Painting
An ongoing autobiographical book project about The Holocaust. Begun in 2005, this painting opens into a book that researches world history, politics, art, and the affects and effects of Judaism and specifically the study of ‘Gematria’ (Numerology) upon all events.
 Though the book begins with the horrors of war, destruction and seemingly endless predictions of despair and utter darkness, it ends with the prophetic and optimistic lights of Chanukah, the inner G-d given powers of Creativity in artistic endeavors, and the reminder of free choice in interpretation of the Gematria of the number 44, which can translate to blood and ominous destruction or Light and hope and the belief in a future of Life and redemption. Every person has a world history, within.
 “44-Blood-Degenerate” are the torn pages of my diary found laying in the streets amongst the discarded, strewn and now filthied remains of the victims of the forthcoming holocaust. It is a spec of cosmic reflective dust that hints at the ongoing reverberations of The Holocaust upon every aspect of existence for each member who now carries the effects of each victim into the proceeding generations.
 I once wrote, as a teenager, “I walk the dusty hollows of a mind that could not sleep and gazed upon the encounter of my soul. This piece is about a search into the vast darkness of the soul in this world and the grasping of glimpses of The Light in the process of discovering the strength and purpose of self. It evolved with my effort to get more involved with “Portraits of Survivors”, the program I initiated where my students would sit with Holocaust survivors and in the course of drawing their portraits, learn their own skills of survival and perhaps prevent that nightmare from reoccurring.
 My goal in this work was in placing myself within the context of my background as a 2nd generation Jewess, a woman, a mother and an artist. Each one of these topics evokes overwhelming responses within me.
 I began with the number 44, which has been coming up for me, and others, everywhere for the past several years. My research in seeking an answer as to why included the questioning of a Kabbalist, mystic, as to its Gematria, numerical significance, within the Torah.
 Initially, I took it as a warning, seeing 44 clearly superimposed over the swastika, cross, and “dam”, the Hebrew word for blood, whose numerical value equals 44. And then, I awakened on Tisha b’Av, a most tragic day in Jewish history on which Jews mourn and fast, and my digital clock read 4:44, and my fear of fears was that it also read HELL, in the visual digital linear.
 In the Torah, Bible, there are numerous incidents and passages numbering 44. One was a dire warning of “Degenerate”, ‘Mameres’, which describes in detail how the Cohen, High Priest, is instructed to remove the impurity of ‘Tzaras’ from the house. I relate to its appearance as my indictment for sins committed.
 Hitler, may his name be erased, was responsible for the largest art exhibition in German history entitled, “Entartete Kunst”, “Degenerate Art”, which was Modern Art, to be outlawed and thus confiscated. Hitler believed the Jews were responsible for corrupting the world as the major influence in their acculturation of art and music through religion, metaphysics, philosophy, politics, economics, medicine, Freudian psychology and Einstein’s theories of relativity and quantum physics - all of which redefined reality and the self. However, of the 112 avant-guard artists featured in the exhibit, only 6 were Jews. I’ve depicted the deportation of Jewish surrealist artist, Max Ernst, and Picasso’s painting, “Guernnica”, the defenseless Spanish village, after Hitler’s bombing, in 1937.
 ... Torn pictures from “Kristalnacht”, The Night of Broken Glass, the German pogram of November 9th and 10th, 1938, when 91 Jews were murdered, others deported to concentration camps, 1000 synagogues burned, along with Torahs and literature. This was the beginning of The Final Solution. I’ve included passages from The ‘Yizkor’ Memorial Service for the dead and part of a ‘Yahrzeit‘ commemorative candle.
 As a child, as as a first generation American Jew, being amongst survivors in what was my great-great-grandmother’s hotel in Coney Island, Brooklyn, N.Y., the feeling of being hunted and on the run was always lurking amidst the shadows, cold spots, and dusty dank smells of the steamers in the cellar. 
 Paranoia ... does this say “Victim Mentality”? Blood drips from the very bricks of that German museum flowing through the streets onto revered rabbis on the past into my world and onto my youngest son receiving his first ‘Siddur’, prayer book. The famous iconic “Self Portrait” with Jewish Identity Card” by Jewish artist Felix Nussbaum, before his deportation to and execution in the concentration camp, Auschwitz, captures the ultimate fear in our eyes as we must continuously run for our lives. The Yiddish workds next to it, ‘Macht Shtill’, make yourself still, silent, while hiding, the admonition with which I grew up. Hide-and-seek in that haunted house with my cousins was the ultimate lesson of hiding, and being still in the utter silence of darkness.
