Jewish Art History

Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė ? V i l n i u s A c a d e m y o f A r t s P r e s s , 2 0 1 0 A M A C A t A L o g u e UDK 726(474.5)(06) Si91 S p o n s o r s o f t h e C a t a l o g u e Lithuanian State Science and Studies Foundation Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania The Cahnman Foundation Directorate for the Commemoration of the Millennium of Lithuania

The article examines the interwar period in the life and work of two architects, Usher Chiter (1899–1967) and Elyukim Maltz (1898–1973), both graduates of the Odessa School of Architecture.During that time the architects were doing work for the Mendele Moicher Sforim All-Ukrainian Museum of Jewish Proletarian Culture in Odessa. Based on documents and visual materials from a number of museums and archives located in Ukraine, Russia and Israel, as well as on private collections (including those of families of architects from Moscow, where Chiter and Maltz moved in the late 1920s),the author attempts to trace and reconstruct the two architects’ research expeditions across the former Pale of Jewish Settlement. A total of seven field trips were conducted in Podolia and the Soviet part of Volhynia – with the aim of collecting materials and exhibition items for the museum and of making nature drawings and watercolors showing Jewish sites, such as synagogues, cemeteries and residential buildings. This empirical approach exemplifies the method of preserving and representing disintegrating Jewish shtetls, commonly practised during the interwar period. The work of both architects is viewed through the prism of musealization of Jewish heritage in the early Soviet period which was closely connected to the formation of state ideology and its transition from «building of the national identity» to class paradigm and atheistic upbringing.

Andrea Morpurgo, Il cimitero ebraico in Italia: Storia e architettura di uno spazio identitario, Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012, 215 pp.

Andrea Morpurgo, architetto e storico dell'architettura, passa in rassegna dal Medioevo al ventesimo secolo la storia del cimitero ebraico in Italia. Il tema principale del libro, come indica il sottotitolo, è l'importanza del cimitero come spazio per l'espressione dell'identità ebraica. La lettura non richiede conoscenze pregresse e, inoltre, vengono definiti concetti di base quali cosa sia una sinagoga o un ghetto. Il libro riassume, a secondo degli argomenti trattati nei diversi capitoli, la storia degli ebrei d'Italia: vengono descritte le condizioni sociali e politiche della popolazione ebraica, il rapporto tra ebrei e cristiani e lo sviluppo e consolidamento dell'identità ebraica. La ricerca è basata in gran parte sulla letteratura e la stampa ebraica italiana del periodo, ma è evidente che l'autore ha anche condotto un approfondito lavoro di ricerca, come dimostrano le note che rimandano a documenti conservati in ventisette archivi.
Il centro della riflessione riguarda il periodo che va dalla fondazione dello stato italiano moderno, nel 1861, fino al ventennio fascista. Dopo un breve capitolo introduttivo sul periodo pre-moderno, si arriva all'era moderna, a partire dall'invasione dell'Italia da parte dell'esercito napoleonico, per poi approfondire la rilevante questione della cristallizzazione dell'identità ebraica moderna. Il terzo capitolo è dedicato alle moderne sinagoghe (Torino, Firenze, Milano, Roma e Trieste), che furono per lo più realizzate in stile orientale. Morpurgo passa in rassegna la storia della progettazione e della costruzione degli edifici, senza trascurare le sinagoghe meno conosciute che furono realizzate nella seconda metà del diciannovesimo secolo. Vengono inoltre confrontate le nuove sinagoghe realizzate in Italia con quelle di altri paesi europei, come ad esempio Germania e Francia.
Tra le rivoluzioni che caratterizzarono il diciannovesimo secolo vi fu anche quella relativa all'atteggiamento verso l'istituzione cimitero. Molti paesi sostituirono le aree di sepoltura, fino ad allora situate vicino alle chiese cittadine, con nuovi grandi cimiteri pubblici costruiti fuori dalle mura della città. Dal quarto al settimo capitolo il libro descrive quindi le storie dei cimiteri ebraici in Italia: le nuove aree di sepoltura di antiche comunità ebraiche (Trieste, Firenze, Livorno), i cimiteri ebraici situati all'interno dei cimiteri comunali (Torino, Genova, Roma, Modena), i cimiteri edificati da parte di nuove o risorte comunità (Bologna, Milano, Napoli) ed infine i cambiamenti che subirono i cimiteri di antiche comunità (Ancona, Venezia, Ferrara). Questi capitoli sono accompagnati da numerose illustrazioni e disegni, che chiariscono in particolar modo le questioni di carattere architettonico dei vari progetti.
I cambiamenti introdotti dagli ebrei d'Italia nelle modalità di sepoltura a partire dal diciannovesimo secolo sono il tema dell'ottavo capitolo. In particolare viene analizzata l'importanza di tali mutazioni riguardo alla formazione della moderna identità ebraica, in costante equilibrio tra la preservazione della tradizione e l'adattamento allo spirito dei nuovi tempi di integrazione e talvolta di totale assimilazione nella società. Il capitolo si conclude occupandosi dei cambiamenti nel disegno delle lapidi, delle iscrizioni e degli apparati decorativi.
Il nono capitolo tratta delle ostilità mostrata dai cristiani verso i funerali degli ebrei, che spesso si tramutavano in vere e proprie manifestazioni di violenza. Morpurgo sottolinea come i cimiteri ebraici e i riti di sepoltura furono “disturbati“ non solo nel periodo pre-moderno, ma anche nel periodo successivo all'unificazione dello stato italiano e naturalmente durante il periodo fascista.
Il libro termina con un catalogo dei cimiteri ebraici presenti sul territorio italiano, divisi per regione e organizzati in ordine alfabetico. Le voci includono dettagli sulla posizione del cimitero e un riassunto della sua storia. Una ricca serie di illustrazioni, mappe e un lessico di termini ebraici concludono il libro.
Il libro di Morpurgo pur non essendo uno studio completo e definitivo rappresenta tuttavia il primo tentativo di riassumere l'argomento, e raggiunge questo obiettivo attraverso un linguaggio chiaro, semplice ed una metodologia di ricerca encomiabile.

