How childhood memories helped create a mezuzah of ice and sun

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Glass production was superseded by crystal in 1945 because of its greater strength to facilitate hand-sculpting as well as the brilliance brought by the addition of lead.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