Kansas Art Gallery's Exhibit Inspired by Judaica Collection

KANSAS CITY JEWISH CHRONICLE
By Barbara Bayer

Photo by Kevin Blayney: Michael Klein (left) discusses the upcoming ‘Between Thee & Me’ exhibit at Epsten Gallery with the gallery’s curator, Marcus Cain. Klein is holding a 1950s Bible with beautiful sterling silver bookbinding.

KANSAS - Michael Klein began collecting Judaica quite by accident. Now his Judaica is the inspiration for a new exhibit, Between Thee & Me — Artists Respond to the Judaica Collection of Michael Klein and the Van Ackeren Collection of Religious Art at Rockhurst University. This project features two independent, invitational group exhibitions, the first of which will be presented at the Epsten Gallery at Village Shalom July 24 through Sept. 4. It opens with a reception at 2 p.m. Sunday, July 24, with an artists’ discussion at 3 p.m. A second group exhibition will be presented at The Greenlease Gallery at Rockhurst University Aug. 26 through Oct. 1. [link]

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Rembrandt's Jewish Jesus in Philadelphia Museum of Art

SACRAMENTO BEE
By Joann Lovinglio

Young Jew as Christ by Rembrandt

PENNSYLANIA - A new exhibit coming to the Philadelphia Museum of Art takes a fresh look at religious paintings, drawings and prints by one of history's most revered artists. "Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus" debuts Wednesday in Philadelphia. "This was very likely the first time in the history of Christian art that Jesus appeared to be Jewish," curator Lloyd De Witt said. "Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus" will make its final stop at the Detroit Institute of Arts from Nov. 20 until Feb. 12. [link]

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Siona Benjamin's Interviews on Canvas Faces of the Bene Israel

ASIAN JEWISH LIFE
By Erica Lyons

Sharon Galsurkar at Magen David Synagogue

INDIA - The story of the Jews in India goes back 2,000 years and is one of peaceful coexistence in a colorful world that embraced them yet one of isolation from global Jewry. When artist Siona Benjamin, an American, set out on her trip back to the India of her childhood in 2010, she arrived with an intense sense of purposefulness heavily laden with nostalgia. She was intent on rescuing the stories and narratives of these people, her people, the Jews of India. Benjamin was awarded the Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship 2010-11, which enabled her to embark on this four month intensive research study in India that allowed her to photograph, interview, and record the Bene Israel's stories lest they fall into oblivion. [link]

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Siona Benjamin's Hindu Portraits Show the Varied Faces of Jews

MONTCLAIR TIMES
By Elizabeth Oguss

NEW JERSEY - In an empty synagogue in Pune, India, an old man prays alone, his still-strong voice rising to the rafters as he chants the Hebrew prayers. The moment is captured in still photos and on video by an American artist, Siona Benjamin. "His voice in the empty synagogue was a symbol," Benjamin said, recalling the moment in the basement studio of her Montclair home. "Once there were 30,000 Jews in India. Now there are around 4,000. When he sang alone, his voice echoed."Her aim is to explore the many faces of Indian Jews in order to "reconfirm" something she has always known: "There is no such thing as a Jewish race." As a Bene Israel Jew raised in a Hindu and Muslim society and educated in Christian and Zoroastrian schools, Benjamin knows firsthand what it is to feel "other." PHOTO: Benjamin with cantor in Mumbai. [link]

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Art Review: "Lilith" by Siona Benjamin | NYC

JEWISH PRESS
By Richard McBeeNEW YORK - Siona Benjamin's exhibition Finding Home: The Art of Siona Benjamin is simply beautiful. Set in the spacious lobby gallery of the JCC Manhattan, it allows for a peaceful contemplation of this complex artist's meditations on biblical women, war, exoticism and contemporary society. The painted walls range from soft ochre to a pale turquoise, setting off Benjamin's palette to maximum effect, each work sensuously vibrating with the atmosphere of Benjamin's native Mumbai, India. (Above) "Finding Home #102 'Lilith' (Fereshteh)" 2008. The exhibit will run through July 30. [link]

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Israeli Artists Challenge Assumptions About Religious Appearance

ISRAEL NATIONAL NEWS
By David ben Yacov

ISRAEL - The way religious women look, our first impression of them, is often the way we judge them, perhaps because of the important role modest dress for women plays in Jewish law. An Emunah College of Arts and Technology student decided to make a statement about that in her graduation project, which is part of the end-of-year exhibit at the Jerusalem college. [link]

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Israeli Govt. Gives Go Ahead to Build Tolerance Museum atop Muslim Burial Ground

ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTIONAL
By Associated Press
ISRAEL - The Israeli government has approved a Jewish group's plan to build a museum over a centuries-old Muslim graveyard in Jerusalem, an official confirmed Wednesday, in the final go-ahead for a project delayed for years by Muslim opposition. The irony of a Jewish-sponsored Museum of Tolerance going up in part on a Muslim cemetery has made the project a target for critics since it was announced in 2003.[link]

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Review: "Thumbs Up" for Bible Exhibit at Oklahoma City Museum of Art

EXAMINER OKLAHOMA
By Briana Joyce
OKLAHOMA - This season's special exhibit at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art is truly incredible. Art aficionados, bibliophiles, young and old, and members of all faiths will enjoy the Passages exhibit celebrating the 400th Anniversary of the King James Bible. Passages explores the Bible's history from its origins in Jewish scripture to its important English translation under King James. The Passages exhibit will be in Oklahoma City until October 16, but don't miss your last chance to see it in the USA—its next destination is Vatican City! [link]

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Fire Devastates Synagogue Under Repair in Manhattan

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Elizabeth Harris
NEW YORK - A four-alarm fire broke out Monday night at an Upper East Side synagogue that was being renovated, spitting flames through stained-glass windows, destroying the roof and heavily damaging the upper floors, the Fire Department said. Hundreds of people crowded around Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, a modern Orthodox synagogue on 85th Street near Lexington Avenue, after the fire began about 8:30 p.m. The synagogue, which is 110 years old, was being renovated and no one was inside, according to Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, and the sacred Torah scrolls had been removed when construction began. The renovation was to have been completed in September. [link]

Firefighters on the 84th Street side of Kehilath Jeshurun, a modern Orthodox synagogue, during the blaze on Monday.

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Aiming to Spread Judaism One Book at a Time

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Mark Oppenheimer

Todd Parr, at his home in Berkeley, Calif., was commissioned by the PJ Library to write a book.

MASSACHUSETTS - In 2004, Harold Grinspoon, a local real estate mogul, heard a story on National Public Radio about the Imagination Library, founded by the singer Dolly Parton to give free books to children in her native rural Tennessee. The PJ Library, a program of his Harold Grinspoon Foundation, made its debut in December 2005, sending 200 books with Jewish content to interested families, primarily those with young Jewish children. Initially, the books were sent to children in western Massachusetts. The program has grown every month since, and in July the PJ Library will mail 76,000 books to children in every state and across Canada. [link]

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Marc Chagall's Jewish Lazarus

THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE | ICONIA
By Menachem Weker

Marc Chagall. Resurrection of Lazarus (1910).
Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

PENNSYLVANIA - Marc Chagall (1887-1985) included two peculiar elements in his painting of the risen Lazarus. According to Michael Taylor, Muriel and Philip Berman curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where Chagall’s Lazarus is on exhibit in Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle, Chagall’s decision to render Lazarus in a Jewish context was absolutely intentional. “Chagall reminds the viewer that the tale concerns a Jew,” writes Taylor, who recently accepted the position of director of Dartmouth’s Hood Museum of Art, in his catalog essay. “A key transitional work, Resurrection of Lazarus anticipates the haunting series of Jewish cemetery paintings that the artist would begin later that decade.” [link]

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$100 Million Facelift Transforms Israel Museum

THE JEWISH CHRONICLE
By Dina Kraft

Tim Hursley, courtesy of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem

ISRAEL - A tawny sandstone sculpture of Nimrod, an ancient Hebrew warrior and hunter figure with a razor-straight back and proud stare, sits at the intersection between modern Israeli art and native art from Africa and the South Pacific at the recently renovated Israel Museum. The 1939 sculpture by Israeli artist Yitzhak Danzinger is an example of the kind of cultural and aesthetic contextual links that James Synder, the Israel Museum director, hopes to evoke in the reopening of the museum following a $100 million facelift he calls a "renewal." [link]

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Art Review: Artist's Work Removes Man's Interpretation from Religious Text

PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE
By Mary Thomas

Ms. Aylon's "Self-Portrait: The Unmentionable."

PENNSYLVANIA - After considerable thought, Ms. Aylon came to the realization that it was not God's voice that was exclusionary, misogynistic, militaristic -- but man's interpretation over time of that voice. She saved the religion. But she challenged the patriarchy that she believes sullies it. The work that both carried out and represents that save -- simultaneously action and metaphor -- is at The Andy Warhol Museum through Sunday [6/26], part of a 2011 exhibition series in which contemporary artists explore texts of the world's great religions. "The Word of God: Helene Aylon's The Liberation of G-d and The Unmentionable," like the artist herself, has soft insistence fueled by a fire within. But the exhibition's more significant achievement is to reacquaint visitors with Ms. Aylon and is best understood within the context of her life's work. [link]

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NYC's Jewish Art Salon Panel Discussion: Diversity in Jewish Art

