Moshe Hudadad Elnatan ("Falafel King") was born in Persia. He traveled the world and worked as assistant to a street painter in Bombay, India, before arriving in Jerusalem in 1939, a date which appears in some of his "Aliya" (immigration) paintings, even those created in a different period. He settled in Jerusalem with his wife and f ive children, and opened a small Eastern restaurant, "Falafel King." He hung his paintings on the restaurant walls, and sometimes exhibited them in Zion Square.

- The discovery -
Among the regular visitors to the restaurant were Jerusalem Post art critic
Meir Ronnen, who wrote about him with awe, Jerusalem-based journalist
and radio broadcaster Yehuda Haezrahi, and journalist Dahn Ben-Amotz, who wrote about him in his column "Mah Nishma" (What's Up) in the weekly Dvar Hashavua. Elnatan exhibited in the Jerusalem-based Engel Gallery, and participated in the exhibition of na.ve artists held at the Israel Museum in 1966, but the big break he yearned for never came.

- The work -
Elnatan maintained he had begun painting at the age of 16. His known
paintings, however, date to the last 30 years of his life, which he spent
in Jerusalem. He painted futuristic as well as biblical scenes, current
affairs (the Sinai Campaign), as well as still life. His paintings
incorporate the portraits of leaders (Ben-Gurion, Herzl, Stalin, etc.) and
are interspersed with symbolic imagery which he refused to decipher: suns and moons, airplanes, spacecraft and rockets, as well as surveying and construction instruments-the symbols of Freemasonry, an organization which the artist endeavored to join his entire life. The intensity, density, and emotional tension in his narrative paintings are also discernible in the depictions of f lower vases. All the paintings surrender his strong sense of color and knack for decoration.