Breaking of the Middle Matzah

Heather Zeiden Rothstain. Breaking of the Middle Matzah. [pencil and water color and digital drawing tools]

Artist's Statement: The illustration shows the breaking of the middle matzah (Yachatz). The piece was created for a recent class I virtually enrolled in with Parsons School of Design/The New School. The assignment was to create an illustration solely based on the theme of food. I couldn’t help but think of the upcoming holiday of Pesach, which happens to also be my favorite holiday. I knew I had to capture the essence of this holiday; unleavened bread, matzah. One of my favorite memories of the seder as a child, was when my dad broke the middle matzah and took one half to put aside as the afikomen; later to be searched for by my brother and I. I loved the crunch it made when the matzah was broken in two and how the pieces went flying. The illustration was created using the traditional mediums of pencil and watercolor paints. The image was then scanned into Adobe Illustrator where I made additional edits using digital drawing tools.

Artist Bio: Heather Zeiden Rothstain is a Teaching Artist and currently teaches with the Laguna Art Museum and Irvine Unified School District in Orange County, California. She is the Education chair with NextGenOC, a young Jewish professional group. In addition, she has held various other administrative and educator positions in the greater Jewish community, including American Jewish University's Whizin Center for Continuing Education & Institute for Jewish Creativity, the USC Shoah Foundation, Pressman Academy and the Jewish Learning Community of Temple Beth Am, Los Angeles. She was a recipient of the 2016 “Word Grant” Bruce Geller Memorial Prize and created Transforming Jewish Text Through Artists’ Books, in which students explored the Ten Commandments and visualized them through the medium of book arts. 


haggadah Section: Yachatz