Prof. David Malkiel
Full Professor, Department of Jewish History, Bar Ilan University (Israel)

The chapter as a whole illustrates some of the possibilities and problems currently haunting the area of Jewish participation in the making and the history of feminist art in the United States.The signficance that gender, class, Jewishness, Marxism, and nationalism have for Martha Rosler is evident throughout her work, though her artistic practice has only recently been written about from such an intersectional perspective.

Introduction: Framing the Holocaust: Contemporary Visions I. GEOGRAPHIES OF THE HEART: PLACES/SPACESOF REMEMBRANCE1. Archiving an Architecture of the Heart 2. Haunted by Memory: American Jewish Transformations 3. A House for an Uninhabitable Memory (The Center for Holocaust Studies at Clark University) II. ISRAEL AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY4. The Return of the Repressed 5. Racism and Ethics: Constructing Alternative History 6. "Don't Touch My Holocaust"-Analyzing the Barometer of Responses: Israeli Artists Challenge the Holocaust Taboo III. TRANSGRESSING TABOOS7. Holocaust Toys: Pedagogy of Remembrance through Play8. The Nazi Occupation of the "White Cube": Piotr Uklan'ski's The Nazis and Rudolf Herz's Zugzwang 9. On Sanctifying the Holocaust: An Anti-Theological Treatise IV. CURATING MEMORY10. Holocaust Icons: The Media of Memory11. Sense and/or Sensation: The Role of the Body in Holocaust Pedagogy Artists' Works A selection of works by artists Alice Lok Cahana, Judy Chicago,Debbie Teicholz, and Mindy Weisel, who participated in theBerman Center's conference, "Representing the Holocaust:Practices, Products, Projections."About the Artists About the Editors About the Contributors Index

Since the second half of the 1970s, a corpus of studies focusing on the history of women during the Holocaust has been produced. These studies assert that even though Jewish women shared the annihilation threat with the men, Jewish women also underwent unique experiences resulting from their female physiology, their female socialization, and the National Socialist Weltanschauung directed against them. These different experiences were also expressed visually in numerous works of art made by women during the Holocaust era (1939–49). Their art is rife with images of pregnancy, motherhood, feminine crafts such as domestic chores, cooking, female solidarity and mutual assistance, loss of femininity, and sexual violence. This article focuses especially on women's artistic expression of three of these topics: mutual assistance among women, loss of femininity, and sexual violence, all of which have received little attention in Holocaust art research.

