The fixer

The Fixer is a 1968 British drama film based on the 1966 semi-biographicalnovel of the same name, written by Bernard Malamud. It was directed by John Frankenheimer

Spinoza'

The film includes the quotation of a sentence by Baruch Spinoza:s quotation[edit]

All these questions fall within a man's natural right which he cannot abdicate even with his own consent.:Tractatus_Theologico-Politicus, chapter XX.^[1]lood libel (also bViews of the Catholic Church[edit]

The attitude of the Roman Catholic Church towards these accusations and the cults venerating children supposedly killed by Jews has varied over time. The Papacy generally opposed them, although it had problems in enforcing its opposition.

In 1911, the Dictionnaire apologétique de la foi catholique, an important French Catholic encyclopedia, published an analysis of the blood libel accusations.^[72] This may be taken as being broadly representative of educated Catholic opinion in continental Europe at that time. The article noted that the popes had generally refrained from endorsing the blood libel, and it concluded that the accusations were unproven in a general sense, but it left open the possibility that some Jews had committed ritual murders of Christians. Other contemporary Catholic sources (notably the Jesuit periodical La Civiltà Cattolica) promoted the blood libel as truth.^[73]

Today, the accusations are almost entirely discredited in Catholic circles, and the cults associated with them have fallen into disfavour. For example, Simon of Trent was deleted from the Calendar of Saints in 1965 and does not appear in the current (2000) edition of the Roman Martyrology.

Papal pronouncements[edit]

• Pope Innocent IV took action against the blood libel: "5 July 1247 "Mandate to the prelates of Germany and France to annul all measures adopted against the Jews on account of the ritual murder libel, and to prevent accusation of Arabs on similar charges" (The Apostolic See and the Jews, Documents: 492–1404; Simonsohn, Shlomo, pp. 188–189, 193–195, 208). In 1247, he wrote also that "Certain of the clergy, and princes, nobles and great lords of your cities and dioceses have falsely devised certain godless plans against the Jews, unjustly depriving them by force of their property, and appropriating it themselves;... they falsely charge them with dividing up among themselves on the Passover the heart of a murdered boy...In their malice, they ascribe every murder, wherever it chance to occur, to the Jews. And on the ground of these and other fabrications, they are filled with rage against them, rob them of their possessions without any formal accusation, without confession, and without legal trial and conviction, contrary to the privileges granted to them by the Apostolic See... Since it is our pleasure that they shall not be disturbed,... we ordain that ye behave towards them in a friendly and kind manner. Whenever any unjust attacks upon them come under your notice, redress their injuries, and do not suffer them to be visited in the future by similar tribulations" (Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), Vol. 8, pp. 393–394).[1]
• Pope Gregory X (1271–1276) issued a letter which criticized the practice of blood libels and forbade arrests and persecution of Jews based on a blood libel, ... unless which we do not believe they be caught in the commission of the crime.^[74]
• Pope Paul III, in a bull of 12 May 1540, made clear his displeasure at having learned, through the complaints of the Jews of Hungary, Bohemia and Poland, that their enemies, looking for a pretext to lay their hands on the Jews' property, were falsely attributing terrible crimes to them, in particular that of killing children and drinking their blood.
• St. Pius V in the bull Hebraeorum gens sola (26 February 1569), by which he expelled Jews from all the cities of thePapal States except Rome and Ancona,^[75] made multiple accusations of wrong-doing against the Jews, including usury, theft, receiving stolen goods, pimping, divination and magic. He did not mention the blood libel.
• Pope Benedict XIV wrote the bull Beatus Andreas (22 February 1755) in response to an application for the formalcanonization of the 15th-century Andreas Oxner, a folk saint alleged to have been murdered by Jews "out of hatred for the Christian faith". Benedict did not dispute the factual claim that Jews murdered Christian children, and in anticipating that further cases on this basis would be brought appears to have accepted it as accurate, but decreed that in such cases beatification or canonization would be inappropriate.^[76]

• In 1928, the Jews of Massena, New York, were falsely accused of kidnapping and killing a Christian girl in the Massena blood libel.
• Jews were frequently accused of the ritual murder of Christians for their blood inDer Stürmer, an antisemitic newspaper published in Nazi Germany. The infamous May 1934 issue of the paper was later banned by the Nazi authorities, because it went so far as to compare alleged Jewish ritual murder with the Christian rite ofcommunion.^[41]
• In 1938 the British fascist politician and veterinarian Arnold Leese published an antisemitic booklet in defense of the Blood Libel titled My Irrelevant Defense: Meditations inside Gaol and Out on Jewish Ritual Murder.
• The 1944-1946 Anti-Jewish violence in Poland, which by some estimates killed as many as 1000–2000 Jews (237 documented cases)^[42]), involved, among other elements, accusations of blood libel, especially in the case of the 1946 Kielce pogrom.

