The painter Yosef Zaritsky was born in Ukraine and studied art in Kiev. In 1923, he settled in Mandate Palestine, where he became a prominent figure in the development of Israeli art. He associated with the younger generation of artists who were rebelling against the academic style of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts. During his long life he worked in a number of styles. In the 1920s, his watercolors of Safed, Tiberias, and Jerusalem combined an intense focus on the Israeli landscape with a commitment to quasi-abstractionism. His later work was more rigorously abstract in style.
Zaritsky was a member of what is known as the Land of Israel movement, a group of artists who, in the 1920s, drew on the ideas and practices of post-impressionism to create a modern art of Jewish…
I have experienced in yishuvim [Jewish communities—Ed.] that old women are unable to keep the commandment of nido [menstrual purity—Ed.] properly. When they examine themselves and find a spot of blood…
According to the colophon, Natan Hammerschlag’s Ilan de-adam kadmon (Sefirotic Diagram of the First Man) was copied from the writings of Ḥayim Vital, the most prominent disciple of Isaac Luria…