ENTERTAINMENT

Dubi Arie
has created
a massive
painting of
Jewish
history he
hopes will
reach Jews
and
non-Jews
alike.

Dubi Arie: "What does it mean to be a Jew?"

ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM

Assistant Editor

mid the dark
days of war,
when the air
was heavy
with death and
men's hearts were swollen
with fear, Dubi Arie dis-
covered creativity.
Arie, a 28-year-old Israeli
paratrooper, was fighting in
the final moments of the Six-
Day War. Standing near the
Kotel, he decided he would
"create a painting that would
show the struggle of the
Jewish people"

More than 23 years later,
Arie has just completed his
work. Called Under the Wing
of God and the Shadow of
Amalek, it is massive in size
and content. Seven feet by
38 feet, the painting tells the
story of the Jewish people
from the giving of the Ten
Commandments to the crea-
tion of the State of Israel.
Now Arie, who lives in
Toronto, Canada, hopes to
use his painting as a
teaching tool. He wants to
exhibit it around the world
to help educate both Jews
and Christians about Jewish
history. "This is for every-
body," he says.

Arie was born in 1939 in
Warsaw. Three weeks after
his birth, he fled the Nazi
terror with his mother,
Sonia, and brother, Isahar,
to the Soviet Union. Arie's
father, a soldier with the
Red Army, had died before
his son was born.
Sonia took any job — many
which demanded hard,
physical labor — to keep her
children alive. After the
war, she returned with her
family to Poland, only to
discover everyone they once
loved, all their friends and
family, had been murdered.
Sonia and her children were
resettled in a refugee camp

in Austria. They called it
home for three years.
Then in 1941, Sonia heard
about the new State of
Israel. She decided she and
her two boys would go there.
Not long after moving to
Israel, Sonia, 36, died. "All
that hard work, and the
camps, then we come to a
safe place and she dies,"
Arie says. "But that was my
mother's mission: to bring
me to a safe place."

Arie, 11, was taken to
Kibbutz Shaar Hagolan in
the Jordan Valley. He work-
ed as a farmer in the day and
created sculptures at night.

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

61

