have to come back home. And people, when they hear the women got released or some being released, they say okay, the problem is not big like it used to be. Many people don’t think in the terms that this, of course, is a man, okay, but he’s a person too. He’s innocent too. He’s part of a family. He’s a brother, he’s a father, he’s a grandfather. So they are, of course, important as well.
[Nitzan] You would expect that in a post-feminism world, I mean, our world is already a post-feminist one, you would expect that women and men would be considered equal and a father these days serves just like as a mother would and-
Right, in terms of nurturing and bringing up children and cooking meals and-
[Nitzan] Exactly, exactly.
Being a full participant in the life of the family, not just in the work world.
[Nitzan] Exactly. And they are so, so, so important, and people forget that. So do you see that poster that you can see it on the screen? This is the father of Ariel and Krier, the two redheaded babies, and he was separated from their mother and from his kids early in the beginning of their abduction. And who knows where he is? He is isolated. And we have so many more families that are torn.
Right. It’s shocking for people to be reminded that there are really elderly people as well as just young men. We see the faces also, very sadly, of young women and have to wonder why are these women still in Gaza? Why were they not released? And as more information has come out about violation of women, sexual violation, sexual torture of women, rapes during October 7th, we fear all the more for the fate of everybody who are in Gaza. And it’s difficult to be reminded of this, but I think it’s something very important, both from the families and from the point of view of the young people themselves. Why are they being held? How can we get them back? We’ve certainly been told that pressurising our politicians is the one thing that the hostage families keep asking us. You know, make those calls to your senator, your congressman. And I think it’s absolutely brilliant that you’re presenting senators and congresspeople with mini milk carton to have on their desk, as you say, so that they cannot have this issue disappear into the background until everybody is free. We want every single one of them back.
Exactly.
Exactly.
[Nitzan] We are experiencing very strange things, I mean, due to the campaign. So for example, on our last day in Miami, we had a phone call with Robert Kennedy Jr. and we told him about this campaign and we offered him also to have a milk carton. So we are trying our best to give all representatives, all presidential candidates, our mini milk carton so all of them would have them in front of their face, in their minds all the time. So this is just the beginning. Senators and public figures and presidential candidates are very important for us. They all need to have one. They all need to remember us.
Right. Dede and Nitzan, your presentation is so wonderful, and there are some people who’ve asked questions in the chat, so if you don’t mind, I’m going to turn to the chat now and ask or read you some of these questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: From Barry Epstein. “Did you try to put up photos of the hostages on the UN building?”
A: Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Of course, of course. I mean, we-
I think there was a projection on the UN very early on.
Yeah.
A huge one, several ones, and also posters inside of the UN on their tables.
On every desk.
Many times.
Q: Yes. You had a picture of that in your slides. How were you able to distribute those posters onto the desks of ambassadors in the UN?
A: Volunteers. It’s only about luck, connections, and goodwill.
All about-
And persistence.
All about volunteers, because the people that joined the campaign, the thing about this campaign is that the posters and all the materials, we don’t keep it to ourself. We put it online and we ask everyone to use it as much as they can. And there was someone out of the volunteers here in New York that-
That had connections.
That had connection and knew they’re going to be in the building before the talk, and he just printed them and they put it on every desk. And the projection on the UN building was there in the same well-remembered conversation about not happening in a vacuum. People probably remember it was this really hard day for all of us to hear what the UN really think about situation.
In the beginning it was, it’s not in a vacuum, and now it depends on the context. Every time the word changes, but antisemitism remains.
Q: Right. Barry also asked, “Have you had any success in South Africa?” I don’t know if you know the answer to that, but I’ve seen at least two major uses of the posters. One was on the Sea Point waterfront where mothers had baby carriages and in every baby carriage, there was a long line of mothers and baby carriages with the posters inside or on the front of the baby carriages. Did you see that?
A: Yeah, of course.
Yeah.
It was very, very emotional.
Strong, powerful.
Powerful.
