Auction 5 Eretz Israel, settlement, anti-Semitism, Holocaust and She'erit Ha-Pleita, postcards and photographs, letters by rabbis and rebbes, Chabad, Judaica, and more
By DYNASTY
Apr 1, 2020
1 Abraham Ferera, Jerusalem., Israel

The auction will take place on Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 18:00 (Israel time).


 According to the instructions, we are unable to display the items in this auction to the audience In our office. We apologize to the audience who requested to come to the items display. Health and happiness to our customer, and to all Beit Israel!

The auction has ended

LOT 63:

Esther Lurie - Etching - a girl with a yellow badge. According to a drawing made in the Kovno ghetto


Start price:
$ 100
Buyer's Premium: 22%
VAT: 17% On commission only

Esther Lurie - Etching - a girl with a yellow badge. According to a drawing made in the Kovno ghetto


Esther Lurie [1913-1998] An engraving of a girl with a yellow badge, signed in pencil in Hebrew and English.


Esther Lurie - an award-winning painter and stage designer and decor. In 1939 she traveled to Kaunas to visit her sister and, following the German occupation in June 1941, was forced to remain in the Kaunas Ghetto and then in camps. While in the ghetto, Luria walked around various workshops. At the pottery workshop, she drew with the consent of the German director, where she request from the Jewish potters to prepare some large jugs for her to store her paintings. She buried her paintings inside the jugs and temporarily handed them over to the Judenrat. On the day of the Aktion on October 26, 1943, when three thousand Jews from the ghetto were deported to work camps in Estonia, she decided to hide the vases in the ground in a small warehouse near her sister's house. The warehouse stood next to a concrete wall, which secured their preservation even if the houses were on fire. Luria wrote a few explanatory words on each side of the sketch, a date when it was created and even added a letter to those who found these vases. In all, these were about two hundred drawings and watercolors of 25x35 cm.


Upon the liquidation of the Kaunas (Kovno) ghetto, she was deported to the Stutthof camp, where she was separated from her sister. Her sister and niece were sent to Auschwitz. In the camp she could hardly draw. Art was used for here as a barter for food, as it was in other camps during the period. Later, Lurie wrote:


"I managed to get a pencil and small pieces of paper from one of the reporters in the concentration camp. I started to draw types of women. Girls, theirs "friends" Of the prisoners and would receive food presents, ask me to draw them. The payment was a slice of bread. I also listed women characters wearing "pajamas". They were painted in thin pencil on bad paper, which I got from a girl working in the prisoner register, the paintings I hid in my clothes for the five months we were in the labor camp." [Esther Lurie, Drawings: Women in a Labor Camp, YL Peretz, Tel Aviv, 1962, p. 21].


Her paintings are a direct testimony to Nazi acts during World War II. The painting "girl with a yellow badge" was created by Lurie in the Kaunas Ghetto in the midst of the horror days. Later, Luria won this piece in the Dizengoff Award. In July 1945, she returned to Israel and was received with great excitement. Her stories were published in the press and her paintings were exhibited in many exhibitions.


Engraving size 15x10 cm. Page size: 28x19 cm. Very good condition.