Monument to the Sephardic community and to Benjamín de Tudela (1984)

Author: Martine Lasry (Tangier, ?).
Promoter/financing: City Council of Tudela and Sephardic Federation of Spain.
Inauguration/installation: April 29th, 1984.
Location: place de San Salvador

Benjamin of Tudela (Tudela, 1130-c. 1175) was one of the main representatives of Jewish culture and a universal Navarrese. A Jew of the Tudela aljama, son of Rabbi Jonás de Tudela, tireless traveler and dedicated to mercantile and commercial activities, around 1172 he undertook a trip to the East where he visited Constantinople, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Damascus and Egypt, among other places, whose experiences he recorded in his famous Book of Travels, written in Hebrew, with which he initiated a literary genre practically unknown in Jewish literature.

On the occasion of the celebration in Tudela of the I Week programs of study Sephardic, on April 29, 1984 was inaugurated in the place of San Salvador a monument dedicated to the Sephardic Community that in turn paid homage to Benjamin of Tudela, realized by the sculptress of Tangier Martine Lasry who was present in the inaugural act. Martine (or Martina) Lasry, belonging to an old Sephardic family of Morocco, began her artistic training in Tangier at the age of twelve with the French painter Marie-Antoinette Boullard-Devé (Paris, 1887-Tangier 1970), artist B work contributed mainly to a better knowledge of the Vietnamese culture. At the age of sixteen she moved with her family to Madrid, where after finishing the high school diploma at the French Lycée she continued with programs of study of painting and decoration at the School of Decorative Arts, realizing her first exhibition in 1977. He began sculpting in 1981, and in 1986 the Kreisler Gallery in Madrid hosted his first exhibition of bronzes.

The Tudela set is made up of two harmoniously intermingled "tes", one Hebrew and the other Castilian, which in their intertwining leave ample empty spaces between them, in a neo-figurative and clearly symbolic language with which Lasry evokes the twinning between the cities of Tudela and Tiberias. In this way, the artist explores the world of letters as the starting point of her creation, and translates into letters her vision of the facts she wants to tell, a procedure that characterizes a large part of her sculptural production. A registration in Spanish and Hebrew recalls the phrase that Benjamin de Tudela pronounced when he left Navarre: "Farewell Ebro River. I will return if only to die on your shores". The back face of the pedestal incorporates a plaque: "The Sephardic Federation of Spain to its elders".