Solomon Yudovin

Born in Beshenkovichi, a village near Vitebsk (today in Belarus), Solomon Yudovin was a graphic artist and book illustrator known especially for his woodcuts and linocuts of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement and for his series of Jewish folk orna­ments. Having studied in Yehudah Pen’s art academy in Vitebsk, he participated in S. An-ski’s Jewish ethnographic expeditions through Volhynia and Podolia in his early twenties both as a collector and a photographer. For the rest of his career, working in the Soviet Union, he focused much of his artistic effort on realist depictions of traditional Jewish life in various media and on reproductions of Jewish folk ornamentation (for instance, traditions of carved tombstone motifs).