Chicago

David Ben Bekker (1897-1956) was born Ben Menachem in Poland. He studied at the Bezalel School for Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem and at the Antokolsky School in Vilna.

Morris Topchevsky (1899-1947) was born in Bialystok, Poland, where four of his siblings perished in the pogroms of 1905.

Half length, frontal image of a rabbi behind a lectern, holding book. Style of figure and background somewhat cubist in inspiration.

Through the years, an estimated hundred thousand Jewish men and women in Chicago participated in some seven hundred landsmanshaft fareinen, or “homeland societies” formed by people who emi

Painter and printmaker Curt Frankenstein was born to a Jewish father and a Lutheran mother in Hanover, Germany.

The Chicago Hebrew Institute was founded in 1903 but remained a “paper institute” for several years.

Adolph Joachim Sabath (1866–1952) was born into the only Jewish family in the small town of Zabori, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic).

Chicagoan Isadore Turner (ca. 1882-1966) served for fifty years as a leader in the local Zionist movement.

Seymour Rosofsky (1924-1981) was a seminal figure in the development of a distinctive Chicago school in 20th-century art. He was born to Jewish immigrant parents on Chicago's West Side.

Chicago artist Howard Schwartz combines the past and the present in mixed media portraits inspired by his family story, a story that, like that of many Chicago families, begins its American chapter