 Within the book, are my passport pictures which include my older set of twins and picture from my childhood, Mouseketeer “Doreen” and Hitler’s quotes, “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human ... Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed ... Healthy emotions tell every independent young man every honorable youth that the dirty and filthy covered vermin, the greatest bacteria in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal Away with Jewihs brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!” Included is an article from Walt Disney’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, with a current warning regarding Hamas’ use of Mickey Mouse in their terror training programs to brainwash toddlers.
 My paternal grandfather, Aaron Schwartz, was a Talmud student and son of a rabbi and ‘shochet’, ritual slaughterer who came to America in 1924 to work at his grandmother’s hotel. After five years, he proved passage for his wife, my ‘Bubby’, grandmother, Tziral, and their three children; my father Zechariah, my Aunt Basya, and my Uncle Gedaliah. Unfortunately, my aunt at the age of eight, was sent back to Poland and did not see her parents for ten years, finally resorting to writing a letter to President Roosevelt for assistance in securing a passport. I made a copy of the postcard I found amongst my father’s U.S. Army Medic paraphernalia.
It was dated 1934, and sent to my grandfather by my great-great grandfather from Maciejow, Poland, admonishing my grandfather’s seeming abandonment of his child, my Aunt Basya.
 After WWII, the many feelings of abandonment, resentment, horror, disbelief, jealousies of childhood’s lost, and family ties uncontrollably broken, were the proverbial elephants at our holiday table. The family picture taken the day before my grandmother, father, aunt and uncle left Poland ... records twenty of one hundred members of our family who were later to be brutally killed. One of my grandmother’s first cousin’s, Regina (not in this picture) joined the Polish Resistance, fought in The Warsaw Ghetto uprising and was honored by the State of Israel in 1992. Newspaper articles of her are in The Yad v’Shem Memorial, as well as a documentary of her return to Poland, featured by PBS on Channel 13.
 A picture of my great aunt, Tziral, Uncle Moish and Cousin Yankel, the day they arrived in America, in 1949, unpacking their belongings in my great-great grandmother’s backyard. They had been running through the Polish/Russian woods, hiding in shallow graves and bunkers for eight years. I was told, years later, that my cousin had been kept alive by my great aunt’s nursing him. My parents became his surrogate American parents, and then eight years later, when my father became ill, the roles were reversed and they became part of the extended family that raised me.
 In 1993, I was asked to paint a Holocaust mural. The contours of flames were formed using victim’s names. I called my great uncle, Moishe, asking for the names of those in our family who had perished. He painstakingly began the recall of twenty of the one hundred and twenty family members massacred on one day in Poland, by the Nazis, in Sept. of 1941, and then relayed he couldn’t take it and that I was never to ask this of him again. I felt so embarrassed, sorry and selfish. I so loved and honored him, and thus wanted to draw his portrait and hear our family’s history, but he adamantly and understandably refused, until April of 1004. My cousin scheduled a portrait drawing session during the interim days of the Passover holiday. But instead, as fate will have it, on the very morning I was to sit with my uncle Moishe, I received an early morning call from my cousin informing me that he had passed away. That ‘Yom Hashoah’,”Holocaust Memorial Day”, coinciding with my mother’s date of death five years prior, on April 18th, I was powerfully jolted into the
tenuousness of our lives. It forced my decision to be responsible in making a positive difference in this world, immediately. 
 But how?
 “Portraits of Survivors”, and then “Portraits of Survivors b’Torah”.
 
 King Solomon was granted all for which one could pray and wish in this world - health, love, children, wisdom, fame and fortune, but the essence of what he came to know as “Life”, eluded him. In pursuit of his quest he wrote, ‘Koheles’, “Ecclesiastesis”, read yearly on the Jewish holiday of ‘Shavout’. His words have been memorialized in the famous song, “Turn, Turn, Turn”, by The Birds, “... To everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn, and a time for every purpose under Heaven”. He reached the conclusion that it is in the process of the ongoing daily study of Torah, that one finds The knowledge, inner understanding, and ultimate wisdom of the universe. These are the glints of light into the constant infinite of ongoing miracles of G-d. This is The source of All there Is.

