The well-known American set designer Boris Aronson was born in Kiev and came of age during the Russian Revolution. Initially, he worked in various media: painting, sculpture, and costume design, as well as scenic design. While in Moscow, he embraced the constructivist style. He left the Soviet Union and, after a short time in Berlin, settled on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1923. He began designing sets and costumes for the more experimental Yiddish theaters and then, in the early 1930s, began to work on Broadway. He was responsible for the design of major Broadway productions, including The Crucible, The Diary of Anne Frank, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Follies, and A Little Night Music. He won the Tony Award for set design six times.
Lerski’s portrait of a young Polish Jewish immigrant to Palestine is in his distinctive, expressionist style. Using mirrors and reflectors to emphasize the transformative powers of light, Lerski liked…
The kapporet is a short curtain, a valance, hung over the curtain of the Torah ark, and first began to appear in Eastern Europe in the late seventeenth century. The griffins and crowns that appear on…
In 1670, Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jewish community commissioned a new synagogue, which, when finished, was the largest in the world. The master mason Elias Bouman, a non-Jew who had helped design the…