The painter Emmanuel Mané-Katz was born in Kremenchug, Ukraine, and as a child was destined for the rabbinate. At the age of seventeen, however, he left home to study art in Vilna and then Kiev and, in 1913, went to Paris. He was in Russia during World War I but returned in 1921 to Paris, where he befriended Pablo Picasso and other important artists, and was affiliated with the art movement known as the École de Paris. In 1931, his painting The Wailing Wall was awarded a gold medal at the Paris World’s Fair. During World War II, Mané-Katz lived in the United States but made Paris his home. Like Marc Chagall, he favored overtly Jewish themes drawn from his childhood in Eastern Europe.
O God of hosts, restore us;
show Your favor that we may be delivered.
You plucked up a vine from Egypt;
You expelled nations and planted it.
You cleared a place for it;
it took deep root and…
This impressive cut-paper birth amulet is in the form of the double eagle, the symbol of the Habsburg Monarchy (and pre-partition Poland) and thus a popular motif in Galician Jewish folk art. It is…
In the wake of the Russian Revolution and the lifting of restrictions on Jewish publishing, Jewish theater companies revolutionized theater and scene design and experimented with modernist approaches…