- Craft
- Bamboo, wood and illustrated porcelain
Mickala Design is the modern Judaica studio of Michal Aharoni, an Israeli designer and ceramicist who founded it to work for herself while raising her four children in the south of Israel. Her pieces are made for the Shabbat and holiday table: seder plates, Rosh Hashanah simanim plates, apple and honey dishes, challah boards, matzah holders, ceramic mezuzah cases and Hanukkah table runners.
Aharoni earned her degree at Bezalel, the Jerusalem design school, and started out designing large-format lighting fixtures before moving gradually into household objects and then Judaica. Her best-known design rethinks the seder plate as a plain bamboo base holding white porcelain bowls, each illustrated with its food in black line or full color. Tablet Magazine likened the drawings to doodles on Instagram rather than the grapes-and-doves motifs of traditional Judaica. She told the magazine she wanted objects that fit the language of the whole home instead of feeling estranged from it, and that the plate let her combine her love of wood and ceramics.
The rest of the line follows the same thinking: natural bamboo and oak, illustrated porcelain, and wood laser-burned with Hebrew text.
Good to know
- Trained atBezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem
- Featured inTablet Magazine, "Rethinking the Seder Plate" (2020)
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