Would you pay nearly £800 for a mezuzah? That’s the pricetag on possibly the most aspirational piece of Judaica on the market, a Lalique crystal mezuzah.

For creator Irma Orenstein it is the symbol of a safe home watched over by a guardian angel — something that means a great deal to her.

“For me it’s an object of both faith and art,” says the designer, who felt only master craftsmen could execute her vision, melding the ice and snow she grew up with in Georgia — “clear, cold and full of crystals” — with the sun and sand of Israel where she found freedom from Soviet domination.

10759800 - Mezouzah by Irma GM doré HD

The Lalique mezuzah, designed by Irma Orenstein

“It looks so brilliant on the doorpost people think there must be light embedded within it, but it’s all down to the artistry of the makers.”

As a child, Orenstein admired the Lalique vases and perfume bottles in her grandmother’s house in Tbilisi, where she lived before making aliyah with her family. There she qualified as an architect and interior designer, often choosing Lalique objets for clients.

She also worked as an artist — her Maia sculpture has been exhibited in Israel’s Holon Museum — and that attracted the attention of Lalique, a company known for its collaborations with great names in art from Yves Klein to Magritte and Israel’s own Arik Levy.

“We were very receptive to Irma’s design, which was much more beautiful than a previous mezuzah we made and felt it would appeal to many of our clients in London as well as Israel,” says Frederick Fischer, UK managing director of Lalique.

He works closely with the British Friends of the Art Museums of Israel and plans to hold a launch event for the mezuzah in the UK.

Irma Orenstein headshot

Irma Orenstein

Lalique’s Judaica dates back at least to 1933, when a resident of Colmar, an Alsace town with a very large pre-war Jewish population, commissioned a decanter with a Magen David stopper and wine glasses with the star embedded in their stems.

The owner of the set is unknown because so much of Rene Lalique’s customer history died with him in 1945, and the firm is now under corporate ownership.

However, the decanter is on show at the Lalique museum in the small Alsace town of
Wingen-sur-Moder, where all the crystal produced for a worldwide audience is still made in the factory built there in 1921, its founder attracted by the natural resources that have made the region a magnet for every great name in glass and crystal. Nothing was too big for his ambition.

He started out as a jeweller, who made perfume bottles and went on to create giant vases, chandeliers and even fountains on the Champs Elysées as well as massive fixtures and fittings for the Normandie ocean liner.

Glass production was superseded by crystal in 1945 because of its greater strength to facilitate hand-sculpting as well as the brilliance brought by the addition of lead.

In Wingen, where Lalique’s villa is now a five-star hotel featuring a magnificent sculpture by Arik Levy, it was possible to get a close look at the mezuzah being hand-finished by artisans who sculpt fine details into pieces and polish to enhance the faceting between clear and frosted surfaces to produce the diamond-like brilliance that catches the light.

The mezuzah is large — even the smaller version, just short of 16cm tall, seems to demand a pair of tall, mansion-size double doors to do it justice — but that was necessary, says Orenstein, in order for the detail she wanted to be properly executed.

“I wanted to incorporate the Hebrew word Shaddai into the surface because it is so closely associated with mezuzahs, and embed a tiny Magen David into the coloured crystals that sit on the ends.

"At only 4-5mm it is so small you wouldn’t see it if you didn’t know it was there, but while most manufacturers require you to cut down on detail from your original concept, there was never any question of that with Lalique.”

She has one of the mezuzahs on her own door and cannot wait for production to arrive in Israel.

She says there’s a waiting list, as interest has been high. Indeed, even at £765 (the larger model costs nearly £2700), the first run of the small mezuzah is already sold out online.