Objects Tell Stories: Rosenbaum’s Mizrah Across Six Generations
Explore the mizrah by Israel Dov Rosenbaum that inspired Kehinde Wiley, and the intersectional family story behind it, as told by Rosenbaum’s great-great-granddaughter Amy Shimshon-Santo
What would you give your child if you knew you might never see them again? Israel Dov Rosenbaum, my paternal great-great-grandfather, gave his daughter Bessie papercut artworks he made by hand. They are now considered to be among the greatest surviving examples of Jewish paper cutting. Art is a vessel for our knowledge, values, and cultures. It can also be a gift of love that connects the generations. One of the paper cuts was a mizrah (מִזְרָח), designed to orient Bessie East, toward Jerusalem, from wherever she landed in the diaspora. Another was an amulet for expectant mothers to protect their descendants. Since Israel’s Hebrew name contained the letters of one of the names of God, he reshaped the lines of a lamed (ל) into a lamed-aleph (ל-א) in his signature to protect its sanctity. Six generations later, these gifts to his daughter continue to inspire new stories.
It would be impossible for me to tell you a complex, 150-year-old story in a few words. But I can tell you a tale about art, culture, and family. The papercuts of my great-great-grandfather Israel Dov Rosenbaum reveal the power of art and culture to ground us in history, create spaces for community connection, and imagine brighter futures.
This story points to different aspects of my family tree. I think about culture in terms of seven generations. My heritage is 99.9% Ashkenazi, and my family’s futures are Jewish, Black, and Latinx. My ancestors fled fascism in Europe. No one who remained survived. My father was born in New Jersey, and my mother was born in Jerusalem under British colonial rule. My children’s father is from Salvador da Bahia, the Black Mecca of Brazil. Our family lives in the United States, Israel, Canada, Uruguay, and Brazil. This story offers a narrative that affirms possibilities for Jewish and Black love, and ethical approaches to immigration, inclusion, and art. I would like to think that Israel had his hand in this somehow, albeit as an ancestor.
In December 2022, my 90-year-old mother Bruria, a fine artist in her own right, received a box of old calendars and address books produced by the Jewish Museum in New York emblazoned with Israel’s mizrah. The box also contained a copy of the original gift agreement arranged by Israel Dov’s grandson Sidney with his second wife Helen Finkel. What should Mom do with the box?
“Throw it away,” my brother said.
“Give it to Amy,” she decided.
We rummaged through it together. I searched online in the Jewish Museum’s collection for his artwork with the aim of requesting copies for the family. Then, quite unexpectedly, a url popped up. Israel Dov’s artwork was somehow linked with the esteemed portrait artist Kehinde Wiley. Huh? What does my great-great-grandfather have to do with Kehinde Wiley?
Unbeknownst to my family, Wiley had chosen Israel Dov’s mizrah as an immersive background for a portrait in his series The World Stage: Israel. He had repainted Israel Dov’s iconography and had centered within it a handsome portrait of a young Jewish Israeli man of Ethiopian descent, Alios Itzhak. When I saw our family mizrah (1877) beside the Alios Itzhak portrait (2011) it struck me in a profound way that ignited mixed emotions and the desire to learn more.
I felt proud to see that Israel Dov’s work was being honored. I also felt a sense of loss when I noticed his signature covered over by the portrait. I wanted him to be remembered, not erased. We had grown up admiring Israel Dov’s paper cuts on the eastern walls of our homes. I missed his amazing images of tree branches and curling text, and a temple guarded by unicorns, fish, and oxen in colorful geometrical shapes. His work was a reminder that we come from something beautiful, not only from painful stories of war or genocide. At the same time, it was comforting to know that the Jewish Museum is able to care for them properly as fragile objects.**
The new portrait is gorgeous. Wiley’s series speaks to my family in myriad ways including my father’s lineage, my mother’s birthplace in Jerusalem, and as a family who descend from Ashkenazi and African diasporas. Seeing Black and Jewish imagery together in Wiley’s work filled an important need for me. As a young woman, I was once told by a religious elder that Jewish culture is maintained through the family and that marrying someone who is not Jewish would constitute the death of my culture.
“You can’t do that,” he said.
