The Art Of The Yamim Noraim

Photo Credit: Saul Jay Singer

As I have previously written in these pages, one of the most popular areas of Jewish document collecting is Rosh Hashana greeting cards, which provide a religious, political, social, cultural, and artistic map of Jewish history and practice through time and wherever Jews have resided. Many of these cards are themselves artistic masterpieces, but in this article, I present several of my favorite original artworks depicting the theme of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.

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Shown here are two original pencil sketches by Zev Raban. In the first, in which the artist depicts the blowing of the shofar in the synagogue on Rosh Hashana, a mixed group of congregants – possibly a family – stands below the bimah (platform), where the central bearded figure wearing his tallit over his head, is blowing the shofar. The figure on his left holds a sefer Torah while the slightly bent figure on the right, probably the koreh (the man who calls out the specific blasts to be blown), looks down with concentration at his siddur to follow the order of the blasts.

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Also exhibited here are two illustrated plates rendered in the gorgeous color that characterizes much of Raban’s work from his famous Chagenu (“Our Holidays,” 1925) series, a handsome collection of illustrations of the Jewish holidays, with both inscribed in the plate by the artist. In the Rosh Hashana piece, the shofar blower stands upon a beautifully constructed bimah between a Torah holder and the koreh, with a young boy wearing a cap looks over the edge of the platform. There are several tallit-wearing men in the foreground and other similar congregants blend into the background to the right.

Raban (1890-1970), who acquired his reputation through the designs he made for Bezalel, was undoubtedly one of the most important artists in pre-State Eretz Yisrael. Recognizing that the traditional European style did not fit the style of the newly-emerging Jewish arts, he synthesized European techniques with authentic Jewish art based on specifically Jewish motifs. He developed a visual lexicon of Jewish themes with decorative calligraphic script and other decorative devices which came to be characterized as the “Bezalel style” and, in doing so, he drew freely from Persian, Oriental, Classical, and Art Nouveau elements.

Raban’s work, which closely follows the historical events of the building of the Jewish State, reflected his desire to strengthen the identity of the emerging Medinat Yisrael through the revival and artistic expression of Jewish symbolism, and he was actively involved in the ethos of the emerging nation, encouraging tourism through posters, illustrating primers for teaching Hebrew, and designing decorative functional objects to imbue the Jewish home with Jewish content. He was renowned for his original depictions of beautiful Israeli landscapes, holy places, Biblical tales, and people (he adopted the Yemenite as a model for the Biblical figure).

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Shown here is a wood engraving by Leonard Baskin of a Jewish sage along with New Year’s greetings in Hebrew, signed by the artist in pencil at the lower right.

A true renaissance man, Baskin (1922-2000) was a writer who commented on important works and often-overlooked artists; a maker of books, whose Gehenna Press set the standard against which fine press books are measured; a Caldecott-honored book illustrator, whose works ranged from the bible to children’s stories to natural history; and a watercolorist, whose explosion of color burst forth unexpectedly in mid-career. He is best known, however, as a prolific master printmaker who reinvented the woodcut and as one of the preeminent sculptors of the twentieth century. His public commissions include a thirty-foot long bas-relief for the FDR Memorial; a sculpture at the Woodrow Wilson Memorial in Washington, D.C.; and a Holocaust Memorial sculpture on the site of the first Jewish cemetery in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Raised by a father who was an Orthodox rabbi, his strong Jewish upbringing eventually formed the foundation and context for his artistic vision, and his religious art, such as illustrations of the Haggadah and of the Biblical Five Scrolls, was informed by his knowledge of Jewish tradition. This influence carried over into later works, such as the Angels to the Jews series and his mid-1990s series of woodcuts about the Holocaust. His work is displayed in major public and private institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Chicago, the Hirschhorn, and the British Museum.

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Exhibited here is Amram Ebgi’s Yom Kippur, in which he depicts two bearded figures with their tallatot draped over their heads. They sit at a shteibel-like table in front of an open ark displaying two Torah scrolls and with a menorah. Inexplicably, he portrays the two central figure wearing tefillin which, of course, are not worn on Yom Kippur; I would argue that the artist, whether intentionally or out of ignorance, sought to infuse the image with as many Jewish symbols as possible, irrespective of their relevance to Yom Kippur.

Ebgi’s art is not specifically religious but rather – consistent with my theory about this Yom Kippur work – reflects broad Jewish themes. Much of his work incorporates a bird, symbolic of Israel’s freedom; other symbols in his art include Israeli vineyards, menorahs, men in tallatot (as here), doves of peace, and flora; and some of his work is composed of as many as 60 separate elements or pieces. He has enjoyed one-man shows throughout the United States and Israel, his pieces have been on exhibit in leading museums across the world, and his distinctive art has been featured in holiday cards published by UNICEF and Hallmark.