AOA NEWS

"Finding Home#89 Vashti (Fereshteh)" by Sonja Benjamin

NEW YORK - On Monday, June 27 at 7pm, The Jewish Art Salon hosts an evening discussion entitled "Jewish Diversity in Art" centering around the works of artist Sonja Benjamin. Benjamin's work is currently on exhibit at The Laurie M. Tisch Gallery at the Jewish Community Center. The event is free. Benjamin's work presents the multi-dimensional identities of Jewish people and she will be part of the panel discussion. Other panel members will include Matthew Baigell, Professor Emeritus of Art History at Rutgers, and author and editor of over 20 books on American and Russian art; and filmmaker Lacey Schwartz. The panel will be moderated by Yona Verwer, president of the Jewish Art Salon. [link]

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Final Days of Art of Marriage at the Jewish Museum of Art, NYC

AOA NEWS

NEW YORK - "The Art of Matrimony: Thirty Splendid Marriage Contracts" at The Jewish Museum in Manhattan is closing on June 26. Thirty ketubbot from the world-renowned collection of The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary, dating from the twelfth through the twenty-first centuries and reflecting the geographical diversity of Jewish settlement, are featured in this exhibition. Found in the homes of married Jews, whether wealthy or poor, scholar or layman, in the West or in the East, ketubbot provide a wealth of information concerning the artistic creativity, cultural interactions and social history of the Jewish communities in which they were created. [link]

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Jerusalem Festival Of Lights 2011: Stunning Art Display

HUFFINGTON POST
By Associated Press

Old city of Jerusalem

ISREAL - Jerusalem's Festival of Lights, now in its third year, illuminates an area known more for religious friction and clashing political claims than for art or nightlife. Most nights, the Old City's stone alleyways are dimly lit, peopled mainly by small numbers of tourists, Palestinian merchants and children, and ultra-Orthodox Jews headed to or from religious studies or prayers. But for seven nights, until June 22, a shining 10-foot-tall (3-meter-tall) puppet named Meir — Hebrew for "the illuminator" — entertains visitors with antics like trying to scale the wall of the moat at the Tower of David, used by conquerors across the millennia as a fortress, barracks and gun emplacement. [link]

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A 300-Year-Old Synagogue Comes Back to Life in Poland

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Laura Brown, a co-founder of Handshouse Studio with a scale model of the synagogue.

POLAND - The Gwozdziec Synagogue, built in the 17th and 18th centuries. Here, in the foothills of the Carpathians, an international crew of master timber craftsmen and students has been working on an intensely hands-on project that combines history, art and education. They are building a replica of the tall peaked roof and inner cupola of an ornate wooden synagogue that stood for 300 years in the town of Gwozdziec, now in Ukraine. Constructing the replica is a joint project of the museum in Warsaw and the Handshouse Studio, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization that emphasizes learning by building, particularly the reconstruction of historical structures and other objects. “There are certain things you can learn by making it that you can’t learn any other way,” said Rick Brown, who founded and directs Handshouse with his wife, Laura. “Every time you pick up a tool or start a process or use a certain material, embedded in that is a very rich, almost unlimited learning experience.”[link]

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Kiddush Cups, Haggadahs Suddenly Museum Chic?

THE JEWISH WEEK
By Eric Herschthal

Hanukkah lamp, Augsburg, Germany, circa 1750. MFA Boston

NEW YORK - For years Jewish art museums have looked upon traditional Judaica with something approaching disdain. But if you think Judaica has died a slow death, think again.  It's having a comeback in major secular museums, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Boston's glitzy new Museum of Fine Art.  According to ARTNews editor Robin Cembalest, in an essay today on Tablet, secular museums have picked up where Jewish museums have left off. [link]

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A Jewish Marriage Made at the Museum

JEWISH DAILY FORWARD
By Jenna Weissman Joselit

Source: Jewish Theological Society

NEW YORK - Now that June is upon us, it’s high season for weddings — and reason enough for The Jewish Museum in New York to mount an exhibition of ketubot, Jewish marriage contracts. “The Art of Matrimony” showcases 30 different versions of the age-old document. Elsewhere within the museum world, the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia has gone a step further in its commitment to the ketubah by operating a Ketubah Gallery where happy couples can have this “monumental milestone marker,” as one museum official would have it, made to order. [link]

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Dead Artists Dinner at San Francisco's Jewish Museum

SAN FRANCISCO WEEKLY
By Jesse Hirsch

CALIFORNIA - We had no idea what to expect with this weekend's dead-artist dinner party at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. The conceit was that 12 dead celebrities, through an elaborate metaphysical contrivance/wormhole, had ended up at a dinner salon hosted by Virginia Woolf. But it wasn't really a dinner party. SFoodie is no stranger to the arts, and this was primarily an event for the mind, not the stomach. [link]

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