The unique and fascinating history of Jerusalem's Ticho House - explainer
Ticho House is celebrating 40 years as a contemporary art annex of the Israel Museum.
Jerusalem’s Ticho House (photo credit: GIL ZOHAR)ByGIL ZOHARUpdated: Before landscape artist Anna Ticho – famous for her evocative paintings of the rocky, olive tree-studded Judean Hills – died in 1980 shortly after being awarded the Israel Prize, she bequeathed her home in downtown Jerusalem to the Israel Museum. That historic villa, located at 10 Harav Agan Street, tucked away behind the corner of King George and Jaffa, recently (on May 29) celebrated four decades serving as the national museum’s annex for contemporary art exhibitions. The current temporary exhibition is “Recollections” – dialogue with photography from the Israel Museum collection.
In addition, the cultural center-cum-café includes a permanent display about the building which served as the studio of the artist and the clinic of her husband, Moravian-born, Viennese-trained pioneering ophthalmologist Dr. Avraham (Albert) Ticho, who settled in Jerusalem in 1912.
From 1924, the Tichos opened their home as a multilingual salon hosting local and British government officials, as well as the city’s artists, writers, academics, and intellectuals.
Those glory days were just one chapter in Ticho House’s long history.
The two-story mansion, with its spacious gardens, was built around 1864 by Aga Rashid Nashashibi, a scion of the prominent Jerusalem Muslim clan. Nashashibi’s wife died shortly after the newlyweds moved in.
An early self-portrait of Anna Ticho, from 1925. (credit: ELIE POSNER)Polish-born antiquities dealer and notorious forger Moses Wilhelm Shapira lived there with his family between 1873 and 1883. Shapira committed suicide in Rotterdam the following year after the British Museum in London declined to purchase for £1,000,000 the Hebrew manuscript which he claimed was the original copy of Deuteronomy.
Recent scholarship suggests the scroll, allegedly found near the Dead Sea, may have been authentic. Shapira’s daughter Myriam Harry described growing up there in her memoir, La petite fille de Jerusalem.
As these events were transpiring, Albert Ticho was born in 1883 in the small town of Boskovice, South Moravia, known in German as Boskowitz. The shtetl, today in the Czech Republic but then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, lacked a train station. Ticho enrolled at the University of Vienna’s illustrious medical school in 1902.
He lodged in Leopoldstadt near the Danube Canal, an area of the glittering Habsburg capital that was sometimes called Mazzesinsel (Matzah Island) because Jews constituted one-third of the district’s population. At university, the medical student witnessed the Judenhetze (Jew-baiting) and calls in the lecture halls of “Juden heraus!” (Jews get out). After several semesters at Charles University in Prague, he graduated in 1908 and began working in Vienna.
There, he was joined by his first cousin Anna Ticho, 11 years his junior, a precocious art student who dreamed of being accepted at the illustrious Akademie der bildenden Künst Wien. Other prospective artists who applied to Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1908 included Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, and the painter manqué Adolf Hitler.
Fin-de-siecle Vienna was a crucible for new artistic expression until the Nazis purged much of that cultural flowering as “degenerate art.” Antisemitism, too, was rampant. After his graduation, one professor offered Dr. Ticho a position on the condition that he convert to Catholicism.
Life in the Jewish homeland
In this context of anti-Jewish discrimination, in 1912 Dr. Ticho answered an ad for an ophthalmologist position in Jerusalem placed in a Zionist periodical by the Palästinensischer Hilfsverein – the Jewish benevolent society based in Frankfurt am Main. Accepted as director of the society’s new Lemaan Zion Eye Hospital, Dr. Ticho proposed to Anna before setting out for Jerusalem. He would be joined shortly by his bride and mother-in-law, Bertha Ticho. The couple married that fall in a ceremony at Hotel Kaminitz on Jaffa Road in their adopted city.
Notwithstanding the various mission-based hospitals in Jerusalem, health conditions in the city were appalling when Dr. Ticho arrived. Trachoma, or granular conjunctivitis, an infectious disease spread by poor hygiene and especially prevalent among children, was causing many to become blind. Dr. Ticho’s life work was to eradicate the disease, just as Dr. Israel Kligler worked to eliminate malaria in Palestine.
Indicative of health care in Ottoman Palestine was a case of primary syphilis, which Dr. Ticho encountered. An Arab woman sick with the venereal disease had licked the eye of a village youth, thus spreading the spirochetes from her mouth to his eye.
The Tichos bought the house of the ill-fated Nashashibis and Shapiras in 1924. The curse continued. The couple never had children, though Anna experienced repeated miscarriages. Modern medicine understands that her body rejected the growing fetuses because of the combination of the couple’s Rh-positive and Rh-negative blood.
On November 12, 1929, someone stabbed Dr. Ticho in the back outside his eye clinic near the Damascus Gate. The attempted murderer was never found. Jews and Arabs blamed each other for the crime. The evening of the stabbing, Anna Ticho returned home after a long and draining day. Waiting for her in the garden outside their villa was a young Arab mother who had come to offer her newborn baby to the childless couple. Anna Ticho declined the heartfelt offer.
Eventually recovering from his near-fatal wound, Dr. Ticho transferred his clinic to the first floor of his home. There, aided by Anna, he continued to serve all Jerusalemites, regardless of their socioeconomic standing or background, until his death in 1960.
“They did a lot of socializing and held soirées,” senior curator Timna Seligman told The Jerusalem Report. “This was an important part of the social scene in Jerusalem back then.” Visiting dignitaries included Nobel Prize laureate author S.Y. Agnon, philosopher Martin Buber, and Hadassah WIZO founder Henrietta Szold.
Dr. Ticho and his wife represent the vanished world of a German-speaking, Central European imperial zeitgeist. The first ophthalmologist to settle permanently in Jerusalem, he witnessed the city’s transformation from an Ottoman backwater to the capital of the State of Israel.
As David Reifler wrote in his 2015 biography Days of Ticho: Empire, Mandate, Medicine and Art in the Holy Land: “Like many of his contemporaries, [Albert] Ticho’s citizenship changed with the times. He arrived as a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and with the empire’s demise in 1918 became an expatriate of Czechoslovakia. Assigned medical license number 73, he worked productively for 30 years in Mandatory Palestine under the increasingly tenuous control of a declining British Empire.
“The dream of an independent Jewish state was not Dr. Ticho’s personal dream, but he became a loyal citizen of the State of Israel. Sentimental and ultimately unrealistic notions of a binational state of Jews and Arabs had to be set aside.”
What of the future?
Having been sensitively restored by architect Amir Freundlich in 2015 in a NIS 10 million makeover, Ticho House is good to go for another century and a half. Its future will be greatly enhanced in 2030 when Israel Railways opens an underground station at King George and Jaffa, preserving the former Jerusalem Central Bus Station.
That work will entail the closing of an unsightly parking lot on Harav Agan Street and its transformation into a square with a vista worthy of an Anna Ticho painting.■