The Moroccan born Ebgi (born in 1939) made aliyah and settled in kibbutz Kfar Blum, where he became Torah-educated, learned Hebrew and English, and began drawing and painting. In 1958, he was awarded a scholarship to study art at Brooklyn Museum of Art and, four years later, kibbutz administrators gave him a painting studio and encouraged him to sell his work. Later, after serving in the Israeli army during the Six Day War and returning to Kfar Blum, he continued to study art at Pratt Graphic Art Center in New York, where he developed an eclectic affection for the printing, etching, wood carving, silk screen, intaglio, relief, stained glass, ceramics, and epoxy modeling.

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Exhibited here is Ben Shahn’s Hayon Harat Olam (“Today marks the birth of the world”) in which he portrays a man blowing a long decorated shofar under the fully stylized text of the paragraph traditionally recited by the congregation following the three sets of shofar blasts during blowing of the shofar during the repetition of the Mussaf Amidah on Rosh Hashana:

Today is the birthday of the world. Today all creatures of the world stand in judgment, whether as children or as servants. If as children, be merciful with us as the mercy of a father for his children. If as servants, our eyes depend upon You, until You will be gracious to us and release our verdict as light, O Awesome and Holy One.

Shahn (1898-1969), who raised the aesthetic level of graphic art in the United States, uniquely explored polemic themes of modern urban life, organized labor, immigration, and injustice in general, employing dramatic symbolism and mixing different artistic genres. He frequently dealt with Jewish subject matter, including drawings for The World of Shalom Aleichem (1953) and designing windows for Temple Beth Zion in Buffalo (1965). As a calligrapher, he repeatedly made use of the Hebrew alphabet, especially in the books Alphabet of Creation (1954) and Love and Joy about Letters (1963; he also wrote the text). He executed drawings of his Haggadah (1965) as early as 1930, and all but one of these were purchased for the Jewish Museum in New York, where they remain among the museum’s prized possessions.

As a member of the Farm Security Administration group, Shahn roamed and documented the American south, and his photographs, graphic art, paintings and New Deal art exposed American living and working conditions, and his fresco mural for the community center of Jersey Homesteads is among his most famous works. Believing that Shahn’s images were useful for persuading voters and Congress to support federal relief and recovery programs, the Roosevelt administration hired him to produce a set of 13 murals inspired by Walt Whitman’s poem, I See America Working (1939). After World War II, he commenced work as a commercial artist, accepting only commissions which he felt were of personal or social value, including his famous portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., which appeared on the cover of Time (1965). His published writings, including The Biography of Painting (1956) and The Shape of Content (1960), became influential works in the art world; the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame recognized him as one of the great masters of the twentieth century; and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

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Exhibited here are three lovely and representative examples of Alphonse Levy’s style. In the first card to the left, “Rosh Hashana – Between Services: The Right Catch,” Levy portrays a congregant in the synagogue before commencement of the Yom Tov donating charity by dropping a coin in a pushka; the middle card, “Paris Salons: A Jew on Yom Kippur,” depicts a sculpture of a Jew wearing his Yom Kipper finery; and the final card, “The Great Forgiveness,” illustrates a Yom Kipper congregational prayer led by a cantor reading from an oversized machzor.

Born into a strictly Orthodox family, Levy (1843-1918), affectionately called “the Millet of the Jews,” infused his subjects, who came from among the native and pious Jews of the French villages, with a rare combination of whimsy and love. In particular, he was struck by the beauty and majesty of Jewish tradition, which formed the core of the subject matter of his work and, against bitter criticism from the upper-class Jews of Paris, who refused to recognize his work, he remained determined to be “the witness of the lives of the Jewish people.” His best-known works remain the exaggerated, yet affectionate, depictions of the rural Jewish community of his childhood, as he sought his subjects from the Jewish people of modest means, the native and pious of his family’s villages in Alsace and Lorraine.

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In the “Alms Giving” relief by Boris Schatz exhibited here, the artist writes a personal note:

From Bezalel, I hereby extend to you and your family blessings for the coming New Year that it may be a year of bliss, raising the prestige of Israel, and the building of the land with Bezalel among it.

Schatz (1866-1932), “the Father of Israeli Art,” is best known as the founder of the Bezalel Academy of Arts, named after Bezalel ben Uri ben Chur, the legendary Biblical artist and creator of the Mishkan. He is credited with reviving a Jewish aesthetic consciousness and planting the seeds for artistic culture in Israel, and his vision of arts as a necessary component of Zionism played an important role in Israel’s singular commitment to the arts.

