Race to beat wrecking ball - A family's frantic push to save mural

Bay Area and California - November 2, 2001

By Steve Rubenstein

Tradition, the stuff of great religions, is stubbornly clinging to a 9-inch concrete wall on California Street. It better come down soon, if it knows what's good for it. The tradition is in the form of a large mural that adorned a courtyard wall of the old Jewish Community Center for 69 years. This week, the son and grandsons of the mural's artist are racing the wrecking ball, a force nearly as formidable as Joshua's trumpet. For some time, workers have been dismantling the old center at 3200 California St. to make way for a new $50 million one, scheduled to open in 2003. And for weeks, the family of the late Bay Area muralist Bernard Zakheim has been hard at work, trying to remove the concrete wall in one chunk, before the wreckers remove it their way, in little bit pieces. The mural was supposed to be out by today. But Nathan Zakheim, the artist's son and professional art restorer from Southern California, persuaded the center's executive director to extend the deadline until Monday. Then he decided that wasn't long enough. He needs more time - a day or two. May be three. May be a week. Who, he says, can say? "People say this isn't a rocket science," said Zakheim, arranging a complicated system of cables, blocks and support to move the plaster fresco. "But it is rocket science." Zakheim does not seem concerned about passing deadlines. The $350,000 mural will survive, he says, because the alternative is unthinkable. There are no Philistines in 21 st century San Francisco, heaven forfend. Community center executive director Nate Levine says that he is patient man but that the work must be finished soon. Every day of delay on the demolition costs about $10,000. "An extra day, a few days, all right," Levine said. "More than that, we're in big trouble." The scene at the shut-down community center is one of great contrasts, as is often the case in such tales. Wreakers work near the area of the mural with heavy equipment, knocking down other things while they wait to get their mitts on the courtyard wall. They have already knocked down two adjoining buildings and are running out of other thinks to knock down. Meanwhile, Zakeim's two sons, 20-year-old Kirti and 18-year-old Dhanan, ever so gingerly touch up Grandpa's mural, which depicts a biblical-era wedding celebration in Jerusalem, full of rabbis and dancers and wedding guests. The two boys dabbed green paint in tiny, deliberate strokes, as if Grandpa was looking over their shoulders, which the Zakheims are not at all sure he isn't doing. "If it was just any artist," said Kirti Zakheim, "I wouldn't be feeling all this pressure." The Zakheim boys said they got into the family art restoration business because of the same sense of father-son tradition that has kept their culture humming since the days depicted in the mural. "This is what our family does," Kirti Zakheim said with a shrug. "It lets us all work together. And the work agrees with me." Yesterday, while the boys painted, Zakheim feverishly worked the phones and arranged for another extension. He said he has now been given until Thursday morning. That's nice, he added, and perhaps the mural will even be out by then. If not, it will be out when it is out. Perhaps on Friday, who can say? The elder Zakheim, who died in 1985 at the age of 89, was a well known art teacher, painter and muralist with either a major or minor reputation, depending on the eye of the beholder. "He wasn't Michelangelo," said Chronicle art critic Allan Temko, "But he was a nice old geezer and his work is good, for what it is, and worth saving." Zakheim, slightly more effusive in praise of his father, agrees that the murals, which adorn Coi Tower and the University of California at San Francisco, must be passed on to future generations. "Destroying any art is bad," he said. "It's even bad to destroy bad art. But this is good art." When the mural does get moved, it will be quite a spectacle, Zakheim promised. The 3,000-pound plaster slab, covered in fabric and attached to a wooden frame, will be lifted by crane high over the center's walls and onto a moving truck, for storage in a South San Francisco warehouse. Plans call for it to be installed on the roof garden of the new center in 2003. Unless the center isn't finished by then.