Leopold Pilichowski

Born in the small Jewish community of Piła in western Russian Poland and raised in a Hasidic home, Leopold Pilichowski pursued art studies in nearby Łódź with the support of the painter Samuel (Szmul) Hirszenberg (a relative) and thereafter in Munich and Paris. Resettling in Łódź in the mid-1890s, he focused much of his effort on depictions of the lives of everyday Jews, both in their capacity as laborers, street peddlers, and migrants and in warm-hearted depictions of traditional Jewish observance, study, and celebration, as in the image featured in this volume. Embracing Zionism in 1908, Pilichowki produced portraits of leading Zionist political and cultural figures (among them Bialik, Ahad Ha-Am, Nahum Sokolow, Max Nordau, and Theodor Herzl). In 1914 Pilichowski moved to London, where he was commissioned to paint portraits, and he spent much time depicting the impoverished Jewish immigrant community of Whitechapel. Visiting Mandate Palestine in 1925, he undertook what became one of his most famous paintings on Jewish themes, the grand Otwarcie Uniwersytetu w Jerozolimie (opening of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem).