RIFOEL
MANDELTSVAYG (September 22, 1908-July 12, 1956)
He was born in Warsaw, Poland. In 1929 he graduated from the Warsaw Art
School and went on to improve his painting in Paris and Brussels. After returning to Poland, in the 1930s he
exhibited his work at the Zachęta Sztuk Pięknych (Encouragement of fine arts) and
other art galleries. With the outbreak
of WWII in 1939, he fled to Soviet Russia and roamed as far away as Samarkand,
where he painted images from the Jewish devastations, Jewish types from Central
Asia, and (in 1945) received a medal for his works. He returned to Poland in 1946. In 1947 he made his way to Brazil and finally
settled in Montevideo, Uruguay. In 1949
he and the poet Elye Verblun began publishing the journal Bleter far kunst un literatur (Pages for art and literature), and
there in issue no. 1 he published a piece entitled “Yidn in breyshis fun der
kunst” (Jews at the genesis of art). In
1950 a community committee in Buenos Aires, Argentina, published (under the
editorship of Pikhes Bizberg, Dr. L. Zhitnitski, Simkhe Sneh, and M. Zakin)
Mandeltsvayg’s art album with a biographical sketch of the artist as an
introduction “Rifoel mandeltsvaygs kinstlerishe velt” (Rifoel Mandeltsvayg’s
artistic world) by Tsalel Blits, and seventy-three reproductions of his
works. He died suddenly in Buenos Aires.
Sources:
Yitskhok Vaynshenker, Poshet mitokh libshaft (Simply out of love)
(Montevideo, 1955); Vaynshenker, Boyers
un mitboyers fun yidishn yishev in urugvay (Founders and builders of
the Jewish community in Uruguay) (Montevideo, 1957); local news and obituary
notices in the Yiddish press; Who’s Who
in World Jewry (New York, 1955).
Zaynvl Diamant
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