Jewry's Role in
Human Affairs

PIONEERS IN THE WORLD OF ART
Evidence of the earliest Hebrew art appears in biblical accounts of the
adornments and decorations of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness and the
Great Temples in Jerusalem. During the ages, artisans ornamented
synagogues and their furnishings, illuminated prayer books and crafted
designs into holy artifacts. But not until the 20th century did most artists
ofJewish origin indulge in realistic representation. The flowering of their
genius was a phenomenon of this century issuing from the palettes of
Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, Max Weber, Franz Kline, Jack
Levine, Lee Krasner, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Mark Rothko and
Robert Rauchenberg to name a few. Their predecessors and colleagues
included:
CAMILLE PISSARRO
(1830-1903) b. St. Thomas, Danish West Indies
Born to a Sephardi family, the often impoverished
painter spent most of his life in Paris and its
vicinity as a leading proponent of Impressionism--
a school of art he helped establish. Early in his
career, Pissarro had been influenced by the works
of Corot, Mallet and other French avant-garde
painters, as well as by the English landscapes of
Constable and Turner. But it was Georges Seurat's pointillist technique of
connecting tiny dots of primary colors that he eventually adopted and most
often employed. His main themes were orderly but understated landscapes,
urban and river scenes, and panoramas of rural life scintillating with light.
In his passion for the movement he championed, Pissarro helped
arrange Impressionism's first major exposition in 1874, a debut with works
by Renoir, Monet and Cezanne--aspiring young artists to whom he gave
constant fatherly support. His own paintings were at first largely ignored
or reproached by critics and the public. Although discouraged, he persisted
in increasing his output, if only to feed an almost penniless family of eight.
A long, collegial friendship with Paul Gauguin had also dissolved.
His fortunes changed in 1892. A large show of his collected work
finally met with success and financial reward. By the time of his death
eleven years later, the kindly and gentle master had bequeathed more than
1,600 treasured works of art in all media to private and museum collections
worldwide. His legacy also included four sons--Lucien, Georges, Felix
and Paul Emile--who were themselves talented artists of varied
reputations.
MARC CHAGALL
(1887-1985) b. Vitebsk, Russia. His father worked
for .a herring-monger and his mother was a
shopkeeper; from these humble beginnings came
a precocious and gifted son whose surreal-
istic/dreamlike creations spawned a lyrical genre
all its own. By his mid-twenties, he occupied a
ramshackle Parisian studio and cultivated friend-
ships with Bohemian poets and artists like Max
Jacob, Guillaume Appollinaire, Chaim Soutine, Robert Delaunay and
Fernand Leger. Chagall thrived in their heady and audacious fellowship
and nurtured a personal, inventive style which endured for a lifetime:
childhood reveries ofJewish communities transformed into richly colored
fantasies populated by figures and objects of religious folklore and village
life, often swimming in space.
Chagall returned to Russia in 1914 and was appointed Commissar
of Fine Arts in his Vitebsk hometown. But conflicts with local authorities
drove him to Moscow where he designed stage sets for Sholem Aleichem's
plays and was attracted to etching and printmaking. Many hundreds of
such illustrations in literary classics, including the Bible, represent most of
his creative production during that period. Chagall resettled in Paris in
1923 and later fled to the U.S. before the Nazi onslaught.
His return to France in the late Forties, and his growing reputation,
launched a new career phase: major commissions from world-famed
institutions. During the ensuing decades he completed a new ceiling for the
Paris Opera and murals for the Metropolitan Opera House lobby. His glass
window adorns the U.N. building and his tapestries hang in the Knesset.
In an ecumenical breakthrough, Chagall was also the first Jewish artist
contracted by the Vatican, in this instance for a stained glass panel for its
audience hall. - Saul Stadimauer

-

I/1
1999

Visit inany more notable Jews at our website: www.dorledor.org
COMMISSION FOR THE DISSEMINATION OF JEWISH HISTORY
Walter & Lea Field, Founders/Sponsors
Irwin S. Field, Chairperson
Harriet F. Siden Chairperson

12 Detroit Jewish News

Students participate in morning prayers.

salaries on the low end at Akiva.
Teachers in the Southfield public
schools average $69,869 per year (in
1996-97, the most recent year for
which data is available), while
Farmington Hills teachers average
$57,623. In the private schools that
are members of ISACS, teachers aver-
age $32,692.
Akiva teachers, by contrast, average
less than $30,000 yearly.
Gross would not provide data on
teacher salaries or turnover. However,
the school paid out $1,271,207 in
salaries and wages for program services
(not including management and gen-
eral) in 1996-97, the most recent year
for which tax forms are available. At
that time, Akiva had 45 teachers,
tutors and counselors (not all full-
time), making the average salary
slightly over $28,000.
Nineteen of the 36 employees
(including teachers) who appear in
Akiva's 1995 yearbook do not appear
in the 1998 yearbook, and 13 of the
22 teachers (59 percent) in the 1995
yearbook do not appear in the 1998
yearbook. According to Akiva
newsletters, seven new teachers
joined the school this fall and four
new teachers joined in fall 1997,
apparently replacing teachers who
had departed.
According to ISACS' Bassett, facul-
ty turnover at "quality private schools"
is "generally slight, although spikes do
occur.

A Question of Ideology

Those who believe Akiva is abandon-
ing centrist Orthodoxy see a trend

dating back to early 1995, shortly
before Gross' arrival.
In March of that year, the board
voted to make all high school classes
single-sex. In the past, Judaic studies
classes had been single-sex and secular
studies co-ed. Centrist Orthodox high
schools around the country vary in
their approach to co-education for sec-
ular studies (most separate boys and
girls for Judaic studies).
According to Rabbi Robert Hirt,
vice president of Yeshiva University's

Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological
Seminary, who oversees the university's

outreach to day schools, the decision
to go co-ed or not does not necessarily
reflect ideology. But Dr. Alvin I.
Schiff, the Irving I. Stone
Distinguished Professor of Education
in Yeshiva University's graduate school

of education, said the trend toward
separating girls and boys is "funda-
mentally impacted by the right-wing
spirirof Judaism that has captured a
lot of Orthodox Jews."
Schiff, who said he spoke at Akiva's

first high school graduation years ago,
was surprised to hear of the change.
"When I saw Akiva, it was a liberal,
modern school," he said. "I guess this
change was in order to accommodate
itself to some of the more Orthodox
that wouldn't send their children to
the high school."
In a 1995 letter announcing Akiva's
new policy, then President Dr. David
Beneson wrote that the change "is not
an indication that Akiva's philosophy
or commitment has changed one
iota." The letter explained the move as
an effort to follow a "halachically

ROAD AHEAD on page 15

