UTW 13

Sh’ma

Art: 1993
Media: Ink, colored pencil on buff etching paper.
Framed, 34 inches H x 25.5 W

Drawn & painted in May 1993 after I learned that (Warsaw Jewish district raised survivor, author and artist) Israel Bernbaum had passed on. The drawing depicts a religious Jewish man in the Warsaw Ghetto with his tallit (prayer shawl), surrounded by imagery from a Polish Jewish gravestone seen in the book Time of Stones.

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Sh’ma is the first word of the holiest prayer in Judaism, called the Sh’ma. In transliteration: Sh’ma Yisrael Adonoi Elohaynu Adonoi Echad
In English: Hear o’ Israel, the Lord our G-d, the Lord is One!
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During centuries of Christian persecution of Jews throughout Europe, observant Jews would recite the Sh’ma in the moments before they were executed and murdered.

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Israel Bernbaum was born and raised in the Jewish district of Warsaw. When the ghetto was being set up as a concentration-death camp by the Nazis, he escaped, fleeing east into the western USSR. Stationed in Siberia, he served in the Red Army and returned to Poland after the war. He lived in Paris, then moved to NY around 1956. In 1992 we exchanged letters and we spoke on the phone once.  

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It was his having guest presented slides of his paintings in schools that inspired me to present my first slide presentation, at Covenant House, Campus Christian Ministry, near the University of Washington campus, in 1994. In spring 1992 I had met the then director and pastor of Covenant House at the Hillel Center nearby and we had stayed in contact. Bernbaum was the painter and author of an award-winning children’s book, My Brother’s Keeper: The Holocaust through the Eyes of an Artist (Putnam, NY, 1985). It won the German People’s Award for Young People’s Literature, 1990.

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Bernbaum's art is in the collection of Montclair State University, New Jersey. It had previously been in the collection of the Clifton-Passaic Jewish Community Center, New Jersey. 

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Between 1994 and around 1999 all of my slide classes interwove Bernbaum’s art with drawings from the Under the Wings series.

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In the foreground of Sh’ma: candlestick holders; note the similarity to the man in UTW 42:  Shoah Dreams, portrayed with a green striped tallit (Hebrew for prayer shawl).