Salisbury Cathedral Wm Golding's The Spire Edward Rutherford's Sarum

http://majorityoftwo.blogspot.com/2009/03/bowl-of-roses.html

My comments in this blog about art and the imagination are certainly apropos.

Depictions in art, literature and
filmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salisbury_Cathedral Salisbury Cathedral by John
Constable, ca. 1825. As a gesture of appreciation for John Fisher, the Bishop of
Salisbury, who commissioned this painting, Constable included the Bishop and his
wife in the canvas (bottom left).The cathedral is the
subject of famous paintings by John Constable. The view depicted in the
paintings has changed very little in almost two centuries.The cathedral is also
the subject of William Golding's novel The Spire which deals with the
fictional Dean Jocelin who makes the building of the spire his life's work.In Edward Rutherfurd's historical novel Sarum, the narrative deals
with the human settlement of the Salisbury area from pre-historic times just
after the last Ice Age to the modern era. The construction of the
Cathedral itself, its famous spire, bell tower and Charter House are all
important plot points in the novel, which blends historic characters with
invented ones.The cathedral featured as the setting for the
2005 BBC television drama Mr. Harvey Lights a Candle, written by Rhidian
Brook and directed by Susanna White. A teacher takes a party of unruly London
fifth-form school children on an outing to the cathedral, and, unbeknownst to
them, marking the day 21 years previously when he had proposed to his girlfriend
who had later committed suicide. The journey is also his
personal pilgrimage to regain his lost spirituality.The cathedral was the
subject of a Channel 4 Time Team programme that was first broadcast on February
08, 2009 Art coming to life!

There is a certain leap of the imagination necessary in any appreciation of art. The mind has a life of its own embedded in art, and appreciation of art makes us literate in the biggest sense of the word.Salisbury Cathedral has a fascinating background as referenced in the wicki article above and was the setting of Mr Harvey Lights and the novel Sarum as referenced above. This Salisbury Cathedral I assume is the painting in the post, the English Cathedral.

Jozef the father of Janusz Korczak as erudite and learned

Misza Wroblewski in this picture

Mezenin

In front of Dom Sierot

http://korczak.com/Biography/kap-2.htm

He was erudite as a scholar intent on demthologizing the Talmud as stated. He, quoting the German and Hebrew sources, knew both German and Hebrew to accomplish this task of making the abstruse familiar, a familiar topic understandable to Pole and Jew alike. He did not take the easier route as was often done of condemning the book but sought by scholarly love to make it understandable. The book was blamed by Poles and assimilated Jews for the "evil behavior" of the Jews . His erudite overview quoting the Hebrew sources gives us a glimpse of his stature as scholar and his role as teacher and lecturer in Jewish marriage law at Kalisz where he met leading Jewish families and met his wife,then wife to be, Cecylia Gebicka,Janusz' mother. He was 30, she 17. Her father Adolf Gebicki was a textile manufacturer and assimilated Jew as well.Adolf was the son of a doctor with a moral fervor akin to Jozef's. Adolf was a folk hero and "saved the poor Jews of Kalisz from homelessness by convincing the governor to spare their dilapidated tenements from demolition. This bespeaks social action born from social concern for his kindred. Janusz had these same qualities as did his maternal grandfather and transferred that concern for acting in the lives of children and establishing orphanages.Adolf's wife and son moved to Warsaw to be near his daughter Cecylia, by now assuredly Jozef's wife and Janusz' mother.He died two years later and Emilia moved in with the couple.

Jozef´s last major publication, in 1871, was his dissertation on Talmudic
divorce law, a subject in which he specialized. Praised in an introduction by
his Warsaw University law professor for being the first to make this esoteric
topic accessible to the Polish people, Jozef was clearly intent on
demythologizing the Talmud, which many Poles blamed for the strange and even
"evil" behavior of the Jews. Unlike other assimilated Jews who joined the Poles
in criticizing the holy book as a backward influence on their people, Jozef
gives an erudite overview of Jewish law (quoting both German and Hebrew sources)
as it operated in Poland from the eleventh century to the nineteenth.
There
are no records as to when and how Jozef Goldszmit met his wife, Cecylia Gebicka,
but it may have been in 1874 when he lectured on Jewish marriage law in Kalisz,
an old industrial town in western Poland. He was thirty, and she seventeen. It
is probable that Jozef had introductions to the leading Jewish families in
Kalisz, among whom was Cecylia´s father, Adolf Gebicki. A successful textile
manufacturer active in both Jewish and Polish circles, Adolf, who himselfwas the
son ofa doctor, had an assimilated background and moral fervor similar to
Jozef´s. (He was even something of a folk hero to the poor Jews of Kalisz whom
he saved from homelessness by persuading the Governor to spare their dilapidated
tenements marked for demolition.) The following year, when he was fifty-three,
Adolf was "felled like an oak and paralyzed" (as his obituary would read). He,
his wife Emilia, and his son moved to Warsaw, perhaps to be near his daughter,
who was by then either married or engaged to Jozef. When he died two years
later, Emilia moved in with the newly married couple.
Although Korczak wrote
with deep affection in the Ghetto Diary of his " Grannie " (the only grandparent
he knew, and the only person in his household who "understood" him), he was more
reticent about his complex relationship with his mother, whose picture he kept
on his desk all his life. " My mother. Later about that, " he noted. But there
was to be no later.