The collection owned by Lesser Giełdziński (1830–1910), relatively little
known to contemporary scholars, was a multifaceted one; it not only reflected the interests and pursuits of its creator, but also pointed to his cultural identity and his connections with the region. Giełdziński, a Polish Jew who was generally considered to be a German, was an active participant in the life of the multicultural city of Gdańsk. His collection, which had been instituted in the latter half of the 19th century, consisted of Jewish ceremonial objects and mementoes produced in Europe and in the area of the former Commonwealth, but also of furniture, craftworks, paintings, sculptures and prints. These objects were exhibited in a private museum created specially for the purpose at no. 18 (later 29) Długa Street in Gdańsk. In 1904 Giełdziński decided to convey a part of his collection to the Jewish kahal of Gdańsk, thus laying the foundations for the fi rst Jewish museum in Europe. The outbreak of the Second World War interrupted the activity of this institution; a part of the collection amassed until the year 1939 was transported to the United States to become the basis for the collection of the Jewish Museum in New York. After Giełdziński’s death, his collection housed in Gdańsk was sold by his heirs at an auction in Berlin. As it has been pointed out in the article, the stature of the Gdańsk collector of art by far exceeds his Jewish roots, prompting a discussion of the issue of his Polish and German identity and pertinent memory.

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When considering the history of society and art in Russia, the last decade of the 19th century and first decades of the 20th century were among the most tumultuous. The monarchical structure of royals, fiefdoms and Tzars, and the cultural artifacts it produced, was undergoing a slow then swift revolution at the hands of peasants and intellectuals alike. Though despised for the perceived exploitation of ethnic Russians by means of capitalist practices, the Jewish community played an important role in this upheaval, fostering many important thinkers and artists. One such figure is the singular modernist, Marc Chagall, whose peculiar palette of folkloric figures, animals and spiritual references anchored him in the quickly disappearing Jewish world as he wandered through the shifting borders of the historically Christian institution of modern art. Like Jewish artists before him, Chagall was drawn to the figure of Christ, an inescapable icon of Western art, and his portrayals of Christ-especially in his Holocaust paintings-reveal something of the Jewish identity of the time. By claiming this Christian figure as a historic Jew and fraternal symbol of Jewish suffering, Chagall both embraced and challenged Jews, and represented their scriptural history, present identity, and folk tradition on one figurative canvas.! ! The visual language known to Marc Chagall was primarily informed by the contemporary Jewish cultural practices and to a lesser extent by Russian folk art and ikon painting. In fin de siècle provincial Russia, each town was ethnically unique from the next, though most contained a variety of cultures and religions 1 . Like many urban centres, Vitebsk was primarily Jewish, including roughly half of the middle-class (including artisans, shopkeepers). Folk art's colourful roosters, fish, cows and donkeys speak to the life-blood of rural industry and of Chagall's relatives: his father was clerk at a herring packing plant; his grandfather the local butcher of the family's ancestral home town, Lyozno. The illuminations of scripture in ikons confirm their role as doctrinal tool and devotional aid-a painted gospel-to Russia's undereducated. With regard to composition, Compton writes, "pictorial space [of ikon painting] is created not so much by 1. Sunderland, Willard. "Shop Signs, Monuments, Souvenirs:

Lidia Głuchowska, Sto lat awangardy i transgraniczny hołd dla Buntu i Jung Idysz = One Hundred Years of Avant-garde and Cross-border Homage to Bunt and Yung Yidish, w: Bunt. Nowa ekspresja/ Bunt. New Expression, red. Maciej Kurak, Uniwersytet Artystyczny im. Magdaleny Abakanowicz w Poznaniu, Poznań 2020, s. 120–192.

This article refers to the celebrations of the 100 years of the Polish Avant-Garde and the Avant-Garde Yiddish, especially to the series of the contemporary exhibitions and book projects inspired by the oeuvre and the manifestos by the Polish modernist/ avant-garde group Bunt (Revolt) as well as Lodz based group Yung Yidish (Jung Jidysz/Jung Idysz) in the zears 2015-2021

יש לי בעיה בעניין זה עם ציורי הדיוקן. עקב עיוותו אני מעדיף תמיד לצייר אנשים הקרובים אליי, המכירים אותי, המוכנים "לבלוע צפרדעים", והמודעים לכוונותיי הטובות. הלוך-הרוח שלי בזמן העבודה הנו של לומד את האדם, של מי שיוצא מתוך הצורה כמתוך נקודת-זינוק ומנסה ללמוד דבר-מה אודות האדם כנציג האנושות; מנסה ללמוד מה הוא הפן המייחד אותו בקונטקסט הכללי. פירושו של דבר שאיני מתייחס לאינדיבידואום הממוקם בהווה נתון אלא לנציג האדם בקונטקסט היותר כללי היסטורי וקיומי.

Helène Aylon (b. 1931) is among the first generation of feminist artists who identified and challenged traditional patriarchal and misogynist readings of ancient religious texts. This article analyzes the discourse and examines the reception of Aylon’s work The Liberation of G-d (1990–1996) within the Jewish art world and the American Conservative Jewish community, and her contribution to these two diverse audiences. Despite the work’s confrontation with tradition, some rabbis from the Conservative movement played a significant role in the acceptance of the work and its exhibition in the Jewish Museum in New York and other Jewish institutions. However, they reduced its radicalism, reframing the work as a Midrashic interpretation (a form of traditional rabbinic commentary) that operates within the framework and rules that delineate the traditional Jewish interpretive community. This article analyzes how the rabbis tamed the artist’s activist and critical work. I argue that Aylon challenges the Jewish community with a radical feminist discourse that is often omitted from the dominant discourse of the traditional Jewish community. By analyzing the engagements with and reception of Aylon’s work within the Jewish art world and the Jewish Conservative community, I demonstrate how the artist seeks real social engagement that reaches beyond the walls of the museum, challenging the structures of religious patriarchy while engaging in a dialogue with its representatives.

This demonstrates the Mathematical Reasoning of the 9 Branches Candelabrum Menorah.

Extract from the Book " God's Language " by Professor Thierry BROUWERS ( Book in Progress as of 8/30/2019. Published on  20/20/2020 )



"If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics."
~ Galileo Galilei

"Numbers are the highest degree of knowledge. It is knowledge itself."
~ Plato

The artist works in various media and is a veteran printer, commissioned in 1983 and 1986 to print for the Israel Arts Council, in addition to her own editions. During the past years she has initiated a number of interdisciplinary projects reflecting her continuing interest in the inter-relationship between different art forms.

A new complete facsimile accompanied by a text volume (304 pp.). Available from the Museum's shop (https://www.zemaljskimuzej.ba/en/shop) in two editions - English and Bosnian. For the credits, title page and table of contents, see the document below.

