Lily Ford: Dreams of Art in the Jewish East End, Part 2

DREAMS OF ART IN THE JEWISH EAST END PART 2: THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE BEN URI, 1915-1919 DR LILY FORD

DATE JULY 2015 SOURCE COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR ESSAY WRITTEN AS PART OF THE BEN URI GALLERY’S RESEARCHER IN RESIDENCE PROGRAMME

Dreams of Art in the Jewish East End Part 2: The people behind the Ben Uri, 1915-1919

By Lily Ford This is Part 2 of the history of the early decades of the Ben Uri Art Society. Part 1 describes Yiddish culture in Whitechapel at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the impulse among first generation immigrants to celebrate Jewish art; Part 2 profiles the founders of the society and its first years of existence in wartime London; Part 3 documents the evolution from a society to an exhibiting organization, revisiting questions of Jewish and Yiddish identity a decade or so on.

The Ben Uri begins The Ben Uri Art Society is by no means a society of millionaires and wealthy art patrons, but then, in place of money, it has a wealth of idealism. 1 The list of Ben Uri’s committee and founder members was printed as part of its first published output, a Yiddish art album produced in July 1916 2. This is, in fact, the earliest surviving evidence of the society’s participants and constitution apart from an article in the Yiddish daily newspaper Di Tsayt on 25th July, 1915, although the minute book dating from January 1916 shows that the committee was meeting every fortnight. Later accounts dated the society’s foundation to July 1st, 1915 3, and at some point the recollection that this took place in a restaurant in Aldgate East called Gradel’s slipped into the story, though it has recently been discovered that these premises were not open until 1919 4. Given that many of the early member meetings were conducted over dinner in another Whitechapel restaurant, the ‘American’, it is very plausible that this hosted the inaugural meeting 5. The apocryphal foundation story is worth retaining for the very clear links it establishes between the Ben Uri, the East End, and the social lives of its members, indeed, we might permit further embellishment of the tale by quoting once more from Sholem Aleichem’s Wandering Stars, which begins the second half with a description of the (fictional) Whitechapel restaurant, the ‘National’: 1 Leo Kenig ‘Jews and Plastic Art’ in Catalogue and Survey of Activities London: Ben Uri, 1930, p. 11.

2 The list is to be found on the back cover of the album, which exists in the Ben Uri archive (PR 01/01/60). A full copy of the album has not survived. David Mazower conducted an investigation into the making and afterlife of the album for his article: ‘Lazar Berson and the origins of the Ben Uri Art Society’.

3 Judah Beach ‘The Ben-Uri: Its History and Activity’ in Catalogue and Survey of Activities London: Ben Uri, 1930, p. 12.

4 Charles S. Spencer mentions Gradel’s in his 1966 essay ‘Jewish Art Since 1915 – Fifty Glorious Years’ (p. 20) and A.B. Levy suggests the society was conceived ‘during discussions in a Whitechapel restaurant’ in his 1966 essay ‘The First Twenty-Five Years’ (p. 24) both in Jacob Sonntag ed. Ben Uri, 1915-1965: Fifty Years’ Achievement in the Arts London: Ben Uri Art Society, 1966.

5 ‘A member’s meeting took place Saturday, 19th February 1916 at 131 Whitechapel Road’ (premises of Louis Eidelstein’s ‘American Restaurant’), 1916-25 minutes p.11. Meetings also took place there on Saturday, 1 April 1916 (p. 21), Saturday, 21 May 1916 (p.26), Saturday, 23rd September (p.26) and Saturday, 16th December 1916 (p. 63). Footnote references to the Ben Uri’s first minute book are abbreviated to ‘1916-21 Minutes’. Page numbers refer to the page numbers in the original Yiddish manuscript, which are retained in Sima Beeri’s translation into English, from which all quotes are taken. Dates for the meetings to which the minutes refer are also given in the footnotes, and if the meeting is recorded as a members’ or committee meeting this is also noted. Footnote references to translations of Yiddish press cuttings use the Ben Uri Archive catalogue reference, eg. PR 01/01/01, which refers to the volume and page number of Judah Beach’s cuttings albums. The Ben Uri Archive will be referred to in notes as BU Archive.

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In fact it was more like a Jewish club than a restaurant. No matter what time of day or night you went there, you would find a collection of Jews of every type that your heart desired: stockbrokers, doctors of philosophy, traveling salesmen, missionaries, peddlers, actors, diamond merchants, office workers, journalists, chess players, clerks, Zionists, Territorialists looking for a piece of land even in Africa where Jews could settle, and young people from who knew where, shouting and blustering, laughing and smoking, taking up most of the chairs and tables. 6 Aleichem’s picture is probably not an inaccurate indication of that night of July 1st – we know from Ben Uri minutes that meetings often took place late at night, and around dinner, and it is clear from the archives that the membership encompassed a range of professions and political persuasions. The liveliness that Aleichem describes is certainly consonant with the mood of subsequent meetings in the society’s first year. It was founded in a spate of energy and goodwill and its functioning was sustained by regular ‘socials’ in hired halls or the members’ own houses and gardens. Balls, fetes, outings and banquets formed the backbone of the society’s activities, with lectures and exhibitions attracting far lower attendance; though the former were intended as fundraisers for the society’s acquisitions of artworks, it was consistently in debt throughout the 1920s.

The impressive 100-strong membership list which was published in 1916 contains many names which it has not been possible to trace, but by cross-referencing with other scholarly studies, we can begin to get a sense of how the Ben Uri committee recruited associates. Strong links emerge, of family, kin or landsmen, politics, Yiddish journalism and printing, and the predominant profession of East End Jews, the garment trade. The most stalwart protagonists of the Ben Uri in its first fifteen years were a group of East European Jewish tradesmen who had arrived in Britain around 1900, and managed to establish their own businesses. Of this group Judah Beach and Edward Good were the most prominent, though Isaac Braydburg 7 and his brother Henry were also instrumental, and several other key figures would join the committee over the years.

Turning to the complexion of the 1916 members list, family groups are the most obvious – with four Braydburgs, four Roses and five Victors (the brothers Isaac and Henry Braydburg, Max Rose and V. Victor were all on the committee) – and there are many married couples (sadly the voices of the wives, daughters and single women on the list are rarely, if ever heard). Judah Beach, the honorary secretary, had at least one landsman in the form of Mr Elstein 8; it is probable that other members were also acquainted with committee members through existing

6 Sholem Aleichem Wandering Stars translated from the Yiddish by Aliza Shevrin, New York: Viking, 2009, p. 201.

7 I have not come across Braydburg’s first name in the archive sources, but the fact that his initial is variously given as Y and

I suggests that he may have been a Yitzhak/Isaac.

8 According to Prager both Saul Elstein/Elshteyn and Judah Beach/Bietsch were secretaries of the Polish landsmanshaft

Rover Hilfs Fereyn in 1920. Leonard Prager Yiddish Culture in Britain: A Guide, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Peter Lang, 1990, p. 559.

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political clubs, friendly societies and landsmanshaftn 9. The founder, Lazar Berson, was already active in the London branch of Poale Zion alongside Solly Abrahams, who called himself Bezalel, an appropriate moniker for his role of honorary secretary of the Ben Uri. Berson and Bezalel probably knew the West End intellectual Dr Jochelman through Poale Zion, alongside Jacob Pomerantz, a Stoke Newington book merchant and later Poale Zion’s general secretary, and the rabbi and radical intellectual Dr Yankev Meyer Salkind, who is not on the first members list but was actively involved with the society in the early 1920s 10. Indeed by David Mazower’s estimate, ‘somewhere between a third and a half of the early Ben Uri members and enthusiasts came from [Poale Zion’s] ranks.’ 11 There are several Yiddish journalists and writers on the list, no doubt ushered into the society via Morris Myer, the founder and editor of the first Yiddish daily newspaper in London, Di Tsayt, Poale Zion activist, and an early champion of the work of the Ben Uri’s founder, Lazar Berson 12. Jacob Capitanchik was not on the members list but would shortly become involved in the society – he worked for Myer on Di Tsayt and was active in Poale Zion. The Yiddish book trade was also represented, with Israel Naroditzky, the famously prolific East End printer (who had already printed Isaac Rosenburg’s plays), and Pomerantz. Even figures from Yiddish theatre appear to have joined the Ben Uri 13. Both Edward Good and Jacob Slivko were jewellers and antiques dealers and five of their fellow committee members were in the garment industry: Max Rose was a furrier, and Beach, Victor and the Braydburg brothers were tailors 14.

