Salon Jewish Studies Blog

(front-cover of the catalog Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater)

The Jewish Museum, New York presented "the first exhibition devoted to the extraordinary artwork created for Russian Jewish theater productions in the 1920s and 1930s. The exhibition will bring to light a remarkable period in the early years of the Soviet Union when innovative visual artists, including Marc Chagall, Natan Altman, and Robert Falk joined forces with avant-garde playwrights, actors, and theatrical producers to create a theater experience with extraordinary mass appeal. Through paintings, costume and set designs, posters, photographs, film clips and theater ephemera - many of which have never been exhibited before- Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-1949 will capture an exhilarating but fleeting moment in the cultural history of the Soviet Union."

Andrea Kirsh wrote an exciting article about "a fascinating exhibition" in theartblog.org

Even if the exhibition moves to the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco, from April 25 to September 7, 2009), selected artifacts and extensive information on the subject can be found on the Website of the Jewish Museum, New York

Further Online Exhibitions at N.Y.C. Jewish Museum are:

1) Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976

2) Off the Wall: Artists at Work

3) From The New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig

4) Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country

5) The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend

6) Dateline Israel: New Photography and Video Art

The Archive of American Soviet Jewry Movement (1963-1990) was established by the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), New York. The movement has been a "worldwide effort to obtain freedom for Jews in the Soviet Union to practice their religion without state persecution or discrimination or to emigrate to Israel, the United States or elsewhere to seek the blessings of freedom, and to pursue lives of their own choosing."

The Archive comprises records of individuals, grassroots and national organizations. Besides information on the historical backround on the movement, the history of the movement itself and a list of archival holdings, a number of particular guides to selected record groups can be found:

The Jerry Goodman Papers will be available from April 2009.
A list of audio-recordings (PDF) is available online as well. Furthermore the Union Catalog of the Center for Jewish History (CJH) contains 34 posters from the National Conference on Soviet Jewry.

(Picture: Poster from the National Conference on Soviet Jewry "Let my people go")

Photography in Jerusalem, a website created by Hadassah College in cooperation with the educational website Snunit presents a carefully selected collection of pictures taken in the first half of the 20th Century together with some biographical information on the photographers. Amongst the photographers who are presented that way is pioneer Tsadok Bassan (1882-1956), the "court photographer" of the orthodox Old Yishuv, who also photographed the city's streets and population, and Alfred Bernheim (1885-1974), who documented documented the buildings of the architect Erich Mendelsohn and photographed many personalities of the cultural political Jewish elite in the 1940s. [Languages: English, Hebrew]

The Center for Holcaust & Genocide Studies at University of Minnesota provides access to a huge collection of materials for use in Holocaust and genocide education. Besides Online Museum Exhibitions and Holocaust Memorials a section called Artistic Responses can be found. It presents artworks of over fifty artists.
For example information on the life and work of David Friedmann (student of Leo Kober, Hermann Struck as well as Lovis Corinth and one of the most famous press artists in the 1920s) is included.
He is cited as followed on the page: "I tried everything to make a living as a sign painter, as artist to sell pictures, and as a contractor again like in Berlin under the Nazi Regime. After Miriam was born, I had to work for three, harder than before and saw no future for us here in Israel. In 1951, I had a one-man show in Tel-Aviv with paintings of the concentration camps. I am sorry to say, the interest was only small and learned people did not want to talk about concentration camps. After I was retired in 1962, sometimes I had the idea to try again, but was afraid to start, had no courage and also in consideration of my wife Hilde. I had to lock my feelings in a kind of jail and close the door. So sometimes I went out, painted pictures from nature and worked on my book, later I went to the libraries to make sketches, also sketches in the streets, parks and alleys. In March 1963, I had a small exhibition in the Central Library, but it was not satisfying. I thought about the time between 1946 and 1948 when I was a successful artist. In December 1963, I had enough. I told myself that all the paintings on the wall mean nothing, they no longer satisfy me, anyone can paint like that. I have to do something that nobody can do in the same way. I opened the door of the jail and in the night quietly left our bedroom for my studio, placed a piece of paper on the easel, took charcoal and made my first sketch. Now I was free again and from that time on nobody was able to stop me. In the short time of only four and one-half months, twenty-eight new drawings were finished... Now I am satisfied, because what I am doing is not only for myself. I wish everyone had to take a good look at the artwork. They have to look at what persecution under the Nazi Regime was, and it can happen again, for in America to be a Nazi, to be a Communist is not prohibited. Against an evil world I will work further to try to put my feelings down on canvas or paper against anti-Semitism, against race hatred of all people." (source: CHGS)

"Moving Here explores, records and illustrates why people came to England over the last 200 years and what their experiences were and continue to be. It offers free access, for personal and educational use, to an online catalogue of versions of original material related to migration history from local, regional and national archives, libraries and museums."
Besides a Jewish Migration Histories Timline, you will find information in following categories: origins, journeys, settling, growing up, working lives, culture and festivals, politics. The Moving Here partnership is led by the National Archives of the UK.

(picture: A bagel seller on peticoat lane - Moving Here catalogue reference (MOL) IN2236)