MOISE or the raven painter!

I met Moise for the first time thirty years ago, when he lived in a canal. He stood out in the horde of street children who begged me at the train station in Bucharest. Moise was a little smaller than the others, but stocky. He made himself the spokesman for the ragged figures. Moise was not thinking of himself at all, but rather “demanding” for many others. So he pushed four-year-old Razvan into my arms and ordered: “You have to take him into a house, he can’t stay at the train station!” I promised to solve the problem, but not until the next day. But the little boy grabbed my hand and protested. “Acum, acum – I want to go now, not tomorrow!” Moise accompanied us to make sure that the little boy was accepted.

When Razvan was six years old, we took him to school and he made his way. He learned to cook and came to Austria as a young man, where he worked day and night in an inn. Today, Razvan speaks good German, has his own apartment and a car. He is a reliable employee in the kitchen of the Klosterneuburg monastery near Vienna. When he has a few days off, he takes the Flixbus for fourteen hours from Vienna to Transylvania to visit Moise, his lifesaver and friend…

After twenty years, I left Bucharest and the project for street children passed into other hands. I started – together with Ruth Zenkert – a new task – connected with the name ELIJAH – in Romanian Transylvania, where many Roma live in poverty. Here we devoted ourselves primarily to children and young people, to give them an education.

Almost every village on the outskirts or down by the stream has a neglected settlement. As soon as the new ELIJAH community was founded, Moise was at the door. He was carrying a huge icon that the children had painted a long time ago for our chapel in the social center in Bucharest. It was wonderful to be with him again. His ideas and his jokes are a delight. He “opened” the doors to all the houses and huts in the village. During the day, everyone goes to work in the workshops or social centers. Moise has found a table in our pottery and is painting. He sits there for hours, highly concentrated, and uses colors to depict what he has experienced: the children in the canal, the train station, his friends, and recently also the longing for peace in Israel and Palestine. The raven is never missing from his pictures, and he paints his own face darker than the faces of the others. His favorite subject is church services with happy children.

“Raven” is the worst insult in Romania for the dark-faced Roma, but according to the Bible, ravens saved the life of the prophet Elijah. “The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening.”

Moise, the street child, the gang leader, the lifesaver, has become an artist. He, who doesn’t fit in anywhere, gifts us with wonderful works…