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.
This is an image of the physician Abraham Zacutus, of Amsterdam. A physician and writer of medical works, Abraham Zacutus was born in Lisbon and later studied medicine in Coimbra and Salamanca, in…
Les Hitlériques was a collection of anti-Hitler verses that Knafo composed in Mogador, Morocco in September and October 1939. This courageous and biting publication was very different from his…
Lerski’s portrait of a young Polish Jewish immigrant to Palestine is in his distinctive, expressionist style. Using mirrors and reflectors to emphasize the transformative powers of light, Lerski liked…