II Jozef the father of Janusz Korczak Portraits of Famous Jews Moses Montefiore

Misza Wrobliewski right side of Korczak right picture

Cultural league dom sierot

dining room Dom Sierot

One of the orphans Szlomo Nadel?

The monographs crafted by Janusz father and uncle told of highly remarkable Jews who not accidentally propelled the world to higher consciousness. These proponents were part of the Jewish soul, so I have read, yet they were assimilated Jews steeped in Judaism, and philanthropists placed in positions to maximize their good to the then known world and the unfolding world.Montefiore and others fought with the force of virtue.Jozef expounded on these Jews as both loyal Jews and loyal citizens. The Polish citizenry would never countenance their status and regarded them with utmost suspicion which was not at all the general verdict of history. These brothers wanted to raise the level of Jewish and Polish consciousness soon forgotten in the pogrom activities that many Polish peasants engaged in. Such idealism was their obsession and a dangerous one for it focused the Polish mentality on the only too familiar and age old ancient preoccupation with raw anti semitism. This was the danger of their liberal intellectualism as it was termed in that it drew the attention to Jewry of the shtetls and to the ancient hatreds smoldering and awakened by the liberal intelligentsia. Note some photos of the activities of son Janusz in his activity with the orphanages with which he was involved. Consciousness was to be raised in a posthumous generation who truly appreciated the down to earth work he was obsessed in and not the flowery literature penned by his uncle and father, which precipitated consciousness of a sort, but Janusz' activities blared in one's face after the fact.

http://www1.yadvashem.org/visiting/temp_visiting/temp_index_korczak.html

Jozef also collaborated with Jakub on a series of monographs called
Portraits of Famous Jews, in which they hoped to enlighten the public about
remarkable Jews of high moral character. (They later expanded this project to
include famous Poles.) The first volume was on Moses Montefiore, the exuberant
philanthropist and financial advisor to Queen Victoria, who traveled the globe
with his carriage, wife, and doctor in tow, distributing large sums of money to
poor Jews for hospitals and orphanages, never neglecting to slip something to
the sultans and czars of those lands for their own poor.
" Sir Montefiore is
a Jew and he never forgets it. But he is also an Englishman, and an exemplary
citizen of his country who fights not with the sword but with the force of
virtue, " Jozef expounded in his flowery nineteenth-century Polish. This message
was one that both he and his brother would stress in all their writings: it was
possible to be both a loyal Jew and a loyal citizen of one´s country. At the age
of eighty-four, in failing health, Montefiore had not hesitated to make a
strenuous trip to Jerusalem when he heard his fellow Jews were once again in
dire need. " Even though the journey is dangerous, nothing will stop me, " Jozef
quotes him. " Having devoted my entire life to my people, I will not desert them
now. "
Known as the "Brothers Goldszmit," Jozef and Jakub used writing as a
tool to educate and raise both Polish and ]ewish consciousness. They wrote
numerous articles on the need to secularize Jewish education and upgrade Jewish
orphanages, and even turned their hand to fiction to address burning social
issues. One has only to read their stilted novels-Jozef´s on the need for
medical planning for poor Jews; Jakub´s on the plight of women driven to
prostitution-to understand why their dream of helping to create a genre of books
about Jewish life that would become part of Polish literature was doomed to
failure.
The Goldszmit brothers moved easily in the narrow stratum of
society made up of Polish and Jewish liberal intelligentsia. Their friends
included the most famous Polish writers of that period, many of whom created
Jewish characters in their novels with whom Polish readers could empathize. When
Jakub became editor of the Polish-language Jewish Kalendar, his Polish friends
contributed articles affirming their brotherhood with the Jews. The Kalendar´s
purpose, Jakub wrote, was to " enlighten Christians concerning Jews and Judaism
and to help bridge the gulf that still keeps the Jews separate. " But Jakub
infuriated the wealthy leaders of the small but influential assimilated Jewish
community with an article in the Kalendar criticizing their " spiritual poverty
." Labeling them a " class of religious hypocrites who do not believe in
anything ," he accused them of shirking their responsibility toward the poor
Jewish masses.