Can a magnificent art museum help save the dying Dead Sea? When 1,200 Israelis posed at the Dead Sea for American art photographer Spencer Tunick in 2011, project initiator Ari Leon Fruchter hoped the eye-popping images would start a wave of activism to save the unique saltwater lake from environmental extinction. The Dead Sea, the lowest place on Earth, is shrinking fast and dramatically due to evaporation and industrial extraction of its minerals. American photographer Ronnie Turner took this picture of the Dead Sea that GuruShots members voted Top Photo. Fruchter learned that if it isn’t stabilized with a steady infusion of freshwater, this ancient wonder of the world will be nothing more than a series of dry sinkholes within 50 years. “I cannot save it by myself, but I can help preserve it through art,” Fruchter shared. Fruchter partnered with Noam Bedein, who began taking time-lapse photos in 2016 to illustrate the changes happening in the Dead Sea, in launching the Dead Sea Revival Project. The top 40 of the 13,123 submitted photos from 40 countries — including Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait and UAE — go on display on Earth Day, April 22, at the Arad Cultural Center and online at the virtual Dead Sea Museum. Fruchter came to Israel in 1997 for a program at the World Union of Jewish Studies, then located in Arad. Thus began a lifelong devotion to this desert city of 25,000 residents some 25 kilometers (16 miles) west of the Dead Sea. He even named his firstborn son Arad. After a detour in Seattle, where he worked for Microsoft, Fruchter and his family moved to Israel in 2007. He took a job at SanDisk and joined the board of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art out of a sense of mission to contribute to society through the arts. He hopes the Dead Sea Museum will inspire the action necessary to save his beloved sea. “We are facing reality and making something beautiful of the situation,” he concludes. Source: Israel 21c