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Cover Design for Istoria evreiskogo naroda
Rachel Bernstein-Wischnitzer
1914
Rachel Bernstein-Wischnitzer’s cover design for Istoria evreiskago naroda (History of the Jewish People) features a title with dramatically stylized letters and a gold and black pattern that evokes both art nouveau and folk art.
Rachel Bernstein-Wischnitzer’s cover design for Istoria evreiskago naroda (History of the Jewish People) features a title with dramatically stylized letters and a gold and black pattern that evokes both art nouveau and folk art.
Credits
Courtesy Texas Tech University Libraries.
Published in:The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 7.
The synagogues where older and more modest congregants pray are spared to some extent. It is a good thing that they are closed all day and all night and are opened only for early morning prayers and…
“That which is well known needs no proof,” and the root cause is the skilled operating of the printing shop in the holy community of Żółkiew [Zhovkva], may the Rock preserve it, which was established…
On the white garments of my great-grandfather
the cross of the middle ages flames anew.
My great-grandfather sits at the seder,
holding a staff from a wild almond tree
to rouse the forefathers.
Not…
Born in Minsk into a middle-class Russified family, Rachel Bernstein-Wischnitzer studied art, art history, and architecture at universities in Heidelberg, Brussels, Paris, and Munich; in 1907 she became one of the first women in Europe to obtain a degree in architecture. In 1912, Bernstein married Mark Wischnitzer, who was then working on the Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, the great Russian-Jewish Encyclopedia project; it was there that Bernstein-Wischnitzer would publish some of her first articles on Jewish visual arts, focusing on synagogue architecture. Relocating to Berlin in the early 1920s, Bernstein-Wischnitzer coedited the Hebrew-Yiddish journal Rimon/Milgroym, where she pioneered the field of Jewish art history in her articles. Bernstein-Wischnitzer was also a practicing artist, as evident from the cover design for the Russian-language History of the Jewish People, a project of the linguistically assimilated but Jewishly engaged intelligentsia in St. Petersburg with which the Wischnitzers associated. With the closure in 1938 of the Berlin Jewish Museum, where she had been working, she moved to Paris and then New York, where she researched synagogue architecture and Jewish art.
The synagogues where older and more modest congregants pray are spared to some extent. It is a good thing that they are closed all day and all night and are opened only for early morning prayers and…
“That which is well known needs no proof,” and the root cause is the skilled operating of the printing shop in the holy community of Żółkiew [Zhovkva], may the Rock preserve it, which was established…
On the white garments of my great-grandfather
the cross of the middle ages flames anew.
My great-grandfather sits at the seder,
holding a staff from a wild almond tree
to rouse the forefathers.
Not…