Born in Warsaw to a house painter, Maurycy (Mojżesz) Trębacz grew up with an interest in painting. With scholarships and the support of patrons, Trębacz studied in Warsaw, Kraków, and Munich, earning awards and accolades for his portraits and landscapes. Working initially in the Polish Romantic-national tradition, he later evolved toward Impressionism. Thematically, he focused on landscape, portraiture, and a mix of biblical and Polish romantic subjects but began to produce contemporary, politically informed depictions of Jewish life and political woe at the turn of the century as he developed Zionist sympathies. Receiving antisemitic criticism for these, Trębacz was motivated to organize Warsaw’s first Jewish art exhibition (1911). He ran a painting school in Łódź from 1918 until it was closed with the Nazi invasion in 1939. He died in the Łódź ghetto.
The gentlemen of the Mahamad [board of governors—Ed.] have received a letter from the very illustrious gentlemen of the Mahamad of the Holy Congregation of T: T: [Talmud…
This scroll of Esther from Germany, created for use on the holiday of Purim, is extensively decorated, with illustrations of biblical scenes from the Esther story, as well as various flora and fauna…
In 1947, when Kurt Weill’s orchestral arrangement of Hatikva received its world premiere in New York, it was still—as it had been for decades—the anthem of the modern Zionist movement, expressing the…