Yeshiva University Museum

05/13/2020

Tapestry from YU Museum’s collection titled “Golda, mother of Israel.” It was made by fabric artist Ina Golub (1938-2015) in 1979, the year after Meir (1898-1978) died, it pays tribute to Meir in both her public and private lives.

05/05/2020

A Virtual Tour of Yeshiva University Museum’s Israeli Art Exhibition with Liel Leibovitz

A Virtual Tour of Yeshiva University Museum’s Israeli Art Exhibition with Liel Leibovitz

In honor of Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s 72nd Independence Day, virtually experience the exhibition "From A to Z: Highlights of Israeli Art from Yeshiva Universi...

05/05/2020

On National Teacher Appreciation Day, I am sharing two different images of education from our collection. The photograph shows a teacher in Israel in the 1930s teaching her young students about flowers. It was one of a set of glass lantern slides used at Camp Cejwin in Port Jervis to familiarize Jewish campers with the land of Israel. Next to it is a more traditional image of formal Jewish education. It depicts a male teacher and a male student with open books on their laps. This item is carved and painted wood, sold as a souvenir in Israel around 1950.

04/29/2020

To find out about this sketch for a sculpture by O'Connor Barret, read our Yom Ha'azmaut blog at https://www.yumuseum.org/education/blogs/a-solitary-yom-haatzmaut

04/20/2020

For Yom HaShoah: Deportation by David Dzienciarski (1912-1980), oil on canvas, Israel, ca. 1970s. Collection of Yeshiva University Museum. Gift of the artist’s Estate. This is one of a series of paintings by Dzienciarski, a self-taught artist, depicting his hometown, Lodz.

04/14/2020

This 19th century silver three-tiered Seder plate was a gift from Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (JCR). JCR was the organization charged with the distribution of “orphaned” Jewish objects after the Holocaust. If you were the Museum Curator or Director, would you want to retain the piece in its present condition to commemorate the Nazi destruction of Jews and dispersal of their property? Would you repair the piece since the damages could predate the Holocaust and thus have the piece represent the heyday of its use?

04/14/2020

Missing Your Pre-Passover Shopping? – Yeshiva University News

Missing Your Pre-Passover Shopping? – Yeshiva University News

Missing Your Pre-Passover Shopping? Most Recent News March 25, 2020 Michael Bettencourt From the YU Museum Blog (March 24, 2020) While we prepare for Passover six or more feet away from one another, we can longingly appreciate this David Dzienciarski painting of a Market Before Passover from Yeshiva...

04/14/2020

The Women’s Branch of the Orthodox Union, Pioneers of Passover Provisions | Library

The Women’s Branch of the Orthodox Union, Pioneers of Passover Provisions | Library

The Children of Israel were redeemed from Egypt in the merit of the righteous women of that generation (Sotah 11:2); women are obligated to partake of the four cups of wine on Passover, since they participated in the miracle (Pesahim 98:1-2); and in the twentieth century in the United States, the .....

04/12/2020

Happy Passover! In the spirit of the holiday, I’d like to share with you a wonderful feature, “Out of the Box: Four Unique Passover Items,” produced in partnership with the Center for Jewish History.
Housed at the Center are tens of thousands of boxes in Yeshiva University Museum’s and our partners’ archival and collections. The Out of the Box series showcases some of the remarkable treasures and stories tucked away inside these boxes. In March, we had intended to highlight – firsthand and in person – some of the over 230 Passover items, spanning over 200 years, that are conserved in YUM’s collections. Due to our temporary closure because of the coronavirus, we brought, with the Center’s help, this conversation into the digital world.
Bonni-Dara Michaels, YUM’s Collections Curator, discusses a few of her favorite Passover items from the collections. Check out the video through the link below, and then read the short interview with Bonni-Dara about what it’s like working with these unique artifacts.
Thank you, Bonni-Dara for sharing your insights on these works with us; to the Center for producing this feature; and to Michael Bettencourt for posting it on YU News here (or you copy and paste the following link: https://blogs.yu.edu/news/out-of-the-box-four-unique-passover-items/). Enjoy!
Moadim l’simcha!
Jacob Wisse, PhD
Director, Yeshiva University Museum

03/31/2020

Looking for a good doctor? This portrait from our collection is a fanciful depiction of Maimonides (Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, the Rambam, 1135/1138-1204) by Arthur Szyk (1894-1951), painted in 1950. Maimonides was a physician as well as a Torah scholar, and translated two works by Galen (physician, surgeon, philosopher, 129-200/216 C.E.). Among Galen’s writings is information about symptoms and treatment of the Antonine Plague, later identified as smallpox.