In 2003, a private Syrian film company created a 29-part television series Ash-Shatat ("The Diaspora"). This series originally aired in Lebanon in late 2003 and was broadcast by Al-Manar, a satellite television network owned byHezbollah. This TV series, based on the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, shows the Jewish people as engaging in a conspiracy to rule the world, and presents Jews as people who murder the children of Christians, drain their blood and use this blood to bake matzah.^{[citation needed]}accus

• In 2008, a Polish team of anthropologists and sociologists investigated the currency of the blood libel myth inSandomierz where a painting depicting the blood libel adorns the Cathedral, and they discovered that these beliefs persist among Catholic and Orthodox Christians of all social classes.^[53][54][55]
• In an address that aired on Al-Aqsa TV, a Hamas run TV station in Gaza, on March 31, 2010, Salah Eldeen Sultan (Arabic: صلاح الدين سلطان), founder of the American Center for Islamic Research in Columbus, Ohio, the Islamic American University in Southfield, Michigan, and the Sultan Publishing Co.^[56] and described in 2005 as "one of America's most noted Muslim scholars," alleged that Jews kidnap Christians and others in order to slaughter them and use their blood for making matzos. Sultan, who is currently a lecturer of Muslim jurisprudence at the Cairo University stated that: "The Zionists kidnap several non-Muslims [sic] – Christians and others... this happened in a Jewish neighborhood in Damascus. They killed the French doctor, Toma, who used to treat the Jews and others for free, in order to spread Christianity. Even though he was their friend and they benefited from him the most, they took him on one of these holidays and slaughtered him, along with the nurse. Then they kneaded the matzos with the blood of Dr. Toma and his nurse. They do this every year. The world must know these facts about the Zionist entity and its terrible corrupt creed. The world should know this." (Translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute)^{[57][58][59][60][61]}
• During an interview which aired on Rotana Khalijiya TV on August 13, 2012, Saudi Cleric Salman Al-Odeh stated (as translated by MEMRI) that "It is well known that the Jews celebrate several holidays, one of which is the Passover, or the Matzos Holiday. I read once about a doctor who was working in a laboratory. This doctor lived with a Jewish family. One day, they said to him: 'We want blood. Get us some human blood.' He was confused. He didn't know what this was all about. Of course, he couldn't betray his work ethics in such a way, but he began inquiring, and he found that they were making matzos with human blood." Al-Odeh also stated that "[Jews] eat it, believing that this brings them close to their false god, Yahweh" and that "They would lure a child in order to sacrifice him in the religious rite that they perform during that holiday."^[62][63]
• In April 2013, the Palestinian non-profit organization MIFTAH, founded by Hanan Ashrawi apologized for publishing an article which criticized US President Barack Obama for holding a Passover Seder in the White House by saying "Does Obama in fact know the relationship, for example, between ‘Passover’ and ‘Christian blood’...?! Or ‘Passover’ and ‘Jewish blood rituals?!’ Much of the chatter and gossip about historical Jewish blood rituals in Europe is real and not fake as they claim; the Jews used the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover." MIFTAH's apology expressed its "sincerest regret."^[64]

• In Kiev, a Jewish factory manager, Menahem Mendel Beilis, was accused of murdering Andrei Yushchinsky, a Christian child, and using his blood in matzos. He was acquitted by an all-Christian jury after a sensational trial in 1913.^[40]

ation)^[1][2] is an accusation^[3][4][5] that Jewskidnapped and murdered the children of Christians in order to use their bloodas part of their religious rituals during Jewish holidays.^[1][2][6] Historically, these claims – alongside those of well poisoning and host desecration – have been a major theme of the persecution of Jews in Europe.^[4]

Blood libels typically say that Jews require human blood for the baking ofmatzos for Passover, although this element was allegedly absent in the earliest cases which claimed that (contemporary) Jews reenacted the crucifixion. The accusations often assert that the blood of the children of Christians is especially coveted, and, historically, blood libel claims have been made in order to account for the otherwise unexplained deaths of children. In some cases, the alleged victim of human sacrifice has become venerated as a martyr, a holy figure around whom a martyr cult might arise. Three of these – William of Norwich, Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, and Simon of Trent – became objects of local cults and veneration, and in some cases they were added to the General Roman Calendar. One,Gavriil Belostoksky, was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church.

