Nathan Rapoport, a sculptor whose monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is probably the best known work of its kind, died here Thursday night of an apparent heart attack. He was 76.
Funeral services will be held Monday at the Magen David Adom Blood Center in Ramat Gan, Israel. There, his latest work, “Brotherhood of Man,” a nine-foot-high bronze statue, was dedicated May 7.
Rapoport received the Polish government’s Polonia Restituta Medal for his “Warsaw Ghetto Uprising” monument erected in 1948 on Zamenhoff Street in the Polish capital, where the doomed struggle began in 1943.
He was named Officier d’ Academic by the French government and awarded the Joseph Handleman Prize in the Arts of the Jewish Academy of Arts and Sciences in New York. On May 12, he received the Herbert Adams Memorial Medal for Achievement in American Sculpture from the National Sculpture Society. His work has been exhibited in 12 countries.
It includes a “Memorial to Jewish Fighters of World War II,” erected in Paris in 1950; “Job” at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem; “Scroll of Fire” in the Judaean hills near Jerusalem; “Monument to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs” in Philadelphia; and “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel” in Toronto.
One of his recent works, “Liberation,” depicting an American GI carrying a concentration camp survivor to freedom, stands at Liberty State Park in New Jersey.
Rapoport was born in Warsaw in 1911 and began to study sculpture at the age of 14. He survived World War II at a labor camp in Siberia and went to Israel in 1948. He came to the United States in 1959 and was naturalized in 1965. He made his home in New York and Ramat Gan.
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