‘Postcards’ Draw Attention to the Hostages

There is a deceptive quality to the daily “postcards” that Israeli artist Zeev “Shoshke” Engelmayer posts on Facebook and Instagram.

Look past the bright colors and the folk art-like images and you are struck by their emotional content and the messages they convey.

Engelmayer’s subjects primarily are the 1,200 men, women, and children murdered and the 251 kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023, when terrorists attacked kibbutzim, towns, and an outdoor music festival in the “Gaza envelope” section of southern Israel.

Get The AJT Newsletter by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

Zeev “Shoshke” Engelmayer’s drawing of 17 arms straining upward for freedom from a Gaza tunnel.

There are representations of the dead and bereaved, and of the hostages, the latter seen in the despair of captivity and in imagined joyful reunions. A woman whose partner is held hostage wrote to Engelmayer: “Perhaps you know how to draw longing.” That agony is evident in his drawing of a woman hugging a pillow, next to a barely visible man.

More optimistic is a postcard that features a happy, multi-generational gathering beneath a banner reading “Not Kidnapped Anymore” in English, around a table with a cake that has the Hebrew word for “freedom” written in icing.

Engelmayer is a well-known artist, illustrator, and cartoonist, and also a lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. His provocative alter ego “Shoshke” — described by Israeli journalist Dana Kessler as “a grotesque, nude, and comically vulgar female bodysuit” — is based on one of his cartoon characters.

“Shoshke” appeared publicly for several years, including at political protests, but since that “Black Saturday” — now 412 days ago — Engelmayer has had a more singular focus.

“I draw daily ‘postcards’ to keep our collective attention on freeing the hostages in Gaza. I see myself as an ‘art-ivist,’ using my art for my activism. I meet the families of the hostages and those we lost every week, and give them the drawings of their loved ones,” he said on the website of the arts group Israel21C.org.

Among those is a drawing of 17 arms straining upward from a darkened hole, with the caption: “They are still there.”

His drawings in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7 were in black, white, and gray, befitting a nation and people in shock. That changed within a couple of weeks. “When I returned to color, it helped me realize that we’re all craving compassion and softness,” Engelmayer told the newspaper Haaretz.

In one postcard, dozens of young people are dancing at the Nova Music Festival, seemingly unaware of two terrorist hang gliders descending from the upper right corner. Another is a portrait of “Rainbow,” an exuberant young man, one of the 380 murdered at the festival.

Kibbutz Be’eri is seen with houses aflame, bodies lying on the ground, and black-clad terrorists with weapons aimed at men, women, and children. More than 100 people were murdered at Be’eri and 30 were kidnapped. Three of the slain were on the Israeli side of my family tree, as were seven of the kidnapped. Six were released in November 2023, but one — a husband and father of two children — remains a hostage.

Zeev “Shoshke” Engelmayer at a rally in Tel Aviv, holding aloft his drawing of hostage Noa Aragami, who was rescued in June, three weeks before her mother died of cancer.

Several postcards have included Shiri Bibas and her ginger-haired sons, who were nine months old and 4 years old when kidnapped and who remain hostages. Engelmayer has drawn them smiling, with a helicopter taking them to freedom; as captives, lying on a dingy mattress, and with Ariel Bibas in his Batman costume, pulling hostages to safety from a tunnel.

In Israel, the postcards have been enlarged and appeared on museum walls, bus stop shelters, and at protests in support of the hostages. They have been exhibited in England, Mexico, Germany, Brazil, Australia, Romania, Italy, and currently (through Jan. 25) at the Westchester Jewish Center in Mamaroneck, N.Y.

At Chanukah, instead of a menorah, Engelmayer drew tears trailing down from eight eyes and a ninth longer as the shamash, or helper candle. More whimsical was his depiction of Mary Poppins aloft with her umbrella, leading a couple of dozen umbrella-carrying hostages, to freedom.

At Sukkot, he drew a young man and woman, alone in a gray tunnel, with a chain of brightly colored paper and lights. The translated caption reads: “There is no shed. Just a tunnel ceiling. Don’t see stars, not skies. There are no pomegranate ornaments, and no confetti necklaces. There is no holiday. There’s no peace building a sukkah, when you’re betrayed, on a concrete floor in a suffocating tunnel.”

Five young women soldiers, still held hostage, were drawn with their hands tied behind their backs, their faces and clothing bloodied. Their unit’s warnings to superiors about Hamas activity pre-Oct. 7 were ignored or dismissed.

Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, are depicted walking on a red carpet, along a runway flanked by the screaming faces of the kidnapped. At his home in Caesarea, the prime minister is shown standing by a swimming pool filled with similarly anguished faces.

Engelmayer’s proposed monument for the rose garden at the Knesset in Jerusalem would be a “Statue of Forgiveness,” with six arms straining skyward from a hole in the ground. The caption with that drawing reads: “The statue will be a reminder of the injustice that caused their death, to tease every chance there was for their release, and to decide to give up their lives.”