To honor the lives of Rabbi Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg murdered in Mumbai, Israeli artist, Prof. Mel Alexenberg is creating a memorial artwork Rotate Light Before Darkness that will be shown in the “Darkness to Light” exhibition on Hanukah in Jerusalem, travel to museums worldwide, and be accessible as an Internet artwork.

He is inviting synagogues throughout the world to collaborate in creating a digital artwork in which morning services will be seen beginning in Jerusalem, circling around the globe through the 24 time zones, and returning to Jerusalem on the next morning. Synagogues from Los Angeles, Denver, Berlin, and Budapest to Hobart in Tasmania, Australia, have already sent photographs.

To include photographs from the different time zones, he is asking synagogues worldwide to send a photograph of a weekday morning service to art@wikiartists.us as a jpg image. This is a wikiart project that like the wikipedia invites extensive participation in creating a web-enabled peer-produced artwork.

Alexenberg is a pioneer in creating artworks exploring digital technologies and global systems that are in the collections of more than forty museums on four continents. He is head of the School of the Arts at Emunah College in Jerusalem, professor emeritus of art and Jewish thought at Ariel University Center of Samaria, and was professor of art and education at Columbia University and Bar Ilan University, head of the art department at Pratt Institute, and research fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. He is author of The Future of Art in a Digital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press) and Dialogic Art in a Digital World: Judaism and Contemporary Art in Hebrew (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass House). He blogs at www.artiststory.com and www.zionistartists.blogspot.com.