 The Light

 My hope in teaching portrait drawing and especially with “Portraits of Survivors” was in looking behind the superficial into the real person, the life, the vast endless history within. To see that each, now elderly survivor was once a very young, sweet, innocent child with a whole future of dreams ahead.
 And as with any creative act of expression, one discovers so much of oneself in the process.
 In this work, I had gone from the depths of depression, questioning (my) existence, servitude, sickness, suffering, feelings of utter emptiness, betrayal and abandonment, the hole of nothing, hatred lies, deceit, attacks on the weak, the elderly and innocent as in so many instances in not only Jewish history, but 9-11 and now.
 All answers can be found in The Torah because G-D created this world with words formed from the twenty-two Hebrew letters directly related to the twenty-two animo acids in the chain of DNA. Studying the very shapes and sounds of the letters and what the possible combinations reveal is just the eye of the needle into infinite worlds of knowledge. We can focus on the many facets of understanding through the light of Torah. We learn, the only true fear is The Fear of G-d. Without this, there is no stopping evil. Others kill in the name of their gods, but to a Jew, this Life is so sacred that to disconnect a patient of life support one must consult a rabbinic authority schooled in science, medicine and Torah.
 To continue into this wisdom, knowledge and understanding assures a future that holds Light.
 My New York Apple company Logo, was symbolic of the light of a new world for my family. The New York Harbor where Ellis Island and The Statue of Liberty became synonymous as the beacon of the light of freedom, was always the promise of that hope shining into the future.
 In this uncovering into the endless journey into the self, the number 44 became filled with the promise of a future of light.
 When I found a 1t cut brisket to broil for the Passover Seder for $44.00, I saw it as a good sign and worth the money to celebrate our freedom and liberation from inner and outer bondage.
 My once recurring and prophetic childhood nightmare of myself, curly-blond-haired- and blue-eyed at two years of age, in my pink satin Passover outfit, stepping into the hole in the wall in my grandparent’s East Side tenement wall and finding myself in the pitched-black alleyway of great-great grandmother’s hotel with the devil running after me in the darkness. I would scream in horror nightly, awakening into my father’s protective arms until one Chanukah, when at the age of five and a half, my father was late to light the Chanukah candles. He was diagnosed with Hodgkins Disease. The box of 44 Chanukah candles was of the horror of darkness until now, 44 years later I decided to turn it into a window revealing that picture of me along with positive passages connecting the olive oil and Chanukah lights with the coming of ‘Moshiach’, The Messiah, and the Final Redemption.
 We commemorate each birthday by reading King David’s Psalms, corresponding to the number for the next year. Rabbi Yitchak Ginsburgh, world renown Kabbalist, reealed to me that my Hebrew name, D’vorah Leah, is the numerical value of 253, which is the triangle of 22. The triangle of a number is the sum of the numbers that add up t it. This triangle number represents the completions of the letters of the Torah, as alluded to int the verse in Psalm 55:24, ‘ ... v’Ani Evtach Bach’, “... and I will trust in You”. the value of ‘Bach’, is 22, and not coincidentally, part of the very passage that was read for that coming year.
 I am back into the world of my childhood dreams. The “Wizard of Oz” is ‘OZ’, the Hebrew word for innermost strength and solitude, our ultimate challenge.
 The Yiddishism, ‘A mentsh tracht, un Gut Lacht’, “Man plans and g-d laughs,”, makes me laugh. I feel protected in that knowledge that He has it all together.
 That is what it means when we pray, “Shema Yisroel Hshem Elokeynu, Hashem Echad”, G-d is One, He is the Essence of One, The sum of all that is one. All the colors of the world spin into one, white light.
 The uppermost portion of the piece reads, “The ultimate artist is G-d. G-d’s artworks move and breathe, and are a reminder of his constant Being and regeneration of Life. The number 8 is indicative of the spiritual plane above the physical world of 7 colors, sounds, and days of the week. 4 � 4 is the balance attained between these two worlds.
 So receipts with the number 44 are good signs, as the one I saved entering the Lincoln Tunnel ... there’s light at the end of the tunnel. All the clothing mysteriously marked $44 perhaps our future fig leaves to be worn in The Garden of Eden.