03/25/2020

Missing Your Pre-Passover Shopping?
YU Museum
March 24, 2020

While we prepare for Passover 6 or more feet away from one another, we can longingly appreciate this David Dzienciarski painting of a Market before Passover from Yeshiva University Museum’s collection (gift of the artist’s estate). Created around 1970, the work depicts a crowded street in the Jewish section of Lodz, reimagined from the artist’s childhood. Pre-Passover activities are proceeding apace. Two men shoulder a cask of boiling water on a pole (the water would have been used to kasher dishes and utensils for the holiday); a rag seller offers up new plates in exchange for old clothes; shoppers go this way and that carrying their sacks and baskets; while children, oblivious to the surrounding chaos, roll hoops and play in between the harried adult bodies.

As richly evocative as the scene is, the painting is as far removed from documentary reality as we all currently are from our places of business and communal gathering. Dzienciarski (1912-1980), who miraculously survived World War II – first, as a member of the Polish army and then as a German prisoner – managed to escape eastward through the Russian frontier before making his way in 1948 to Israel, where he settled. This work was painted by the artist among tens of others while living in the new Jewish homeland decades after the leveling of the Lodz Ghetto and the decimation of European Jewry.

The son of a lumber and furniture merchant who traveled between Polish towns and villages by motorbike, Dzienciarski considered his paintings a mixture of observation and imagination:
“They are partially a documentary record and partially a personal vision depicting a way of life, which was suddenly erased and which tragically can never again exist. There is something in my paintings to which all can relate, but I believe they will have the greatest impact on the generations of young people who want to know what the Holocaust destroyed.” He viewed them as his life’s most important achievement, serving to make manifest for future generations a culture that no longer existed.

Market before Passover was exhibited among 35 works by the artist in a monographic show called “In My Mind’s Eye: Jewish Life in Lodz, 1920-1939,” presented by Yeshiva University Museum in 1980, around the time of the artist’s death. You get a sense of Dzienciarski’s creative relationship to observed reality from a photograph in YIVO’s collection showing Koshering Dishes for Passover in Lodz, likely dating from the period when the artist lived there as a child (Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York).

Perhaps we can take inspiration and derive strength from such a monumental and vital act of artistic preservation, re-creation and forward-looking-ness. Market Before Passover provides an imaginative window on another time and place, which is most welcome in the here and now, and could also helpfully remind us to avoid the crowds.

03/18/2020

Collection item of the week: photograph of a technician with guinea pigs in the garden of the Breslau Jewish Hospital, 1934. Guinea pig inoculation was used at the time for the diagnosis of tuberculosis.

03/09/2020

Collection item of the week: Zvi Raphaely's Purim, oil on canvas, 1979, currently on view in From A(gam) to Z(aritsky): Highlights of Israeli Art from YU Museum’s Collection

03/02/2020

Collection item of the week: ca. 1960s dress design by Adele Simpson (1903-1995) for Claudia Alta (Lady Bird) Johnson (1912-2007), wife of Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973), 36th President of the United States, Gift of Joan Raines.

02/26/2020

Collection item of the week: poster by Leonard Pinkhof (1898-1943), Amsterdam, ca. 1919. Pinkhof met his death at Sobibor

02/20/2020

Sacred Spaces for Yom Kippur: a 15th Century Spanish Mahzor Unmasked | Library

Sacred Spaces for Yom Kippur: a 15th Century Spanish Mahzor Unmasked | Library

What are the vacant spaces: precise, deliberate incisions reminiscent of a Purim face mask, which gaze up from this manuscript fragment? This remnant of a manuscript page mysteriously made its way from 15th century Spain to the Mendel Gottesman Library’s rare book room in New York. The parchment p...

02/18/2020

Collection item of the week: photograph of snow in Central Park (?) taken by Anton Hollander ca. 1950.

02/10/2020

Collection item of the week: Grandmother and Grandson by Boris Schatz (1867-1932) ca. 1929, oil on board; frame copper repoussé. On view in the exhibition From A(gam) to Z(aritsky): Highlights of Israeli Art from Yeshiva University Museum’s Collection through July 12, 2020.

02/07/2020

It may not be June yet, but this early 20th century Rosh Hashanah card from our collection should provide a warm, cheery note on a gloomy day (at least it is here in NYC).

01/28/2020

Collection item of the week: Adam and Eve by Moshe Tamir, oil on canvas, The Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Collection of Yeshiva University Museum.

01/22/2020

MusicTalks

Meet our Artist of the Week, the rockin' Gilad Paz, headliner of our special “Effer Ve’Avak” concert for #InternationalHolocaustRemembranceDay on Monday, January 27th Yeshiva University Museum @ 7:30 PM.⠀

MusicTalks' own Maya Ben-Meir recently sat down with Gilad to talk about his musical journey and hear about his connection to rock music.⠀

MT: How did you become a singer? Did you always know you wanted to perform? ⠀

Gilad: I always knew I wanted to be a performer and I love being on stage and giving audiences a great show.⠀

MT: How does it feel to perform material that speaks about the Holocaust?⠀

Gilad: I feel very honored to take part in this concert. Both my paternal grandparents were in Europe during World War II. At 17 years old, my grandfather fled to Ukraine about 3 weeks before the Nazis invaded his home of Lodz, Poland, leaving behind his parents and two brothers, as well as the rest of his extended family. He never saw them again, and to his last day, he regretted not defying his parents' requests and taking his younger brother out of Poland with him.⠀

