Professor Boris Schatz Dies in American Hospital

Professor Boris Schatz, the founder of the Bezalel Jewish School of Art in Jerusalem, died last night in hospital at Denver.

Professor Schatz, who was born in the district of Kovno, was in his 55th year. He was a student at Yeshiba, when he fell under the influence of the Haskalah movement, lost his religious faith, and took up secular education. He was fifteen when he went to Vilna, where he entered the School of Drawing, suffering considerable privation, until a Russian General, Dinamovitch, took him up. The famous Jewish sculptor, Antakolsky, on one of his visits to his native town, Vilna, arranged for him to get a stipendium enabling him to study at the Petersburg Academy of Art, but the Czarist authorities refused to give him a permit to reside in Petersburg. He thereupon settled in Warsaw, studying at the School of Fine Arts, and took up sculpture. He then lived for about six years in Paris, afterwards going to Bulgaria, where he founded a School of Art, at which he was appointed Professor, and he was the official sculptor to the Bulgarian Government and Court. His wife left him after several years, taking with her their only child, a daughter, and he was plunged into despair. At this time he began to interest himself in Jewish questions, and became a Zionist.

He founded the Bezalel Jewish School of Art in Jerusalem in 1906, and since then he had devoted himself solely to the promotion of Jewish art in Palestine.

Professor Schatz visited America several time, obtaining funds there which repeatedly enabled him to keep the Bezalel School open when it was on the verge of closing down and once, in 1928, after it had already been closed for a few months.

Professor Schatz also wrote much on Jewish art and on various Jewish questions in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian and Bulgarian.

In 1927, on the occasion of the 20th. anniversary of the founding of the Bezalel School, he published a Utopian tale, in which he pictured Jerusalem as he imagined it in the future.

In addition to its work of reviving Jewish art in Palestine, the Bezalel has through the Bezalel workshops provided a means of livelihood for hundreds of young people engaged in artistic craft work.

Attached to the school is the Jewish National Museum which, founded at the same time, was also directed by Professor Schatz, and contains over 5,000 paintings, statues and other works of art, including some by famous men like Joseph Israels, Max Liebermann, and Henry Glicenstein.