If it seems perplexing that an art society should be led by a body of journalists, tailors and jewellers, perusal of archive material from the Ben Uri’s first few years demonstrates the deep, almost spiritual commitment to art and its elevation of ‘the Jewish soul’ that these men possessed. Furthermore, it is easy to see how the world of work and the world of worship, or spiritual contemplation, was not so separate for these Jewish Londoners, almost all of whom, as first generation immigrants, were concerned with carving out an amenable environment for themselves, their families and their kinsmen and coreligionists. Many figures involved in the Ben Uri already juggled a day job or profession with a trade union office, a role in a charitable 9 The list refers to a Mr. Epstein, who may have been the manager of the North London Jewish Club in 1914, mentioned in Abraham Mundy’s account of the Jewish Shelter. A. Mundy ‘Some Reminiscences of the Shelter’s Activities for the Last Quarter of a Century’, translated by A. Michaelson, typed MS at the Jewish Museum, London, p. 84.

10 Sharman Kadish Bolsheviks and British Jews: The Anglo-Jewish Community, Britain and the Russian Revolution, London: Frank Cass, 1992, pp. 199, 202. David Mazower ‘The Ben Uri and Yiddish Culture’ in Dickson and MacDougall eds. Ben Uri: 100 Years in London: Art Identity Migration, London, Ben Uri, 2015, p. 40. Prager op. cit. p. 526.

11 Mazower ‘Ben Uri and Yiddish Culture’ p. 41.

12 Myer was a member, as was co-founder of Di Tsayt Baruch Weinberg (Prager op. cit. 671) if allowance be made for misspelling/mistransliteration (‘B. Weinrib’ is listed). Mazower mentions Bernard Weinryb as a member of both Poale Zion and Ben Uri (Mazower ‘Ben Uri and Yiddish Culture’, p.41). ‘Mr Cahan’ was probably Abraham Cahan, an important New York Yiddish journalist who had links with England (Prager op. cit. p. 183), and ‘Mr Dingal’ was Solomon Dingol, another Yiddish writer who spent eight years in England before emigrating to the US in 1916 (Prager op. cit. p. 203). ‘Mr Vichevsky’ probably referred to Ozer Warshafsky/Varshavski, then a Polish-based Yiddish novelist and journalist (Prager op. cit. p. 670).

13 Mr and Mrs Poliakoff were comic actors with the Kampaniets troupe, which played in London several times (Prager op. cit. p. 526). M. Goldberg may have been Michl Goldberg (281) and S. Erlich may have been Zanvl Erlich (Prager op. cit. p.

221), both Yiddish theatre actors. If allowance can be made for similar initials, then B. Rosenthal may have referred to Phil Rosenthal, manager (with his brother J.W. Rosenthal) of the Pavilion theatre which was the East End’s leading Yiddish theatre (Prager op. cit. p. 556).

14 David Mazower ‘Lazar Berson and the origins of the Ben Uri Art Society’ in The Ben Uri Story from Art Society to Museum and the influence of Anglo-Jewish Artists on the Modern British Movement, London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2001, p. 45.

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organization, or a writing habit. Activism in artistic and cultural matters often went hand in hand with political activism, and there was a strong tradition of socialist philanthropy in the Jewish East End after the notable success of the Jewish working class anarchist and libertarian movement around the Arbeter Fraint newspaper between 1885 and 1914 15. The final statute of the Ben Uri’s constitution declared that it ‘carries no inclination for any political affiliations and is open to anyone who wishes to partake in it’ 16. While the society maintained political neutrality, it was by no means divorced from the turbulent issues in which its members were often engaged. At one of the Ben Uri’s first celebrations, Dr Jochelman noted the presence of ‘Zionists, territorialists, Bundists, PPS and anarchists’ 17. This disparate group was, for Jochelman, ‘united under the banner of art’, but there would be various instances in the coming years where ‘the banner of art’ was not binding enough to maintain a suspension of political differences.

