Boris Schatz

Boris Schatz (23 December 1866 – 23 March 1932) was a Lithuanian Jewish artist and sculptor who settled in Palestine. Schatz, (), who became known as the "father of Israeli art," founded the Bezalel School in Jerusalem .

Boris Schatz was born in Varniai, in the Kovno Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Lithuania). His father, a teacher in a cheder (a religious school), sent him to study in a yeshiva in Vilnius, Lithuania. In 1883, while at the yeshiva, he enrolled at the Vilnius School of Drawing, where he was a student until June 1885. In 1887, he met the Jewish sculptor Mark Antokolsky, who was visiting his parents. He showed Antokolski a small figurine of a Jew in a prayer shawl he had carved from black stone. Antokolsky secured a stipend for Schatz and encouraged him to apply for the St. Petersburg Academy of Art, but the plan to study there did not work out. Meanwhile, he began to teach drawing privately in Vilna. In 1888, he moved to Warsaw and taught art in Jewish schools. His first sculpture “Hendel,” created in Warsaw, is an ode to the Jewish peddler. In the summer of 1889, Schatz married Eugenia (Genia) Zhirmunsky. In 1889, Schatz moved to Paris with wife to study at the Académie Cormon. In 1890, they lived in a small French town, Banyuls-sur-Mer, for six months. At the end of 1895, they moved to Sofia, Bulgaria, where their daughter Angelika was born in 1897. Genia left him for a student of Schatz's, Andrey Nikolov, later a well-known Bulgarian sculptor, and took Angelika with her.

In March 1904, Schatz sailed to the United States to oversee the construction of the Bulgarian Pavilion at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. He remained in the country for ten months, until the end of December 1904. Back in Sofia, he declared himself in love with 16-year-old Theodora (Dora) Gabe, later a renowned Bulgarian poet and children's author. In 1905, heartbroken when she did not return his affection, Schatz left for Berlin, where he stayed with the Zionist illustrator Ephraim Moses Lilien. Lilien introduced him to Franz Oppenheimer, a supporter of cooperative land settlement in Palestine, and Otto Warburg, later president of the World Zionist Organization. Both were enthusiastic about his idea of establishing an art school in Jerusalem. The founding of Bezalel was officially proclaimed on October 8, 1905.

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