Very powerful. And the other one was a drone, I think, photographed a beach installation where the posters were laid out on, like, red towels or red cloths on the beach, and you saw it from very far away. It looked like just a red strip. And then as they came closer down, you saw that it was a poster with maybe a little teddy bear or a child’s toy. And it was very interesting to see South Africans of all races and all, you know, different types of South Africans walking past these posters on the beach in Durban, I think it was, and looking at the photographs.
Q: Somebody else has asked, “What about Canada, especially since they voted against Israel in the UN?” This is from Monica.
A: Yeah, so we had many volunteers, actually, in Montreal, Toronto, Halifax, really big groups walking in the street, putting up posters. Yeah, we hear about antisemitism there, too, toward the synagogues, shouting in the streets.
Huge rallies.
Huge rallies. We hear about that, yeah.
But we have participants with our campaign, too.
Q: Right. So Rosemary Wolfson asks, “How are you funded, Dede and Nitzan?”
A: We are not.
We’re not.
We are not funded, not at all.
This is the totally extraordinary part of this.
Yeah, we are not funded. We are the biggest guerilla campaign that the history of mankind has ever known. Really, it is the truth.
It is.
And we are not funded. We are-
All based on volunteers and people with goodwill that believe in the cause and want to help and want to give from themself on their own time and their own expense.
Dede and I, I mean, I can speak only on our behalf. We are not receiving any funding from the government or from any organisation. And basically Dede and I, we came here for an art programme. We dropped from the art programme on the 7th of October because we wanted to just focus all our time only about this campaign. So basically we are moving from apartment to apartment according if someone wants to host us or to give us space. And right now, very generous people provided us with a beautiful studio so that we can work and people are giving us apartment, one for one month and then the other-
One for one week.
For another week. So we try to thrive, and we’ve managed to really meet very important people and to reach very high places without knowing the culture, without knowing, I mean, I’m talking about the USA, without even having the best English. And we are just swimming. We are swimming and doing our best. And by now it was successful, I can say, but not successful enough because not all our hostages are back home.
Exactly.
Not that I feel that it’s my responsibility and this campaign will bring them home, but it has a lot of effect on very important people.
I think your passion comes from a deep connection, obviously, to Israel, the fact that you’ve served in the Israeli army. Talk a little about your personal trauma, because I think that this makes people understand why you’ve been able to give up the rest of your life basically and devote yourselves so entirely to this over the last two and a half months.
[Nitzan] Yeah, so let me put something so that Dede can speak a little bit about his personal traumas after the military service. Do you see the screen?
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay, so this is just one example. It’s a Bandaid. I started painting and creating the Bandaids after my military service. And I finished my military service with post-trauma after serving as an officer in Bethlehem. Really hard time, the early 2000, you know, Intifada and all that happened over there. I had soldiers suffering. I suffered myself. We’ve been through a lot and-
[Nitzan] When young kids, by the way, I’m sorry to interrupt. When young kids these days in pro-Palestinian rallies, they shout, “Intifada, Intifada,” they have no idea what it means. They have no idea how dangerous how insanely violent and what the true intentions behind the word Intifada.
Yeah, I think most people when they say Intifada, they think, like, kind of rally and kind of resistance, but they don’t understand Intifada around Bethlehem or anywhere. It means-
Death to the Jews.
It means war, actually, because us driving in those area not too far from Jerusalem and, you know, having to drive in a protected Jeep. We’re wearing a vest. People sometimes shooting or throwing stones or Molotov bottles, it’s-
[Nitzan] And bombs underneath the vehicle.
And sometimes even bombs on the road. So yeah, it was crazy. You have to be alert all the time and serving like that for a long time can really mess with your head and-
[Nitzan] And you lost your friends, too.