The Bulletin of the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts.  Journal of Eastern Studies  / ed. E. Kotlyar. – Kharkiv: The Center for Eastern Studies of KSADA, 2010. – # 8 (Vol. 3:  Jewish Art and the Ukrainian Context: Horizons of Traditional Artistic Culture). – 360 p.
Вісник Харківської державної академії дизайну і мистецтв. Сходознавчі студії / Упор. Є. Котляр. – Харків: Центр сходознавства ХДАДМ, 2010. – № 8 (Вип. 3: Єврейське мистецтво і український контекст. Обрії традиційної художньої культури). – 360 с.
The Center for Eastern Studies at the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts (KSADA) presents the Third Volume of Eastern Studies, a special issue of the Bulletin of the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts. This is the first time that an entire issue of a Ukrainian academic journal is devoted to Jewish art. The present volume deals with topics of traditional art and culture; the Fourth Volume will present current research findings in Art Judaica and work of Jewish artists beyond the scope of tradition. The two volumes’ special focus, “Jewish Art and the Ukrainian Context,” has attracted numerous submissions by scholars from Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Israel, the U.S., and Canada. The essays included in our collection are evidence of considerable international interest in Jewish art and cultural heritage that are in some way directly or indirectly bound up with Ukraine.
In setting ourselves the goal of bringing together in the Ukrainian academic field both native and overseas researchers of Art Judaica, we hardly expected to see such a thematically diverse spectrum of material submitted for publication. To introduce it to the general academic reader, we want to note that Jewish art on Ukrainian soil has been marked by extraordinary achievements, masterworks, and names which have become a part of not only Jewish, but also world art culture. Traces of antiquity and the Middle Ages, influences of the Rec’ Pospolita and of three world empires – Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman – as well as of other countries and states, made Jewish culture in this region inimitably variegated. This culture took on a shape all its own, manifesting itself in a variety of temporal and cultural milieus. The universe of the Eastern European Jewish shtetl produced a cultural environment that brought to life astounding works of Ashkenazi Jewish art, including wooden and stone “defense”-style synagogue architecture and ritual objects made of stone, clay, metal, wood, and textiles, which served in the Jews’ daily round and ritual. The architectural and object surroundings of the former Jewish shtetls along with the graves of the Chasidic masters (the Zaddiks), sites of mass pilgrimage by Chasidim from all over the world, by their power of mass attraction today constitute a historical landscape in their own right.
The traditional artistic universe of the Pale of Jewish Settlement, discovered by Shimon An-sky, became, in the art historian Abram Efros’ phrase, an “Aladdin’s lamp,” a source of living inspiration for the Jewish avant-garde tearing beyond the limits of the ghetto and leading forth into the world open artists such as Chagall, Lissitzky, Ryback, and dozens of others who set the fashion and the shape of world modernism. In addition, the artistic heritage of the Crimean Jews and Karaites reflected the coalescence of cultural Jewish elements with the Turkic-Tatar world. These phenomena are making a comeback today, after having sustained varying levels of loss due to the wars and totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Contemporary Art Judaica in many ways is a turn to addressing this world, simultaneously combining evolved national forms and novel ideas with the universal objectives of art.
World academic forums and periodicals devoted to Judaica and Jewish art have long been working to introduce Eastern European Jewish Studies, as well as Jewish Ukrainian cultural discourse, into the scholarly context of today.
In bringing this discipline into the foreground, we are, in effect, conveying to the reader the collective art historical research of the very phenomenon of Ukraino-Judaica, as it was capaciously labeled by the well known ukrainist Marten Feller. This phenomenon has in many ways determined the cultural diversity of Ukraine, especially Ukraine’s Western regions, lending them a peculiar image of their own; it also conditioned the mutual integration of the Ukrainian context with the European and world cultural and hermeneutic space.
This volume includes articles on Jewish ritual objects and traditional art, historical-artistic heritage and collections of decorative and applied craft works.
We are grateful to colleagues at the Center for Eastern Studies, and to Ukrainian, Russian, and overseas researchers for their participation in preparing this volume. Special thanks to Elen Rochlin (Jerusalem) and Bogdana Pinchevskaya (Kyiv) for their translations of materials included in the present volume, as well as to Oleg Koval and Konstantin Bondar (Kharkіv) and Gregory Kotlyar (New York) for their academic and logistical support for the appearance of the present collection in print.
We hope that the publication of this collection will not only prove of interest for specialists and the public concerned with landmarks of traditional Jewish culture in Ukraine, but that it will also attract the attention of those responsible for the preservation of Ukraine’s multinational heritage. This is a priceless resource for future generations and the development of modern tourist and pilgrimage infrastructures, where the Jewish urban historical heritage, and, especially, the heritage of the shtetls, occupies a niche all its own.