A quick glance at my DNA reveals that this idea prevailed throughout my family history. On the 23andMe App, I’m all aqua — 99.9% Ashkenazi, while my children’s father is a rainbow of geographies, 85% of which are Sub-Saharan African. We raised our kids with the belief that being a family of different heritages inspires the opportunity to learn and know twice as much: 200% not half. This means honoring our global connections, and practicing the best qualities of Jewishness, Candomble, and Ifa. In my poem “sidur / a new book could be written,” I make this wish: “may the bloody generations of outsidering end with us.” It is exhilarating to see how Wiley’s work connects my great-great-grandfather’s vision of beauty and belonging with anti-racist values and affirmation of Blackness. Wiley’s The World Stage: Israel centers multiple expressions of Jewishness, Blackness, and masculinity.
When I told my family about Wiley’s portrait within Israel Dov’s mizrah, we all got to talking. How had we become separated from the mizrah itself? How had the mizrah’s story continued to evolve? I even posted on social media about my surprise and my friends gawked in disbelief. A friend of my daughter had studied the mizrah and didn’t even know it was made by one of her best friend’s ancestors.
Many social forces separate families from their stories and their heritage. Assimilation, colonization, and genocide forge barriers that make it difficult to know one’s origins, communicate with parents and grandparents, or read our ancient texts. We can sustain our mother tongues. Rosenbaum’s papercuts and Wiley’s portraits remind us we need not be defined by trauma. We are also defined by beauty and restoration.
In my family, my grandfather playfully called himself “Shloime from Podkamien.” Shloime Rosenbaum was renamed Sidney Finkel in the United States, and his Yiddish was replaced by English. A similar dynamic occurs when Ethiopian Jews in Israel are asked to rename themselves or supplant Amharic with monolingual Hebrew. The price of inclusion should not mean the loss of culture, language, and our unique differences. Instead, I welcome polylingualism to enjoy cultural continuity. We can speak as many languages as we wish.
Culture, ritual, and art are tools for teaching and learning. I see Israel Dov Rosenbaum paper cuts as his way of connecting our community to a sense of place through his mizrah, and manifesting positive futures through his amulet for expectant mothers. Similarly, Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of Alios Itzhak honors Jewish African heritage and imagines new futures through art.
The paper cuts and painting have been diligently analyzed by art historians in the book that accompanied the exhibition of Wiley’s The World Stage: Israel in 2011. As a living contemporary painter, there are opportunities to learn more about Kehinde Wiley’s life and work. Little has been known about Israel Dov Rosenbaum, and I can fill in some basic information from the family. He lived in the shtetl of Podkamien in the 1800s when the shtetl was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His daughter Bessie fled Europe in the late 1800s for the United States. Israel Dov and his wife, whose name we do not know, raised my grandfather Shloime until Bessie was able to send for him. This took nine years. He was her child from a levirate marriage. She fled Europe to escape Aryan supremacy and fascism, and, most likely, a forced marriage. In New Jersey, she co-created a new family with a partner of her choice named Bernard Finkel. She was involved in the Sisterhood of Temple B’nai Abraham led by Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who spoke at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. My father was one of Sidney’s two sons, George and David, both children from his first marriage to Reva Mucha who emigrated to the United States from Kherson.
I was very curious about how Israel Dov’s work came to be used in Kehinde Wiley’s painting. I emailed the Jewish Museum and spoke with their curatorial staff. They immediately added the names of living relatives to the object metadata, and, a few months later, they invited me to write this post from a family perspective.
Meanwhile, Kehinde Wiley had an opening of new works in Los Angeles where I live. I went with the hope of meeting him. The line to get in snaked around the block. Inside, I noticed the book The World Stage: Israel and was able to flip through its pages. Israel Dov’s iconography was wrapped inside the cover, and featured in the opening essay, “Yearning for Jerusalem.” The essay discusses the mizrah from an art historical perspective. The book cited my great-great-grandfather’s name, the year the mizrah was completed, and the place Podkamien. Missing were any details of the person who made the work, or how it came to be in the Jewish Museum collection.