In Jewish lore, blood libels were the impetus for the creation of the Golem of Prague by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel in the 16th century.^[7] According to Walter Laqueur:

Altogether, there have been about 150 recorded cases of blood libel (not to mention thousands of rumors) that resulted in the arrest and killing of Jews throughout history, most of them in the Middle Ages. In almost every case, Jews were murdered, sometimes by a mob, sometimes following torture and a trial.^[8]

The term 'blood libel' can also refer to any unpleasant and damaging false accusation, and has taken on a broader metaphorical meaning. However, this usage remains controversial and has been protested by Jewish groups.^[9][10][11]

I t is the story of a 

History[edit]

The earliest versions of the accusation involved Jews crucifying Christian children at Easter/Passover because of a prophecy. There is no reference to the use of blood in unleavened matzo bread, which evolves later as a major motivation for the crime.^[14]

Possible precursors[edit]

Though otherwise very different from the medieval myth, there are two records of ancient stories about Jewish acts of sacrifice that have been linked to the later blood libel stories of the medieval era. The first is in the writings of the Graeco-Egyptian author Apion, who claimed that Jews sacrificed Greek victims in their temple. This accusation is known fromJosephus' rebuttal of it in Against Apion. Apion states that when Antiochus Epiphanes entered the temple in Jerusalem, he discovered a Greek captive who told him he was being fattened for sacrifice. Every year, Apion claimed, the Jews would sacrifice a Greek and consume his flesh, at the same time swearing eternal hatred to Greeks.^[15] Apion's claim probably repeats ideas already in circulation as similar claims are made by Posidonius and Apollonius Molon in the 1st century BC.^[16]The second story concerns the murder of a Christian boy by a group of Jewish youths. Socrates Scholasticus (fl. 5th Century) reported that some Jews in a drunken frolic bound a Christian child on a cross in mockery of the death of Christ and scourged him until he died.^[Aman named Yakov Bok, a Jew living in the Russian Empire, who was unjustly imprisoned based on prejudice and the blood libel. It was based on the incidents of the Beilis Trial in 1913, in which Menahem Mendel Beilis was wrongly accused of having murdered a Ukrainian boy named Andrei Yushchinsky, with blood libel being presented as the alleged motivation.ars Alan Bates.    

Professor Israel Jacob Yuval of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem published an article in 1993 that argues that blood libel may have originated in the 12th century from Christian views of Jewish behavior during the First Crusade. Some Jews committed suicide and killed their own children rather than be subjected to forced conversions. Yuval investigated Christian reports of these events and found that they were greatly distorted with claims that if Jews could kill their own children they could also kill the children of Christians. Yuval rejects the blood libel story as a fantasy of some Christians which could not contain any elements of truth because of the precarious nature of the Jewish minority's existence in Christian Europe.^[18][19]

Origins in England[edit]

Main articles: William of Norwich, Werner of Oberwesel, Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, and Andreas Oxner

The crucifixion of William of Norwich depicted on a rood screen in Holy Trinity church, Loddon, Norfolk

In England in 1144, Jews of Norwich were accused of ritual murder after a boy,William of Norwich, was found dead with stab wounds in the woods. William's hagiographer, Thomas of Monmouth, claimed that every year there is an international council of Jews at which they choose the country in which a child will be killed during Easter, because, he claimed, of a Jewish prophecy that states that the killing of a Christian child each year will ensure that the Jews will be restored to the Holy Land. In 1144, England was chosen, and the leaders of the Jewish community delegated the Jews of Norwich to perform the killing. They then abducted and crucified William.^[20] The legend was turned into a cult, with William acquiring the status of a martyr and pilgrims bringing offerings to the local church.^[21]

This was followed by similar accusations in Gloucester (1168), Bury St Edmunds (1181) and Bristol (1183). In 1189, the Jewish deputation attending the coronation ofRichard the Lionheart was attacked by the crowd. Massacres of Jews at London and York soon followed. In 1190 on March 16, 150 Jews were attacked in York and then massacred when they took refuge in the royal castle, where Clifford's Tower now stands, with some committing suicide rather than being taken by the mob.^[22] The remains of 17 bodies thrown in a well in Norwich between the 12th and 13th century (five that were shown by DNA testing to likely be members of a single Jewish family) were very possibly killed as part of one of these pogroms.^[23]

After the death of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, there were a series of trials and executions of Jews.^[24] The case is mentioned by Chaucer, and thus has become well-known. The eight-year-old Hugh disappeared at Lincoln on 31 July 1255. His body was discovered on 29 August, covered with filth, in a pit or well belonging to a Jewish man named Copin or Koppin. On being promised by John of Lexington, a judge, who happened to be present, that his life should be spared, Copin is said to have confessed that the boy had been crucified by the Jews, who had assembled at Lincoln for that purpose. King Henry III, on reaching Lincoln at the beginning of October, refused to carry out the promise of John of Lexington, and had Copin executed and 91 of the Jews of Lincoln seized and sent up to London, where 18 of them were executed. The rest were pardoned at the intercession of the Franciscans (Jacobs, Jewish Ideals, pp. 192–224). Within a few decades, Jews would beexpelled from all of England in 1290 and not allowed to return until 1657.

Continental Europe[edit]

Simon of Trent blood libel. Illustration in Hartmann Schedel's Weltchronik, 1493

The first known case outside England was in Blois, France, in 1171. This was the site of a blood libel accusation against the town's entire Jewish community that led to around 31 Jews^[25] being burned to death.^[26][27] The blood libel revolved around Isaac bar Eleazar, a Jewish resident of Blois, who was accused by a Christian servant of throwing a child into a watering hole. The child's body was never found, and all the Jews who lived in Blois were killed for the alleged ritual murder.^[25]Thomas of Monmouth's story of the annual Jewish meeting to decide which local community would kill a Christian child also quickly spread to the continent. An early version appears in Bonum Universale de Apibus ii. 29, § 23, by Thomas of Cantimpré (a monastery near Cambray). Thomas wrote "It is quite certain that the Jews of every province annually decide by lot which congregation or city is to send Christian blood to the other congregations." Thomas of Cantimpré also believed that since the time when the Jews called out to Pontius Pilate, "His blood be on us, and on our children" (Matthew 27:25), they have been afflicted with hemorrhages:

• At Pforzheim, Baden, the corpse of a seven-year-old girl was found in the river by fishermen. The Jews were suspected, and when they were led to the corpse, blood allegedly began to flow from the wounds; led to it a second time, the face of the child became flushed, and both arms were raised. In addition to these miracles, there was the testimony of the daughter of the wicked woman who had sold the child to the Jews. A regular judicial examination did not take place; it is probable that the above-mentioned "wicked woman" was the murderer. That a judicial murder was then and there committed against the Jews in consequence of the accusation is evident from the manner in which the Nuremberg "Memorbuch" and the synagogal poems refer to the incident (Siegmund Salfeld, Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches(1898), pp. 15, 128–130).

  At Weissenburg, a miracle alone decided the charge against the Jews. According to the accusation, the Jews had suspended a child (whose body was found in the Lauter river) by the feet, and had opened every artery in his body to obtain all the blood. Again, supernatural claims were made: the child's wounds were said to have bled for five days afterward, despite its treatment.At Oberwesel, "miracles" again constituted the only evidence against the Jews. The corpse of the 11-year-old Werner of Oberwesel was said to have floated up the Rhine (against the current) as far as Bacharach, emitting radiance, and being invested with healing powers. In consequence, the Jews of Oberwesel and many other adjacent localities were severely persecuted during the years 1286-89. Emperor Rudolph I, to whom the Jews had appealed for protection, issued a public proclamation to the effect that great wrong had been done to the Jews, and that the corpse of Werner was to be burned and the ashes scattered to the winds.Alan Bates CBE
  Bates in 1975
  Born	Alan Arthur Bates 17 February 1934 Allestree, Derbyshire, UK
  Died	27 December 2003 (aged 69) Westminster, London, UK
  Cause of death	Pancreatic cancer, stroke
  Nationality	British
  Occupation	Actor
  Years active	1956–2003
  Spouse(s)	Victoria Ward (m. 1970–1992) (her death)

  Yakov Shepsovitch Bok
• Dirk Bogarde as Boris Bibikov, investigative magistry
• Georgia Brown as Marfa Golov
• Hugh Griffith as Lebedev
• Elizabeth Hartman as Zinaida
• Ian Holm as I. N. Grubeshov
• David Opatoshu as Latke
• David Warner as Count Odoevsky
• Carol White as Raisl Bok
• George Murcell as Deputy Warden
• Murray Melvin as Priest
• Peter Jeffrey as Berezhinsky
• Michael Goodliffe as Julius Ostrovsky
• Thomas Heathcote as Proshko
• Mike Pratt as Father Anastasy
• Stanley Meadows as Gronfein
• Francis de Wolff as Warden
• David Lodge as Zhitnyak

"First Squad"

DESCRIPTION

“You need the dead to fight the dead.” It is 1942 and the war has stalled along the Eastern Front. Desperate to advance, Hitler’s forces turn to the Ahnenerbe, the secret occult division of the SS, to raise the spirits of their dead ancestors to fight on their behalf. Should they succeed, it will be all-out slaughter, for how can the Russian army possibly stand against the forces of the undead? Fortunately, the Russians are not without occult resources of their own. Their 6th Division conducts its own experiments with the afterlife, and their one great hope is the gifted teenage psychic Nadya, who they must send into the underworld to recruit the spirits of her dead companions—the departed souls of the First Squad—to stand against the Nazi threat.

Loosely based on characters from a hugely popular series of Soviet-era propaganda comics, FIRST SQUAD: THE MOMENT OF TRUTH is a totally unique fusion of history and fiction. The battle sequences and secret societies are factual—both the Ahnenerbe and the Russian 6th Division are known to have existed and been active in this period—with a layer of pure speculation and fantasy added to the mix. Using mock-documentary inserts to heighten the experience, the goal is not just to entertain, but to create a believable alternate history of the Russian-German campaigns of World War II. For this first-ever Russian-produced anime feature, the Russian creators of FIRST SQUAD have worked closely with hugely acclaimed Japanese animation house Studio 4ºC (THE ANIMATRIX, GENIUS PARTY, TEKKON KINKREET) to create something truly unique. The level of detail is remarkable and the vision of war-era Russia convincing, while FIRST SQUAD also packs its speculative history with stacks of hyper-stylized action. With plans already underway for a manga series and further features, we certainly haven’t seen the last of thAlternative title:

Pierwszy oddział: Moment prawdy (Polish)

Primer escuadrón (Spanish)

Первый отряд (Russian)

ファースト・スクワッド (Japanese)

幽冥特工 (Chinese (Taiwan))

Genres: action, supernatural

Themes: military, nazis, sorcery, soviet union, spies, superpowers, undead, war, World War II, World War Two

find similar anime based on genres & themes

Plot Summary: During the winter of 1941/42, the Second World War comes to a temporary standstill on the Eastern Front yet both Nazi and Soviets are putting everything they got in order to turn the tide in their favour. Meanwhile Ahnenerbe, Nazi occult organization within the SS, calculates that the next "moment of truth" (a rare moment when actions of a single man can determine the outcome of an event, a battle or even the entire war) is approaching on the Eastern Front. The man is some anonymous Soviet officer and unless he is eliminated, his actions are going to bring success to some local Soviet offensive. To eliminate him, spiritualists of Ahnenerbe summon the long-dead baron von Wolff from the world of the dead. To counter this plan, special occult branch of the Soviet Intelligence, called 6th Division, deploys it's best agent - 14-year-old esper girl Nadya, the only survivor from the special operations unit of 6th Division - the "First Squad".6th Divisione First Squad. 

Samuel Bak

Speaking About the Unspeakable: A Lecture by Samuel Bak

International Colloquy about the Holocaust and the Arts, which took place at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, October 2002. The Images in the gallery were works that Bak used in his presentation.

Allow me to introduce myself: my name is Samuel Bak, I am a painter. "Speaking About the Unspeakable" is the title of a documentary film on my art that was recently produced in the US. I have rightly given today's talk the same name. It will concern a number of paintings that I have selected from a large body of my work. All are a response to the miracle of my survival. More precisely, these paintings are a visual statement born of an ever-growing need to deal with my experience of having come through the horrors of the Holocaust, and of having done it by age eleven. The images that you will see have matured over a long span of time. Was this indelible experience the sole inspiration for these canvases? I can't say. The creative process is a matter of such complexity that conscious intentions often eclipse subconscious needs. This question must remain open.

Speaking About the Unspeakable: A Lecture by Samuel Bak

International Colloquy about the Holocaust and the Arts, which took place at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, October 2002. The Images in the gallery were works that Bak used in his presentation.

Allow me to introduce myself: my name is Samuel Bak, I am a painter. "Speaking About the Unspeakable" is the title of a documentary film on my art that was recently produced in the US. I have rightly given today's talk the same name. It will concern a number of paintings that I have selected from a large body of my work. All are a response to the miracle of my survival. More precisely, these paintings are a visual statement born of an ever-growing need to deal with my experience of having come through the horrors of the Holocaust, and of having done it by age eleven. The images that you will see have matured over a long span of time. Was this indelible experience the sole inspiration for these canvases? I can't say. The creative process is a matter of such complexity that conscious intentions often eclipse subconscious needs. This question must remain open.I was born in Vilna in 1933, in a city that then belonged to Poland. It is now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. A place so famous for its institutions of learning that it was called the Jerusalem of Lithuania. The members of my family were mostly secular, but were proud of their Jewish identity. The year 1939 shattered what had been for me a child's happy paradise. Irrevocably, I was marked by traumatizing experiences -- brutal changes of regime, Nazi occupation, ghetto, murderous "aktionen," labor camps, moments of great despair, escapes, and periods of hiding in unthinkable places.I lost many of my beloved ones, but my mother and I pulled through. She provided me with a shield of so much love and care that it must have saved my psyche. When in 1944 the Soviets liberated us, we were two among two hundred of Vilna's survivors -- from a community that had counted 70 or 80 thousand. This was not the end of our personal struggle, for there followed a dangerous escape from the Soviets and a long period of waiting in the DP camps in Germany. I was fifteen when we arrived to the newly established state of Israel in 1948, which was then battling for its independence. On and off, I spent there some fifteen years of my life.

Gallery I

The Family (1974 oil on canvas) is a painting that I have dedicated to the memory of the perished members of my family. An explanation of this work would be beyond the limit of my present time, so let me go on with the outline of my biography. During most of my last four decades, I have been indeed a wandering Jew. I have lived and worked in Tel Aviv, Paris, Rome, and Lausanne, and I presently reside in the US, in Boston. I have become a man who is at home everywhere and nowhere, an artist whose real roots are in the ground of his art. As I said earlier, and it may sound trite, I know that what I have been painting comes from a compulsive need to give meaning to the miraculous fact of my survival. It tries to appease a sad sense of bewilderment. It comes from the fear that in a world of unparalleled upheavals, things are never what they seem. My work reveals a reality observed through the eyes of a child who had suddenly aged. Some might call it elaboration of Trauma; I hope that my art is more than that. To conclude, it is not "Bak" who chose the Holocaust -- it is rather the Holocaust that was put on "Bak's" shoulders a very distinct,almost inescapable need to give testimony.I feel that we live in a world polluted by triviality. The Holocaust is a portentous subject. Artists who have chosen to deal with matters of importance, who are questioning the existential dimensions of life, death, good and evil, turn to the experience of the Shoah and believe that their images will stir emotions and stimulate reflection. Visual statements can be stronger than words. But the rhetoric of painting has its limitations. Visual Arts are mostly physical, they require places and spaces, and they can bear only so much moral weight. Besides, certain experiences demand verbal expression.For that reason I decided to complement my painterly output with a verbal one. The result is a memoir entitled "Painted in Words." Enthusiastically prefaced by Amos Oz it was published in 2001 by Indiana University Press. My book is now part of a tuition program that trains American teachers to bring to their students the lesson of the Holocaust. Its vast array of implications is analyzed via a careful examination of literature, films, and the visual arts. As you can see, the aim of my writing, the desire to bring a decimated world back to life, at times with pain, sometimes with irony, and unmistakably with humor, was very close to what I try to achieve through my paintings.

The recently published monograph on my art, which covers over fifty years of painting, has this image (Close Up, 2003 oil on canvas )on its jacket. If I had to define my art's language or style, I would situate it in a realm of allegory and metaphor. I tackle a vast array of subjects.

Devastated landscapes of ancient cities and urban constructions seem to have been made of a child's building blocks.

Figures are half-alive and half-contrived of bizarre prostheses. Abused angels stand helpless.

Huge fruit, mostly pears in various stages of reinvention, pears made of stone, pears in the form of hovering planets, pears giving birth to other pears represent a shattered and bewildering world, a universe that offers no explanations. At times one can see in many of these paintings the traces of a human effort to repair.

But have these efforts managed to transform the world's wreckage into a viable reality? Colors, mostly serene and bright, might hint at an element of hope. I hope they do. Finally, I should mention that my style is often said to border on the surreal. I have no problem with that, though  Huge fruit, mostly pears in various stages of reinvention, pears made of stone, pears in the form of hovering planets, pears giving birth to other pears represent a shattered and bewildering world, a universe that offers no explanations. At times one can see in many of these paintings the traces of a human effort to repair. But have these efforts managed to transform the world's wreckage into a viable reality? Colors Huge fruit, mostly pears in various stages of reinvention, pears made of stone, pears in the form of hovering planets, pears giving birth to other pears represent a shattered and bewildering world, a universe that offers no explanations. At times one can see in many of these paintings the traces of a human effort to repair. But have these efforts managed to transform the world's wreckage into a viable reality? Colors, mostly serene and bright, might hint at an element of hope. I hope they do. Finally, I should mention that my style is often said to border on the surreal. I have no problem with that, though you will surely recognize how deeply my vision is rooted in the facts of modern history. I wish now to focus on works that concern the Jewish experience of the 20th century. , mostly serene and bright, might hint at an element of hope. I hope they do. Finally, I should mention that my style is often said to border on the surreal. I have no problem with that, though you will surely recognize how deeply my vision is rooted in the facts of modern history. I wish now to focus on works that concern the Jewish experience of the 20th century. you will surely recognize how deeply my vision is rooted in the facts of modern history. I wish now to focus on works that concern the Jewish experience of the 20th century. The Ghetto of Jewish History, 1976 oil on canvas. The ghetto. Here is an inclined surface with no horizon and no possibility of escape. Indeed, when we were thrown into the ghetto like human garbage, it felt like being in a deep hole. This hole is in the shape of the Star of David, the emblem of the ghetto. Near it lies our badge of identification. The texture of the painting tries to evoke the stony indifference of the outer world. After the liberation, when I revisited the ghetto, it stood in ruins similar to the ones in the painting. Here the title is Alone. It is another structure in the form of a Jewish star, an island surrounded by a menacing sea. The painting's sky sheds an ominous light. I have returned to the Star of David over and over again, attracted by the simplicity of its shape and by the clarity of its meaning – an icon of humiliation that has acquired the status of proud identity. At times I depicted it as if it were made of metal, wood, fabric or stone. Here are some examples.The blend of journey and burden is not unique to the biography of artist Samuel Bak. The paradigm of the stories of survivors who embarked on the voyage of life after their encounter with death in all its horror, and the baggage they carry with them is thus both personal and collective – the story of European Jewry during the Shoah. Like his fellow survivors, at first Bak wrapped himself in silence, seeking to forge for himself an Israeli identity after his immigration to the country in 1948. Gradually, as his path took him across countries and continents, he shed the cloak of silence until he felt that he could no longer keep the burden locked inside. Thus began a journey of a different kind, into the recesses of his own identity, which culminated in a direct confrontation with the burden itself, with the realization that the burden was part of his ipseity and therefore bound to be the essence of his art. An Arduous Road Samuel Bak: 60 Years of Creativity Exhibition Curator and Editor: Yehudit Shendar Bilingual English/Hebrew edition (2006) ISBN: 0-9764425-6-6, Cat. No. 456 104 pp., soft cover, 20X24 cm. Like his fellow survivors, at first Bak wrapped himself in silence, seeking to forge for himself an Israeli identity after his immigration to the country in 1948. Gradually, as his path took him across countries and continents, he shed the cloak of silence until he felt that he could no longer keep the burden locked inside. Thus began a journey of a different kind. Viewers joining the six-decade-long journey of Samuel Bak’s works, as presented in this exhibition, are presented with a multi-faceted experience – an encounter with an artist dealing head-on with the basic question of “how” underlying the language of art, with an artist debating with himself about the abstract, the figurative and the gamut between them. His varying stylistic periods reveal an artist capable of producing fine pencil drawings in the classical tradition, on the one hand, and thick, layered oil brushstrokes of pasticcio color on large canvasses. Every period reveals a little but conceals twice as much about the inner burden. The journey and burden are shaped into a single identity, which, while it may be paradigmatic, is nevertheless unique and private – the arduous road of Samuel Bak spanning sixty years of creativity.Would not copy/transcribe better than this