תקציר
מהי אמנות יהודית־פמיניסטית וכיצד היא תורמת למרחבי האמנות, החברה והדת? הספר ביקורת נאמנה מציע מסגרת תיאורטית להבנת אופייה, דרכי פעולתה ותרומתה של תנועת האמנות היהודית הפמיניסטית הדתית, אשר התפתחה מאז סוף שנות התשעים של המאה העשרים בשני המרכזים היהודיים הגדולים – ישראל וארצות הברית. כמחקר ראשון מסוגו הוא עוסק באופן רחב ושיטתי באמנות זו ודן בביקורתה כלפי המסורת היהודית, ההלכה והמוסדות היהודיים הדתיים.

גיבורות הספר הן אמניות מישראל ומארצות הברית המבקרות ביצירתן את הטקסט הדתי, את הממסד הרבני ואת הריטואלים היהודיים. יצירותיהן מנותחות לאור האמנות הפמיניסטית הכללית וההגות היהודית־פמיניסטית ובהשוואה לפרקטיקות אקטיביסטיות, תוך ניתוח ההתקבלות של היצירות ובחינת הדיונים הציבוריים שהן חוללו.

הספר מראה כיצד האמנות היהודית־פמיניסטית משמשת סדנה לבחינה חוזרת ונשנית של המסורת, תוך חתירה תחת הבניותיה הממשטרות וניסיון לעצב אותה מחדש. מה שיכול להיתפס במבט ראשון כפרובוקציה וכמעשה אנטי־דתי, מתברר במבט בוחן ומעמיק יותר כעשייה דתית פנימית המכוונת לתיקון. העיון המשולב באמנות היהודית־פמיניסטית הצומחת בשני המרכזים – ישראל וארצות הברית – מאיר את ההקשרים המקומיים, את ההתפתחויות הדומות והשונות, ואת ההשפעות של הגלובליזם, התפוצתיות וההגירה, על האמנות.

Many scholars view the choral synagogues in the Russian Empire as Reform synagogues, influenced by the German Reform movement. This article analyzes the features characteristic of Reform synagogues in central and Western Europe, and demonstrates that only a small number of these features were implemented in the choral synagogues of Russia. The article describes the history, architecture, and reception of choral synagogues in different geographical areas of the Russian Empire, from the first maskilic synagogues of the 1820s-1840s to the revolution of 1917. The majority of changes, this article argues, introduced in choral synagogues were of an aesthetic nature. The changes concerned decorum, not the religious meaning or essence of the prayer service. The initial wave of choral synagogues were established by maskilim, and modernized Jews became a catalyst for the adoption of the choral rite by other groups. Eventually, the choral synagogue became the "sectorial" synagogue of the modernized elite. It did not have special religious significance, but it did offer social prestige and architectural prominence.

Examining a selection of modern urban spaces, this article describes how
the history of medieval Ashkenazi Jewry is displayed in Germany today, as well as
who displays it and for whom. The preoccupation of Germany with its Jewish past
is not trivial; it is an institutionalized trend designed not only to teach the public
about local medieval history, but also to educate it to re-include medieval Jews into
its history.

On the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto staged a now legendary revolt against their Nazi oppressors. Since that day, the deprivation and despair of life in the ghetto and the dramatic uprising of its inhabitants have captured the American cultural imagination. The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture looks at how this place and its story have been remembered in fine art, film, television, radio, theater, fiction, poetry, and comics. The book explores seventy years’ worth of artistic representations of the ghetto and revolt to understand why they became and remain touchstones in the American mind, including iconic works such as Leon Uris’s best-selling novel Mila 18, Roman Polanski’s Academy Award–winning film The Pianist, and Rod Serling’s teleplay In the Presence of Mine Enemies, as well as accounts in the American Jewish Yearbook and the New York Times, the art of Samuel Bak and Arthur Szyk, and the poetry of Yala Korwin and Charles Reznikoff. In probing these works, I pursue key questions of Jewish identity: What links artistic representations of the ghetto to the Jewish diaspora? How is art politicized or depoliticized? Why have Americans made such a strong cultural claim on the uprising? The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture shows the importance of the ghetto as a site of memory and creative struggle and reveals how this seminal event and locale served as a staging ground for the forging of Jewish American identity.