I finished my military service with this post-trauma and back then there was even less help and support than today. Today there are some programmes if you release post-trauma from the military service, but back then almost nothing. And I didn’t even know that’s what I have at the time. And came up with the bandaid because I wanted to, I was searching for a symbol to communicate in the public space with everyone that want to listen, and I started painting them everywhere around the city. So with each one that I painted, I felt much, much better, and after years of painting them, I can say I’m healed completely from this. But along the way I heard many stories and comments from people that saw the bandaid. You know, when you see it, you don’t understand it necessarily talking about military service. You talk about the difficulty, talk about a problem, and people were sharing with me their own problem, their own stories, and without even knowing me, and they were emailing me such personal stories that now my bandaid work is mostly about other people, trying to help as many people as I can. So that was my personal trauma. Just one quick word about this specific location. The bandaid that you see here is on Rabin Square in Tel Aviv where the prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in '95, so this is, like, a huge wound that I felt needed a bandaid.
[Nitzan] By the way, you can see Dede is standing in the middle of the Bandaid here.
Right.
Understand-
So you understand the proportion.
Somebody is asking on the chat, Sandra Cohen, how could we, or she get, actually, one of the milk cartons for their community?
[Nitzan] So it really depends where she’s located. If she’s very far away, we can send her-
Far away from New York or far away from Israel?
[Nitzan] Far away, I mean, Israel has nothing to do with this campaign. This campaign’s only purpose is to serve Israel from abroad.
Abroad, right.
[Nitzan] Israelis are really in such a deep mud and they have their own problems now. So we feel like we are serving as soldiers in a very far away land and trying to help bring in awareness so people could assist our country. But if she’s far away from Miami or New York, we can always send you blueprints of how to create the milk cartoons and then you need to find some place to produce it wherever you are, like a workshop with a carpenter or something like that. You need to find, like, some way to finance that. It’s not extremely expensive but still you need money to do that. And then you can produce one and put it wherever you want. But if you are close to Miami or New York, we might be able to produce one for you.
Q: And another person, Edna Jenko, has asked, “Could you show us a few more of the milk carton photographs on your screen? And of course an immense thank you to Dede and Nitzan for this extremely important and ever so painful presentation.”
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
A: [Nitzan] And we can return to the same pictures if you want. So this is how it’s done. This is the construction of the milk cartons. This is the base, like, this kind of-
Lightweight aluminium frame?
Yeah, yeah.
[Nitzan] And then wood or cardboard or plastic or whatever you can do.
And on top of that a sticker, a printed sticker with the design of the posters.
Exactly.
Of the panel.
Exactly.
Right. And these have been made fairly recently, so actually, every photograph that’s on the milk cartons is of somebody who as of now is still in captivity.
[Nitzan] Absolutely. Absolutely. And we also prepared another sticker so in case this person is rescued or god forbid murdered, we can put it and people can be updated real life, too.
Right, right. Well, we are almost at the end of the programme, and I just want to say that from my perspective, when I think about the future, I do believe that when the history of this very dark period for the Jewish people is written, that your campaign will be seen as a beacon of hope and a beacon of light that helped many of us get through these dark times. We felt that if we were putting up a poster of a kidnapped person, if we were amplifying the voice that they could not use, that this was at least something helpful. And I do believe that your names will be surely greatly respected throughout history once this awful time is behind us. So thank you, Dede and Nitzan, for all that you do. Keep going and we wish you well.
Thank you.
Wow, thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
[Jen] Thank you.
[Nitzan] I have one final word. I mean, think about all the people that we’ve managed to rescue and they see the posters now and they see how people worldwide really cared about them. I think this is the most important thing about this campaign.
Yes.
That they succeed.
Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly, that’s how I was going to just wrap up, just to say a very big thank you to you, Jen, and to Dede and Nitzan for this past hour. And I just want to say to the two of you that your brilliant campaign really captured the spirit and the essence of the Jewish nation and it really gave everybody, it was something for everybody to hold onto. So it was almost like it was a bead on the string and the same bead for every country, and I really feel that it, for all humanity and for all humanity, not only Jews, for all people who just were horrified by what has happened, and you gave a face to those hostages, so, please God, more will be released. Please God, we’ll get them all back. And all I can say is thank you. Thank you to everybody. Thanks, Jen. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Wendy.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
All of you, and stay in touch, and if you can help with the milk cartons, please approach and we can continue spread the word.
Definitely.
Thank you.