Berson’s Ben Uri Lazar (or Eliezer) Berson was in fact only associated with the Ben Uri for 14 months, but he was instrumental in setting it up, and shaping its early objectives. He was a Lithuanian Jew who left his village to study painting in St Petersburg around 1900 (aged about 18), and from there moved to Paris, where there was an established community of Eastern European Jewish artists known as the École de Paris, among whose number Berson exhibited in 1911 18. He arrived in London in August 1914, found a studio and probably lodgings in Notting Hill, at 67 Blenheim Crescent, and began painting portraits and writing articles on Jewish identity, Zionism and art for the Yiddish daily newspaper Di Tsayt. Early in 1915 he was giving lectures and art classes in Whitechapel, and had also received an important artistic commission from the editor of Di Tsayt, Morris Myer: a wooden shield to commemorate a recent controversial declaration of Anglo-Jewish identity by the prominent novelist Israel Zangwill 19. Indeed, although Berson was a painter, his principal passion was decorative art, and the carving of wooden vessels, plates and boxes with motifs drawn from ancient illuminated manuscripts. It was in this respect that Berson’s theories on the Jewish artistic tradition, and the importance of continuing it, united his nationalism with his artistic practice. He told a correspondent of the Jewish Chronicle: Hidden away in ancient manuscripts, monuments and coins are decorative elements which are essentially Jewish, and which lend themselves to modern application with surprisingly beautiful effect. It is not true… that the ancient Jewish artists were mere imitators who adopted the style of the countries in which they lived. If this were so, we would not find, as we actually do, that the same decorative types are utilized in manuscripts from the Genizahs of Cairo, the Crimea and Palestine. […] It would have 15 See Bill Fishman’s East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914 London: Duckworth, 1975, and, for a shorter account, ‘Jewish

Immigrant Anarchists in East London 1870-1914’ in A. Newman ed. The Jewish East End, 1840-1939 London: The Jewish Historical Society of England, 1981, pp. 233-254.

16 The statutes are also on the back cover of the album (see note 2). PR 01/01/60.

17 ‘The Hanukah Banquet of Art Society Ben Uri’, cutting from The Daily World, 5th December 1915. PR 01/01/05.

18 Mazower ‘Lazar Berson’ p. 41.

19 Mazower ‘Lazar Berson’ pp. 43, 37.

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been a great pity if such fine material were allowed to remain for ever buried in the museums and not made to live again in modern artistic expression. 20 It is a compelling argument, and an important contribution to the ongoing debate about whether, and what, Jewish art could be, given the traditional religious strictures on the graven image. As Joseph Guttman has pointed out, this question was tied up with Jewish self-definition and nationalism from the late nineteenth century 21. Like many of the Jewish writers and artists in 1910s London (and, as we have seen, many other Ben Uri members), Berson was a Zionist; his efforts to assert a Jewish national identity through art were channelled into the Ben Uri from 1915. At the society’s first Hanukah Banquet, in December 1915, he pointed out that while the Jewish literary heritage was well known, the Jewish ‘creative spirit’ was not.

[H]uman culture has evolved to talk on the telephone over long distances. [H]uman thought, however, also has a telephone to talk to the spirits of the antiquity, the spirits who lived and created many thousands of years before us. These are the antiques, the antiquities of every people. The telephone exchanges are the museums, the British Museum, the Louvre! We must make sure that we also build such a telephone exchange for ourselves so that through it we could talk to those creative spirits of the Jewish past! 22 According to the report of this event in The Daily World, Berson’s speech made ‘a strong impression on the audience’. There is no doubt that Berson’s ideas, which resonated long after his departure from the Ben Uri, shaped the society’s ambitions as a cultural body for British Jews.

