David Labkovski's Artwork Creating a Foundation for Learning

The life of Jewish artist David Labkovski was filled with tragedy. Born in Lithuania in 1906, he survived three years of imprisonment in a brutal Siberian gulag during World War II. He then returned to a devastated Lithuania, where over 95% of the Jewish population perished in the Holocaust. Throughout Labkovski’s life (He died in Israel at the age of 85.), he painted the story of his struggles and those of his community—the vanished, as well as the people and places that survived. “If it was a choice between a cup of coffee and paints, it was always paints and paintbrushes,” his great-niece Leora Raikin says of David and his wife, Rivka. “Their entire life’s focus was securing paint supplies in whatever form, to be able to document what had happened.” 

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