The SS Shalom was the flagship of the Israeli merchant fleet.
A committee headed by the President of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, chose the ship’s name, following a proposal by the poet Avraham Shlonsky. Paula Ben-Gurion, wife of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, was the ship’s sponsor, and gave the vessel her name at an official ceremony.

Zvi Herman, head of ZIM’s passenger lines, recruited for the ship’s interior design project the leading Israeli architects of the day - Dora Gad, Al Mansfeld and Arieh Noy. He approached prominent young Israeli artists, as well as important international artists, to create works of art especially for the ship. The vessel was more than once described as a ‘floating museum’.

Shalom was designed to the highest standards of her time, and was intended to give her passengers an experience of luxury and comfort, in the tradition of the great transatlantic liners. She was built at the Chantiers de l’Atlantique shipyard in Saint-Nazaire, France, where France’s famous passenger liners were built, such as the France. Shalom first reached Haifa on March 3^rd 1964, and thereafter sailed regularly to the East Coast of the United States and to the Caribbean.

Dani Karavan (1930–2021) was a pioneer of environmental, site-specific sculpture. At the start of his career he studied painting, trained in fresco technique, and designed sets for theater and dance. From the 1960s onward he created more than seventy environmental sculptures around the world.

Karavan was an Israel Prize laureate, represented Israel at the Venice Biennale in 1976, and received, among other honors, the title ‘Artist for Peace’ from UNESCO and Japan’s Praemium Imperiale. He worked for peace, justice and human rights, and was among the initiators of the preservation of the ‘White City’ in Tel Aviv.

In May 1963 ZIM commissioned Dani Karavan, then a young artist of thirty-three, to create the artistic design of the first-class smoking lounge aboard the ship, known as the ‘Pipe of Peace’ - a name also proposed by the poet Avraham Shlonsky.

Karavan created an ensemble of wall paintings some 25 meters long and 2 meters high, together with eight painted tables and a designed iron screen. The technique was unique: painting in CIBA colors on white Formica panels, which then underwent a heating process that fused the painting into the panel itself. Production was carried out at a specialized Formica works in the town of Quillan, in the Aude region of southern France.

The work, as its name attests, depicts a primordial and idyllic Garden of Eden, with animals and plants, alongside verses from the Scriptures on the theme of peace.

After the ship was sold, and at Karavan’s demand, the works were removed from her. Three of the wall panels have been preserved at ZIM’s headquarters building in Haifa.

Avigdor Arikha (1929–2010) was one of the greatest Israeli painters of the twentieth century. He was born in Bukovina, Romania. In 1941, at the age of twelve, he was deported with his family to the camps of Transnistria, where his father was murdered. In 1944 he immigrated to the Land of Israel with his sister, lived at Kibbutz Ma’ale HaHamisha, and was severely wounded in the War of Independence.

He studied at Bezalel in Jerusalem from 1946 to 1949, and from there went on a scholarship to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he also trained in fresco technique. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he was among the leading voices of abstract painting, and to this period belong his wall works and tapestries as well.

Arikha was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and a member of the French Légion d’honneur, and retrospective exhibitions of his work were held at the Israel Museum, the British Museum and in Madrid.

The wall tapestry Arikha created for Shalom was installed in the ‘Carmel’ dining room, one of the ship’s principal and most elegant spaces. The tapestry was woven under the artist’s supervision at the Aubusson textile workshops in France, renowned for their superb quality and for a weaving tradition centuries old.

The work belongs to the artist’s abstract period, the early 1960s, on the eve of the turn that would lead him to abandon abstraction entirely and to focus on figurative drawing and painting.

Arikha’s wall tapestry is among the few works that remained in ZIM’s hands after the ship was sold, and it adorned the boardroom at its Tel Aviv offices. After a period in storage, it was conserved by Yona Drezner, head of textile conservation at the Israel Museum, and hung at ZIM’s headquarters in Haifa, on the third floor.