Schatz’s own work, which was heavily influenced by his traditional training in Europe, reflects romanticized, sublime, and sentimental visions of Jewish personalities, religious practices, and sites in Eretz Yisrael. Jewish art at the time was essentially related to the art of the Diasporan communities where the Jews happened to live, and Schatz changed that by establishing a distinctively Jewish art that employed Jewish themes and designs. Believing that a facility in Jerusalem would serve as a center for his novel Jewish art that would gather talented Jewish art students from around the world, he founded Bezalel to develop and promote an indigenous artistic tradition for Eretz Yisrael.

Schatz sought to express the national ethos through depictions of simple Jews at work and at prayer. Bezalel artists and craftsmen under his tutelage celebrated farmers, road builders, and factory workers, and the Bezalel artists became noted for combining their deep feelings for Jewish themes and nationalism with remarkable skill and craftsmanship. He planted the seeds for artistic culture in Israel, and Israel’s extraordinary commitment to the arts is in no small part due to his vision of arts as a necessary component of Zionism.

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Exhibited here is a print of a painting by Aharon Kahana on which he has signed and inscribed “Shana Tovah” in Hebrew.

Painter, printmaker, and ceramicist, Kahana (1905-1967) was born in Stuttgart, Germany, where he studied at the Academy of Art before pursuing further art studies in Berlin and Paris. In 1934, he made aliyah to Eretz Yisrael, where he settled in Ramat Gan, which later opened a museum of ceramic art in his memory. His unique style of Modernist forms, usually geometric, presented remarkable defining lines together with an archaic conceptual and biblical content, and he became a leading founder of Ofakim Chadashim (“New Horizons”), an important Israeli art movement that focused on abstraction and reflected contemporary Jewish modernism. His work not only took on a Cubistic, minimalist feel, but it also reflected the work he had established in ceramics: bold and saturated with glowing color. He won several honorary prizes, including the Dizengoff Prize in both 1938 and 1953.

Exhibited here is a signed abstraction by Mordechai Ardon on which he extends “Blessings of the New Year” to Teddy Kollek and his wife from Jerusalem.

Considered one of the giants of Israeli art, Ardon (1896-1992) was an abstract expressionist painter who, known for the aesthetic and spiritual value of his use of color, strove to create Modern art of the Bauhaus and the color technique of the old Masters – two, seemingly contradictory elements that forged the character of his painting throughout the seventy years of his artistic career. His works are deeply infused with Jewish mysticism and religion, likely the result of having received a formal Jewish education in Torah and Talmud and growing up with his observant father’s Chassidic tales. He is probably best known for his mammoth and monumental Isaiah’s Vision of Eternal Peace, a set of large stained-glass windows which incorporate visual elements from the Kabbalah and which are displayed prominently in the Jewish National University and Library in Jerusalem.

After the Nazis’ rise to power, Ardon fled to Eretz Yisrael (1933), where he taught at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem (1935-52) and served as its director (1940-52); lectured extensively at the Hebrew University; and served as Artistic Advisor to the Israeli Ministry of Education and Culture (1952-63). He was awarded the Israel Prize (1964), and he had the distinction of offering the first one-man exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York (1948) .

Though the charismatic Kollek’s life parallels the birth and development of Israel, ranging from his efforts to build one of the first kibbutzim in Eretz Yisrael, to safeguarding Jews during World War II, to helping to build Israel, he is best known for his 28-year mayoralty of Jerusalem (1965-1993). Much of the face of modern Jerusalem is due to his efforts, as he worked to develop the city to take its place not only as a holy city of ancient origins, but also as the capital of a modern Jewish state; Yitzhak Rabin called him “the greatest builder of Jerusalem since Herod.”

Exhibited here is a sweet portrayal by Nachum Goldmann of a young peyot-wearing boy wrapped in a tallit being instructed in the fine art of shofar blowing by an older bearded man, who holds up a siddur so that the boy can see which kolot (blasts) he is to blow next.

Nahum Goldmann (1895-1982) was an Israeli artist and Zionist leader who was raised in a Jewishly-identifying home in Germany, where he studied philosophy and law. A passionate Zionist even in his youth, he worked at the Jewish division of the German Foreign Ministry in World War I and attempted to enlist the Kaiser’s support for Zionism. After the war, he launched the project of a German Jewish encyclopedia but, after completing twelve volumes, the Nazi rise to power halted the project; however, he went to play a leading role in creating the English language Encyclopedia Judaica in the 1960s.

During the Mandate Period, Goldmann negotiated the idea of Jewish statehood with the British while still fighting for the needs of Diasporan Jews. In 1936, he helped to organize the World Jewish Congress, was the first chairman of its executive board, and later served as its president for many years. He also founded the Conference on Jewish Organizations and was involved in countless efforts on behalf of Jews around the world, including serving as Ben Gurion’s plenipotentiary to negotiate a reparations agreement with West Germany for Holocaust survivors, advocating for Soviet Jewry, and promoting Jewish education and culture.

Wishing all a L’Shana tova tikatevu!