The gallery opening was loud, festive, and boisterous. I pushed through the crowd and found Wiley beside an enormous painting posing for photographs. I waited in line, and when it was my turn, I congratulated him and asked if I could quickly share a strange story. I opened the book, pointed to the page, and said, “This is my great-great-grandfather.”
He titled his head to one side, “Excuse me?”
I felt like a ghost, a living emissary of a dead object in a catalog. Here stands a descendant of an image that you have painted. My body became a reminder that artworks are made by people. I touched my index finger to the page and spoke our names aloud: “Israel Dov Rosenbaum, Shloime Rosenbaum (Sidney Finkel), David Finkel (my father), me. Israel Dov Rosenbaum is my great-great-grandfather.”
He got the message and pulled me in close for a hug.
“We must honor this somehow!” Wiley said, reaching out a long arm to his studio manager.
“I don’t believe that my great-great-grandfather would have ever imagined that this would have happened with his mizrah,” I said. “I also don’t believe that he could have imagined that his great-great-great-grandchildren would be both Jewish and Black.”
The sounds, bodies, and colors of the crowded party swirled around us, but I felt at peace inside. I had tried to do the right thing for my ancestors’ memory. Israel Dov Rosenbaum’s artwork has taken an unimaginable journey from a rural shtetl to an urban megalopolis, from a home space to prominent museums and galleries. His imagination traveled by foot, horse, train, and boat from Podkamien through Hamburg to New York, California, and Jerusalem.
“Your great-great-grandfather was an artist?!” someone asked me at Wiley’s opening.
I never got to meet Israel Dov Rosenbaum, but I did know his grandson, my grandfather Sidney. My thoughts circled back to our kitchen table where I once interviewed him with my father David. This gave me a sense of what life was like for children in Podkamien.
“Jews didn’t get to go to school,” he stated matter-of-factly. He wanted me to never take access to public education for granted. I also learned from him about gender segregation. The boys went to the Rabbi’s house to study Torah and the girls would stay home and do chores.
“Lunch was a crust of bread,” he said. “Sometimes we would rub a clove of garlic on it for flavor.”
I removed my hands from my pockets and looked up. Artist. Of course my great-great-grandfather was an artist, but I don’t know if he would have referred to himself that way. He created beauty for his family and community’s spiritual sustenance. His art came from a completely different context from this pristine, white-walled gallery we were standing in on La Brea Boulevard in Los Angeles. The arts flow through my family without end. My mother is a fine artist. I am a poet and dancer, my son is a composer, and my daughter is a filmmaker.
“Yes,” I said. “He was an artist, but in a very different time and place.”
The Rosenbaum mizrah now links six generations to an ancient and evolving story of identity, family, and community. Two works of art — Israel Dov Rosenbaum’s mizrah and Kehinde Wiley’s Alios Itzhak — now exist in eternal relationship.
We pushed open the gallery doors. Outside, the brisk night engulfed our bodies. I filled my lungs with air.
Turns out, my friend had videoed the hug. I shared it in a group text with my family.
“Aṣẹ oo” my son Avila wrote back, blessing our encounter in Yoruba.
“So, he was nice?” my brother Adam texted.
“Yes,” I bubbled back.
“Well, he’s a part of the family now,” my mother Bruria said. “That is the pleasure.”
Then Israel Dov Rosenbaum’s great-great-great-granddaughter, my daughter Reva, chimed in.
“That is beautiful.”
** The Mizrah was exhibited alongside Kehinde Wiley’s painting in the exhibition Kehinde Wiley/The World Stage: Israel on view at the Jewish Museum from March to July 2012. It was most recently included in Scenes from the Collection, the Jewish Museum’s collection exhibition, from January to June 2018, also installed next to the Wiley painting. Because it is a light-sensitive work, the mizrah cannot be exhibited for prolonged periods but an image of it is on the object label for Wiley’s painting currently on view.
Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo is a writer, teacher, and catalyst who believes that creativity is a powerful tool for personal and social transformation. Her writing and community work nourish inclusive cultural ecologies for planetary justice. Connect with her at www.amyshimshon.com
Special thanks to Ann Force, Sanford Sherman, Rich Abels, Kehinde Wiley, Georgia Harrell, Cameryn Hines, Karen de Sa, Rabbi Yonasan Perry, and the staff of the Jewish Museum.