I never met my grandmother, but she was a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and was reunited with her sister (who survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp) after the war. This sister, my father's aunt, is over 90 years old and still participates in Holocaust commemoration events in Israel every year. The stories she tells about her experiences during this period of her life are hair-raising, and really make one think about how and if they would survive that horrific time in human history.⠀

Diving into Efer Ve'Avak, and listening to some of these songs for the first time, has helped me take another glance into the experience of being a survivor. That horrible feeling of going back home after the war only to find that nothing has changed for the people who used to be your neighbors, while you and your family have been fighting for your lives.⠀

Head over to our website to read the rest of the interview and get tickets for Monday's concert. Swipe 👉for more great photos of Gilad.⠀

#MusicTalksConcerts @ New York, New York

01/14/2020

Collection item of the week: Jerusalem, embroidery by Shulamith Wittenberg Miller (1907-1995)

01/07/2020

Collection item of the week: Chaim and Renee Gross housewarming invitation

12/31/2019

Collection item of the week: scrap (the Victorian equivalent of today’s stickers) depicting America welcoming immigrants, New York, ca. 1910

12/23/2019

Collection item of the week: illustration from Yossele's Holiday And the Brave Maccabees, New York, ca. 1939, author and illustrator: Sonia Mazer.

12/17/2019

Collection item of the week: Flute Player by Reuven Rubin (1893-1974), 1938, donated by Kathryn Yochelson. This is currently on exhibition in From A(gam) to Z(aritsky): Highlights of Israeli Art from YU Museum’s Collection on view through July 12, 2020

12/09/2019

Collection item of the week: detail of the Torah binder (wimpel) of Yosef ben Binyami (Jerry R. Herz), New York 1946/7.

12/05/2019

Collection item of the week: Moshe Tamir’s Scarecrow ca. 1965, The Rita and Jacob Berger Collection of YU Museum. This painting is on view through July 12th in our exhibition From A(gam) to Z(aritsky): Highlights of Israeli Art from Yeshiva University Museum’s Collection

11/26/2019

MusicTalks

Meet our Artist of the Week, the wonderful Ariella Edvy, headliner of our concert Celebrating Yemenite Singers on Thursday, December 5th @ 7:30 at Yeshiva University Museum!

We loved chatting with Ariella about her musical journey and hearing about her love of Yemenite music.⠀

MT: What drew you to performing Yemenite music?⠀

Ariella: It’s funny, the farther I am from home the more trills I make with my voice, which is something that comes out of the Yemenite tradition. It’s almost as if the farther I am the more I feel connected to my roots. It was a natural gravitation toward what I had lost as a child. My grandfather grew up in an Ashkenazi orphanage, so we didn’t have a lot of Yemenite culture in our home. We sang from the Israeli Hebrew songbook on Shabbat dinners. But somehow, these days, my dad in Israel has been listening to more Yemenite music than ever, and I am singing more Yemenite music than ever halfway across the world.⠀

MT: What did you grow up listening to?⠀

Ariella: I grew up listening to Guns and Roses, Shlomo Artzi, Achinoam Nini and Boaz Sharabi. I went to a Jethro Tull concert with my dad when they were in Israel, but I've never been to a Yemenite one.⠀

Head over to our website to read the rest of the interview, and grab your tickets to this special evening through Tribute to Yemenite Singers⠀

We can't wait to see you there! Swipe 👉 for more images. ⠀

#MusicTalksConcerts⠀in partnership with Yeshiva University Museum and American Sephardi Federation @ New York, New York

11/26/2019

Join us for 'A Celebration of Yemenite Singers' @YUMuseum on Dec 5th @ 7:30 PM!
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Israeli-Yemenite singer @Ari_Ella_Edvy and the @MusicTalksConcerts Ensemble with host @EladKabilio in a high-energy tribute concert to the Yemenite singers who became such an inseparable part of the Israeli Songbook.
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Featuring iconic songs by Ofra Haza, Eurovision winners Izhar Cohen and Gali Atari, Zohar Argov, Margol, Noa (Achinoam Nini) and others along with traditional Yemenite music.
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We can't wait to see you there!

For tickets go to https://bit.ly/2scQcKL

11/26/2019

YU Museum's collection item of the week: printed textile titled The Guardian, Israel, early 20th century

11/20/2019

Collection item of the week: Ruth, stencil on velvet, Bezalel, ca. 1920s.

11/11/2019

Model presented by Ismar David (1910-1996) to the competition for the Suffolk County Vietnam Veterans’ memorial, 1990

11/05/2019

Collection item of the week: The Flood by Lessery Ury (1861-1931), Oil on canvas, 1906

10/29/2019

Collection item of the week: Dizengoff Square by Michael Aram (1908-1998), oil on canvas.