Esther Lurie was an Israeli painter and set designer. After studying at theatre set design and drawing in Belgium, and immigrating to Palestine in 1934, Lurie obtained work by painting and exhibiting her art in Tel Aviv. During the German occupation of Lithuania in 1941, she was residing with family in Kovno, and was deported to the Kovno ghetto. While imprisoned at the Kovno ghetto, and later the Stutthof and Leibitzconcentration camps, Lurie continued to paint and draw art, both under the surveillance of the Germans and clandestinely. After the war, in 1945, Lurie published reproductions of her artwork in the sketchbookJewesses in Slavery. Her sketches and watercolors documenting the Holocaust also served as part of the testimony in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann. She is a two-time recipient of the Dizengoff Prize—she received it first in 1938, for The Palestine Orchestra, and again in 1946, for Young Woman with the Yellow Patch.
Early life and education
Born in Liepāja in 1913, Lurie was one of five children in a religious Jewish family. She studied at the Ezra Gymnasium in Riga, a Hebrew day school, and developed her artistic talent from the age of fifteen. She continued refining her talents by studying theatre set design at the Institut des Arts Décoratifs and drawing at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Belgium from 1931 to 1934.
Career
Lurie immigrated to Palestine in 1934. There, she painted backdrops for the Adloyada parade, the Levant Fair, and the Hebrew Theater in Tel Aviv, in addition to drawing. She won the Dizengoff Prize for Painting and Sculpture in 1938, for The Palestine Orchestra, and was accepted into the Painters and Sculptors Association of Palestine in the same year. Lurie was especially inclined to depict musicians and dancers in her artwork. She held an exhibition of her work at the Cosmopolitan Art Gallery in Tel Aviv in 1938. The exhibit included Dancing, a painting which art critics praised and said it highlighted her developing artistic talent. After returning to Belgium to continue her studies, she moved to Kovno to help her sister Mouta and Mouta's son Reuben. She held several art exhibitions in Kovno prior to the German invasion of Lithuania in June 1941, including an exhibition at the Royal Opera House in 1940, where many of her works were bought by local Jewish institutions and the Kovno State Museum.
Imprisonment during the Holocaust
While residing in Kovno during the German occupation of Lithuania, Lurie was deported to the Kovno ghetto. The ghetto's Judenrat became aware of her artistic talent and arranged for her to create realistic depictions of life in the ghetto, in lieu of forced labour. She formed a collective of artists to work to that end, whose members included Josef Schlesinger, Jacob Lifschitz, and Ben Zion Schmidt. Under the order of the Germans, she painted portraits commissioned by German commanders as well as reproductions of masterpieces. After receiving special permission to draw in the pottery workshop, Lurie asked Jewish potters to prepare ceramic jars that she could use to secure her artwork. She eventually used the jars to bury more than 200 works of clandestinely drawn art under her sister's house in 1943. When the ghetto was liquidated in July 1944, she was deported to the Stutthof concentration camp and then to the Leibitz camp, where she continued her work documenting life within ghettos. While imprisoned at Stutthof, she was asked by women to secretly draw their portraits in exchange for sliced bread. None of the 200 original works that she buried in the Kovno ghetto were recovered. However, photographs of her original artwork were taken beforehand for the Kovno ghetto's archive. 11 of her sketches and watercolors and 20 of these photographs of her works were hidden in crates buried underground by on behalf of the ghetto's Judenrat, which he took to Israel after the war. She used these photographs to reproduce most of her other works from the war.
Post-war career
Lurie was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945. Two months later, she reached a camp of Jewish soldiers from Palestine fighting in the British army in Italy. For the camp's military song and dance performances, Lurie created stage backdrops. She also authored a sketchbook titled Jewesses in Slavery, after an exhibition of drawings was organized by the painter, a soldier in the camp. The sketchbook, published by the Jewish Soldiers' Club of Rome, collected reconstructions of the works she drew at the Leibitz concentration camp. Lurie returned to Palestine in July 1945. There, she married and had two children. While raising her family, she continued to paint and exhibit her work in Israel and abroad. In 1946, she again won the Dizengoff Prize for the second time with her sketch Young Woman with the Yellow Patch, which she drew in the Kovno ghetto. Prior to the Eichmann trial in 1961, in an interview with Maariv, she said, "I am a local Israeli painter. It's time I stopped being the Ghetto Painter." Although she was not required to testify in the trial herself, her sketches and watercolors documenting the Holocaust were approved by the Supreme Court of Israel for their documentary value and served as part of the testimony. Lurie donated much of her work from the time of the Holocaust, which can found in the collections of the Ghetto Fighters' House and Yad Vashem in Israel, both memorials to the Holocaust. After the Yom Kippur War, her work mainly focused on depicting landscapes, especially that of Jerusalem. She died in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1998.
