The painter Isaac Dobrinsky was born in Makarov, Ukraine, into a traditional Jewish home and received a yeshiva education. When his father died suddenly, Dobrinsky moved to Kiev to study sculpture. In 1912, he left for Paris, where he remained until his death. Within a year of his arrival, he abandoned sculpture for painting. He and his family spent the first two years of World War II in Paris and then fled to the Dordogne. In the 1950s, he painted a memorable series of about forty portraits of Jewish boys and girls from an orphanage whose parents had been murdered in the Holocaust.
Aryeh Judah Leib ben David (d. 1709), known as Leib Calisch, or Kalischer, was rabbi in the communities of Kremsier (now Kroměříž, Czech Republic); Łobżenica (in modern-day Poland); and Kalisz, Poland…
This hand-drawn map of Hebron, Israel, is from an autograph manuscript of Melekhet Shelomoh (The Work of Solomon), Solomon Adeni’s commentary on the Mishnah.
This bucolic, and clearly romantic, scene of a humble home in a shtetl or village is characteristic of Pen’s style and subject matter. Best known as a painter of everyday Jewish life, he was the…