The Rebbe And Art

Hendel Lieberman was an artist. Born in 1901 to a Lubavitcher family in the village of Pleshinitz (Pleshchenitsy) in what was then the Russian Empire, Lieberman doodled as a child on scraps of paper and the inside of his siddur and chumash. He lost his father as a young boy, and at the age of 12 was sent to study in the village of Lubavitch, which had been the center of the Chabad movement for nearly a century. There, his artistic talents continued to flower.1

This was a time of great spiritual and political upheaval throughout Eastern Europe, when many young Jews were being lured away from traditional Jewish life by avant garde culture, radical politics and the promise of a utopian new world. The Lubavitcher yeshivahwas founded in 1897 as a bulwark against this revolutionary tide, and Lieberman’s artistic predilections were frowned upon. The yeshivah’s fears were not unwarranted, as Hendel found himself “attracted to the outside world which beckoned with increasing intensity.”2

“The conflict was deep and seemingly fundamental,” the Chassidic writer Heyshke Dubrovsky recounted. For Hendel, “the dilemma appeared irreconcilable: either he remain a Chassidic Jew or renounce his tradition and enter the ‘outside’ world.” He tried running away from Lubavitch a few times, only for his mother to bring him back.

Eventually Lieberman did leave, and by 1920 he was studying art in Moscow. Within a few years, he was married with children and struggling to support his family. A turning point in his artistic career came in 1927, when Lieberman’s sketch won first prize in a national art competition and a scholarship to the Moscow Academy of Art.

"The Skating Rink" by Hendel Lieberman, pencil on paper, 1927. The piece won Lieberman a scholarship to the Moscow Academy of Art.

Via Zev Markowitz / Chai Art Gallery

Lieberman’s career progressed. He was even exhibited in the Soviet capital’s famed Tretyakov Gallery. Then came World War II, when the artist was drafted into the Red Army and wounded multiple times. He returned home to find that his wife and two daughters had been murdered by the Germans. With nothing left of his previous life, Lieberman headed to Samarkand in Soviet Uzbekistan, where a large number of Lubavitcher Chassidim had found refuge during the war.3 In 1946, Lieberman joined Chabad’s Great Escape from the USSR using falsified Polish identity papers. At one station along the journey, a DP camp in Austria, a trunk containing whichever of his paintings he’d manage to salvage was temporarily lost. “[W]ith that almost went my last reason for wanting to live,” Lieberman told an interviewer in 1952.4

Upon reaching Paris, Lieberman found himself confronted by the only things left of his shattered life—his art and his religion. He desperately wanted to know: Could the two be reconciled?