Hannelore Künzl, author of Jüdische Kunst, professor of Jewish Art and teacher at the Institute for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg. An enthusiastic teacher and significant researcher, Prof. Künzl educated a new generation of art historians specializing in the field of Jewish art. Ms. Kunzl attended many Center conferences. We all mourn her untimely death.
Zussia Efron (1910 - 2002) co-editor of Jewish Art (with Cecil Roth, 1957), former director of Mishkan le'Omanut art museum at Kibbutz Ein Harod, researcher, writer and lecturer on Eastern European Jewish art. Born in Vilna, Efron immigrated to Palestine in the 1930s. A well respected scholar on Jewish art, Efron was instrumental in establishing Judaica collections and museums in, among other places, Warsaw, Belgrade and Vilna. As an army of one person, Zussia traveled for many years in the former Soviet Union and its satellites to survey Jewish art treasures, synagogues, their decorations, furniture, ritual objects and cemeteries.
The vast photographic and slide collection which he kept at his studio and was not known until now was donated by his wife Irene and son Ariel to the CJA to be used by the researchers, teachers and students on the premises.
Mendel Metzger, art historian who dealt exclusively with Hebrew illuminated manuscripts. His Ph.D. thesis was published as a vast volume of l’Haggadah illuminé. In collaboration with his art historian wife Thérèse, he wrote the well-known Jewish Life in the Middle Ages .He worked until his untimely death, struck by a car while on a bicycle, returning home from the library of the University of Strasbourg.
Elie Borowski (1913-2003) whose vast collection of Middle Eastern artifacts forms the bulk of Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum. Born in Warsaw, Borowski was educated in Poland’s leading Jewish seminaries before enlisting in the Polish division of the French army at the outbreak of WWII. After the war, he studied at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, the Sorbonne in France, and elsewhere in Europe. He became an expert on ancient Biblical art and moved to Switzerland where he became an antiquities dealer. Over a period of fifty years he assembled an important collection of Ancient Near Eastern art reflecting the cultures and civilizations of the biblical period. Encouraged by former Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, Borowski and his wife Batya created the Bible Lands Museum. They have mounted several important exhibitions focusing on Ancient Jewish art. Batya Borowski is the Director of the Museum.
