In Galilee Mountains

Zionism and kibbutzim. Lithuanian, Polish, Latvian, Ukrainian and other national movements began to take shape in the Russian Empire the mid-19th century, and the 1870s saw the rise of Zionism, the Jewish national movement, which proclaimed that Jews living in the diaspora should return to Zion, the land of Israel. The increasingly forced assimilation of Jews, the poor living conditions, and the rapid growth of the Jewish population in the Pale of Settlement, prompted the mass migration of Jews to their original homeland. The first immigrants found it very difficult in the barren lands of Israel, especially without any experience of agriculture. They began to move into kibbutzim, communal settlements where all the land and the means of production, finance and objects were treated as shared property. A century and a half ago, the word bochur (Hebrew for ‘boy’), which is still used in Lithuanian today, meant a resident of a Palestinian kibbutz.

In 1933, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, the artist Issai Kulvianski, who came from Jonava and lived in Berlin from 1912, was forced to flee urgently to Palestine. He relaunched his career in the Promised Land. His portrait of Antanas Smetona, the president of Lithuania, was hung in the Lithuanian Consulate in Palestine, and the Palestinian authorities commissioned him to paint portraits of King Hussein and King Abdullah of Jordan. The variable landscape of Palestine was a frequent motif in the artist’s work: green oases rising out of the yellow sands, with emerging kibbutzim in the mountains of Samaria and Galilee.

Text author Vilma Gradinskaitė

Source: Law firm Valiunas Ellex art album STORIES OF LITVAK ART (2023). Compiler and author Vilma Gradinskaitė
Expositions: "Shalom, Israel! The Paths of Litvak Artists", 16 December  2015  – 13 March 2016, Tolerance Center of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, Vilnius; “Académie de Vilna. Vilnius Drawing School (1866–1915)”, 5 October – 26 November 2017, National Gallery of Art, Vilnius (curator Jolanta Širkaitė). Published: Académie de Vilna: Vilniaus piešimo mokykla 1866-1915 / Vilnius drawing school: Exhibition Catalogue, Nacionalinė dailės galerija 2017 m. 4 d. - lapkričio 26 d., compiled by Jolanta Širkaitė, Vilnius: Lietuvos kultūros tyrimų institutas, 2017, p. 252.

Zionism and kibbutzim. Lithuanian, Polish, Latvian, Ukrainian and other national movements began to take shape in the Russian Empire the mid-19th century, and the 1870s saw the rise of Zionism, the Jewish national movement, which proclaimed that Jews living in the diaspora should return to Zion, the land of Israel. The increasingly forced assimilation of Jews, the poor living conditions, and the rapid growth of the Jewish population in the Pale of Settlement, prompted the mass migration of Jews to their original homeland. The first immigrants found it very difficult in the barren lands of Israel, especially without any experience of agriculture. They began to move into kibbutzim, communal settlements where all the land and the means of production, finance and objects were treated as shared property. A century and a half ago, the word bochur (Hebrew for ‘boy’), which is still used in Lithuanian today, meant a resident of a Palestinian kibbutz.

In 1933, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, the artist Issai Kulvianski, who came from Jonava and lived in Berlin from 1912, was forced to flee urgently to Palestine. He relaunched his career in the Promised Land. His portrait of Antanas Smetona, the president of Lithuania, was hung in the Lithuanian Consulate in Palestine, and the Palestinian authorities commissioned him to paint portraits of King Hussein and King Abdullah of Jordan. The variable landscape of Palestine was a frequent motif in the artist’s work: green oases rising out of the yellow sands, with emerging kibbutzim in the mountains of Samaria and Galilee.

Text author Vilma Gradinskaitė

Source: Law firm Valiunas Ellex art album STORIES OF LITVAK ART (2023). Compiler and author Vilma Gradinskaitė
Expositions: "Shalom, Israel! The Paths of Litvak Artists", 16 December  2015  – 13 March 2016, Tolerance Center of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, Vilnius; “Académie de Vilna. Vilnius Drawing School (1866–1915)”, 5 October – 26 November 2017, National Gallery of Art, Vilnius (curator Jolanta Širkaitė). Published: Académie de Vilna: Vilniaus piešimo mokykla 1866-1915 / Vilnius drawing school: Exhibition Catalogue, Nacionalinė dailės galerija 2017 m. 4 d. - lapkričio 26 d., compiled by Jolanta Širkaitė, Vilnius: Lietuvos kultūros tyrimų institutas, 2017, p. 252.