Art © A. K. Segan

UTW 20

Rubinsztajn, mime artist in the Warsaw Ghetto concentration-death camp

Art: 1993
Media: Ink w/ touches of white & gray penciling and gouache on beige etching paper
Framed, 46 in. H x 35 W [116.8 x 88.9 cm]. The frame was a gift of Seattle’s Museum of History & Industry

Drawn from a photo courtesy of the photo collections of the YIVO Institute & Library, N.Y.
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Rubinsztajn was a lets, Yiddish for street performer, in the Warsaw Ghetto. Yiddish was the language spoken by millions of Jewish people in eastern and central Europe before the Holocaust. His name is pronounced Rubinstein, e.g. roo – bin – stine.
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Rubinsztajn was reported seen by witnesses as he went to the Umschlagplatz* exclaiming:

“Ale glajch!” (All are equal!).
*The umschlagplatz is where the train tracks were at one side of the ghetto - from which Jews were deported to death camps in Poland. Most of the Jewish prisoners in the Warsaw ghetto who were transported from the ghetto were murdered at the Nazi’s Treblinka death camp. (Treblinka was not a concentration camp. It was an extermination - mass murder - death camp)
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In the ghetto, no one knew his first name. According to archivist Marek Web at the YIVO Institute and Library in New York, where the artist found a card catalog listing (pre-computer, in 1993) of the photo of Rubinstzajn that Segan used to create the drawing, Rubinsztajn hailed from a Jewish shtetl (a Jewish village) in the province around Warsaw.
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He reportedly lost his reason after he had been viciously beaten during a Gestapo interrogation. The Gestapo was the German-Austrian Nazi Secret Police.
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He was murdered at the Treblinka death camp in the summer of 1942. 
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Watch a 5 min., 7 sec. video excerpt of a Segan power-point presentation at a secondary school in Angus, Scotland; the excerpt is when he was showing the Rubinsztajn drawing to a class.

Exhibits, selected

  • Museum of History & Industry, Seattle (1994)

  • B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, Washington, DC (1994)

  • Broadway Market, Seattle’s Capitol Hill district (1994)

  • Temple Beth Am, Seattle (1997)

  • Seattle Central Community College, Art Gallery (1998)

  • University Congregational Church, Seattle (1999)

  • Western Illinois University, Macomb (2004)Washington State University, Tri-Cities (2007)