Biography | Martin Weyl — The Monster Slide He Helped Land in This Kiryat Hayovel Park

The sculpture in Rabinovich Park is a two-storey monster head with three sliding tongues.

Niki de Saint Phalle built it in 1972.

Jerusalem knows it as HaMifletzet, the Monster, and formally as Le Golem.

Teddy Kollek commissioned the piece for a children's garden in Kiryat Hayovel.

Some parents first called it too frightening.

Kollek held the commission.

Martin Weyl was then the mayor's art advisor as well as a curator at the Israel Museum.

Hebrew-language accounts credit him as a principal figure in getting the Golem built.

The Jerusalem Foundation later recorded his memory of the inauguration: Kollek was supposed to slide down one of the tongues, and a crush of children kept the mayor off the ladder.

In a 1980 Centre Pompidou interview, Saint Phalle named this among the monumental works she was proudest of.

The park is still a neighborhood playground.

Children climb an exterior stair, pass through a small dark chamber, and come down through the open mouth.

The pin is the sculpture itself, at the intersection that locals still call Monster Park.

Photo: Bachrach44, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons