Curator and Catalog Editor – Dr. Alek D. Epstein
Opening to the Public as part of an "Advance Visit" – Sunday, November 2, 2025
Festive Event and Catalog Launch – Wednesday, November 19, 2025, at 5:00 PM
Celebratory Event Closing the Exhibition – Wednesday, January 21, 2026, at 5:00 PM
Naftali Bezem (1924–2018) – Eternal Love
Isaac Frenel (1899–1981) – Rabbi with a Torah Scroll
Jacob Wexler (1912–1995) – Small Talk in a Cafe
Yosl Bergner (1920–2017) – Two Klezmers
David Hendler (1904–1984) – Mother and a Child
Meir Pichhadze (1955–2010) – A Woman and a Butterfly
Joseph Kossonogi (1908–1981) – A Young Woman at an Easel
Gershon Knispel (1932–2018) – Violinist
Eliahu Sigard (1901–1975) – A Woman with a Bouquet of Flowers
Zvi Shor (1898–1979) – Still Life with Fruits and Flowers
Ludwig Blum (1891–1974) – Jerusalem, Street in the Old City
Albert Goldman (1922–2011) – Shepherd
A Collection of Words about a Collection of Paintings
Dr. Alex Gizunterman
I was born in the city of Kiev, which has a history stretching back for over a millennium. However, even prior to history, this city was ruled by nature – which, with great skill, filled it with ranks of chestnut trees, and endowed each season with a distinct, impressive appearance. The green, blooming spring is succeeded by the sunny summer, which then gives way to the gold of autumn leaves, and to winter… The winter played a trick on me. Overnight, everything was covered with a white sheet. On my way to kindergarten, I perceived a similarity between the snow and my great love: sugar. I loved it spread on bread, or even in an ordinary spoon. And so, I dreamed that I was surrounded with a boundless expanse of sugar. While walking in the yard, I ate the snow, expecting to feel sweetness. And then, I came down with laryngitis, which left me bedridden. All my toys had been packed into two crates, and I had already come to know them well. During the days of my sick leave, I kept looking for something new – and I found a treasure in my father’s closet: albums with stamps. A great variety of colorful pieces of paper, the most beautiful of which had been placed in an art album. I studied them carefully and learned the names of the artists. Occasionally, the artists themselves were depicted on the stamps, and I would then make sure to attach the artist to their creation, as though righting some past wrong.
In the summer, our regular destination was Feodosia, on the shores of the Black Sea. There, I learned the concept of the beach, and also that of the museum, thanks to the house of the painter Ivan Aivazovsky. His large paintings looked real, and the frames seemed the only barriers to reality. I spent the summer of 1986 elsewhere. Following the Chernobyl disaster earlier that year, my grandparents had spirited me away to Moscow. Thus, when I was six, we found ourselves in a single room of a communal apartment, with no games to play. And so, every day we would go to the Obraztsov Puppet Theater, to look at the clock on the wall, waiting for its twelve figures to come to life at noon. They were my game; they were my friends.
After our return to Kiev, I undertook the challenge of learning to ride a bicycle. I practiced the riding and the falls in the park near our home, which attracted me on some subconscious level; it was named Babi Yar. At the time, my mother had a subscription for the Family and School magazine, whose last page was dedicated to artworks. I would regularly check the contents of our mailbox, having an interest of my own in the monthly magazine issue: cutting out and collecting the pages with the artworks. I had to give up on this hobby when we left the city yet again, this time for good.
I was ten years old when we immigrated to Israel, and I began to collect the experiences of a new immigrant in Israel. Thirty years later, I would realize why I collected them. As a child psychiatrist, I have been exposed to countless stories, and I could only regret that I lacked the literary talent of my teacher and idol, Anton Chekhov. However, I met another highly talented person, the poet Yehuda Atlas, who had been collecting stories about the difficulties experienced by adolescents, and reworking them into a book of poetry. At one of our meetings, after I had given him material for new poems, we discussed his celebrated book It’s Me. I told him about myself, and this tale, with some minor additions, became a poem about my journey. Even before setting out on this journey, I got to see a performance of The Fiddler on the Roof in Kiev. Since then, I have been looking for opportunities to watch new shows. Once, after attending a stage play with Orna Porat, I was so impressed by her character that I sent her a letter of appreciation. I received a response, written upon a postcard with a painting by Rembrandt. I took a good look at both sides of the postcard and decided that, from now on, after each visit to a museum, I would buy a postcard with my favorite painting.
Before becoming a child psychiatrist, I had spent another chapter of my life as a medical student in Italy. I lived in the city of Ferrara, in a building of the ghetto, which appears in the Oscar-winning film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. In Italy, art suffuses the very air. One breathes it in while walking in the street, while riding a bicycle – and, certainly, while visiting the museums. During my study breaks, I would rush to the secondhand bookstores. I pampered myself with art books, once again surrounded by colorful pictures, constant friends. However, in addition to attending classes, a student must also work. Among other things, I found an opportunity to repay Italy, at least a little, for all the centuries of history and culture that it had so graciously lavished upon me. In the city of Salò, which had once been the seat of Mussolini’s short-lived Fascist republic, I lectured on Jewish history and culture. I was awarded my degree in a hall named after another student of the same university – an old friend of mine, whose face adorned a stamp that I had kept ever since coming into possession of my father’s albums. This friend is Nicolaus Copernicus, who wrote a brief article asserting that it was the planets that orbited the sun, and not the other way round.
After returning to Israel, I went to a fair with my mother and looked at the pictures. She bought me one of them, as a gift on the occasion of my graduation. I then developed an interest in painting, and began to read up on the existing galleries and art sales. I obtained catalogues, and would leaf through them during my lengthy shifts as an intern. The first painting I bought, which marked the beginning of my collection, is still the one dearest to my heart. It reflects the sadness that is part of the legacy of the Jewish people – alongside the humor, the traditions, and the mutual solidarity. The artist Maurycy Trębacz perished in the Holocaust. I felt that, by hanging his painting on the wall, I was bringing him and his characters to life. Merely buying the painting was not enough for me, and I decided to restore it. I had some specialists clean it, repair a blemish, and add a protective cover. I mended and protected the painting, giving it what the artist himself had been prevented from doing. I was very satisfied. So, I kept looking for other paintings. As a bachelor living on my own, I would devote much attention to heritage: carefully reconstructing the genealogical tree of my family, volunteering with Holocaust survivors, and working to commemorate the Holocaust. The paintings I bought at the time were similar in terms of subject matter – sad Jews. Ten years later, my marital status changed. I married at the age of forty, and went on to have three sons over the next five years. This changed everything for me: Even the planets began to move differently, according to a formula that has yet to be worked out; even the contents of the paintings were altered. The collection became more diverse, acquiring some abstract shapes, still lifes, and landscapes. Since I prefer Israeli products over imported ones, I have also decided to focus on Israeli artists. None of them stayed in their places of birth. Some fled persecutions, while others took up arms. Even in times of peace, they would wander from land to land, searching for the painted and the realistic views, in order to distill their styles and mix their sensations with the works of nature – an angle of a tree branch, the wrinkles of a face. Israel was either their destination or an intermediate station. However, my collection does have a single exception – a very small painting by Aivazovsky. After all, I couldn’t let the past just slip away, could I? And if, one day, Israel is covered with snow, I will make sure to taste it for sweetness.
Figurative Art at its Best:
An Exhibition of Paintings from the Collection of Dr. Alex Gizunterman
Dr. Alek D. Epstein
Artistic Director and Curator, the Moshe Castel Museum
of Jewish Israeli Art in Ma’ale Adumim
Our current exhibition showcases a collection of relatively modest size, but of outstanding quality, loaned to the museum by Dr. Alex Gizunterman. He was born in Ukraine, grew up in Israel, studied medicine in Italy, and returned here. His biography is the story of the stunning success of an immigrant who arrived in Israel in 1990, and who now comes to our Museum of Jewish-Israeli Art with a collection that can be rivaled by very few native Israelis. Some of our past exhibitions have featured works from the collection of Eli Schechter, another immigrant from 1990, and I am very happy to see people like myself, who came from a different cultural background, starting out penniless in this country – and who have since fallen in love with Israeli culture, and are now putting the works bought with their hard-earned money at our disposal, for the edification and enjoyment of the general public.
Other works by some of the artists in Dr. Gizunterman’s collection have already made an appearance at our museum these past two years: Three pieces by Naftali Bezem starred in this year’s exhibition Survive, in Order to Create: 18 Israeli Artists – Holocaust Survivors, while an impressive artwork by Ludwig Blum was included in the exhibition Our Eternal Capital: Jerusalem in Israeli Art. More than forty drawings by Isaac-Alexander Frenel were displayed in his solo exhibition From Odessa to the Artists’ Quarter in Safed via Paris, which we held on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of this important artist. Additionally, graphic works by Frenel and by seven other artists – Emmanuel Mané-Katz, Aharon Giladi, David Hendler, Yossi Stern, Moshe Bernstein, Albert Goldman, and Naftali Bezem – featured last year in the exhibition Self-Portrait: The Figure and Soul of the Painter in Israeli Art. However, the present collection includes representative oil paintings by most of these artists, letting our visitors greatly enrich their understanding of the artistic worlds of those men. Some of them passed away more than fifty (Ludwig Blum), or even sixty (Mané-Katz), years ago, while others (e.g., Naftali Bezem) died in the last decade. But, regardless of the historical distance between us and them, the importance of these artists has remained undiminished, and their works definitely merit a museum exhibition.
Some of the artists visit our museum for the first time. Four of these – Jacob Wexler, Avigdor Stematsky, Marcel Janco, and Zvi Meirovich – were, together with Moshe Castel, members of the “New Horizons” group in the first decade of Israeli independence. Thus, the museum visitors will have a rare opportunity to see the art of Moshe Castel’s friends alongside his own works in the permanent exposition.
It is very hard for a young collector (Dr. Gizunterman is only forty-five years old) to lay their hands on the very best works of any given artist; usually, such pieces are zealously guarded by the artist’s heirs, by museums, or by veteran collectors. Hence, it gives me particular pleasure to note that five artworks in this exhibition (by Isaac Frenel, Jacob Wexler, Zvi Shor, and Gershon Knispel) are among the best works of their respective creators. I believe that these pieces from Dr. Gizunterman’s collection ought to be included in any future exhibition of these artists’ oeuvre, because of their outstanding merits.
This collection, like the previous exhibitions that I have curated at the Museum, proves yet again that Israel was home to some amazing artists who have been unjustly forgotten. I would like to offer my deepest thanks to Dr. Alex Gizunterman for helping bring them back into the artistic limelight – and I invite everyone to come visit the exhibition.