Berson’s physical resemblance to the celebrated Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, noted by the Jewish Chronicle correspondent, must have helped to attract attention among London’s Yiddish and East End intellectuals. Israel Zangwill was apparently inspired to write ‘a remarkable tribute’ to Berson for publication in the Ben Uri album 23. ‘He is every inch the artist,’ went on the Jewish Chronicle correspondent, ‘and one has only to look at him to be impressed at once by a personality.’ 24 Other contemporary accounts also suggest Berson was a charismatic and ambitious figure: ‘a fine agitator, a man who could inspire others’ according to Edward Good 25. Judah Beach remembered that ‘[i]n addition to his artistic abilities, young Berson had a highly developed social instinct and a flair for organization work’ 26. He placed Berson at the heart of the London Jewish art scene in 1915 in his 1930 history of the Ben Uri, and it is easy to see how the artist could have united enthusiasts one summer evening in Whitechapel to join with him in forming a society for the promotion of Jewish creativity.

20 Jewish Chronicle September 10th 1915 p. 12.

21 Joseph Guttman ‘Is there a Jewish Art?’ in Clare Moore ed. The Visual Dimension: Aspects of Jewish Art Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press, in cooperation with the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, 1993, pp.

1-19. p. 3.

22 ‘The Hanukah Banquet of Art Society Ben Uri’, cutting from The Daily World, 5th December 1915. PR 01/01/05.

23 Jewish Chronicle March 24th 1916 p. 23. The album is now lost.

24 Jewish Chronicle September 10th 1915 p. 12.

25 Mosheh Oved Visions and Jewels: autobiographic in three parts London: Faber & Faber 1952, p. 83.

26 Beach ‘The Ben Uri’ p. 12.

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Reading through the original statutes, the artist’s personal stamp on the organization is most apparent – the first seven describe activities in which Berson was already engaged, with only four remaining to define the operation of the society itself 27. It was Berson who came up with the name Ben Uri (denoting Bezalel, the son of Uri the architect of the Tabernacle and sculptor of the Menorah), both referencing the most famous biblical craftsman and suggesting a link with the recently founded Bezalel School of Art in Palestine 28. Furthermore Berson is described as ‘director and founder of the society’ and his name appears on the letterhead of official correspondence, alongside the logo of his design. David Mazower points out that membership came at a high price – 20 shillings – ‘presumably at least partly due to the need to pay for Berson’s services as Art Director’ 29. His commitment to the society was steady over the first year: he created forty ‘decorative’ works (mostly in wood) in its first six months to constitute the Ben Uri collection, and then worked on drawings of these and other subjects to be sold as loose leaf prints in the 1916 album.

It is clear from the minutes of 1916 that Berson was the leading light of the Ben Uri group. The committee met fortnightly in Berson’s atelier, renamed the ‘Ben Uri Studio’, which felt profoundly Jewish to the Jewish Chronicle correspondent, ‘as if he had entered the workshop of Bezalel of old’ 30. Though other committee members expressed opinions and put forward proposals, and Edward Good joined Berson in contributing his own creations, in the form of a diamond-studded brooch for the collection, it was Berson who set the tone of the meetings, met any disagreements or problems with a spiritually rousing proclamation, and furnished the group with lectures, both programmed and impromptu, inspired by the subjects he was working on at that moment 31. Many of these are abridged in the minutes, but they record, for example, that on Sunday 16th January 1916, friend Berson gave an explanation about the latest creations/undertakings of Ben Uri. Using philosophical analysis of each stroke and line, elaborating on the importance of colour as well as harmony of colour of which each dot is Jewish. And maintains [sic] that there was always Jewish art amongst Jews as well as Jewish artists. 32 There is a sense in which the founding committee members, by Judah Beach’s description ‘art lovers and social workers’ (the latter is perhaps better translated as civic-minded members of the community) 33, were drawn to Berson’s intense creativity and inspiring views, visiting his studio twice a month almost as patrons, being persuaded to part with ever more donations towards publishing the album and contributing to running costs, simply for the pleasure of being associated with such a visionary.

27 The statutes are also on the back cover of the album (see note 2). PR 01/01/60.

28 Beach ‘The Ben Uri’ p. 12.

29 Mazower ‘Lazar Berson’ p. 45.

30 Jewish Chronicle September 10th, 1915 p. 12.

31 ‘The Hanukah Banquet of Art Society Ben Uri’, cutting from The Daily World, 5th December 1915. PR 01/01/05.

32 1916-21 Minutes. Committee meeting 16th January 1916, p. 7.

33 Beach ‘The Ben Uri’ p. 12.

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Nevertheless, as would soon be proved after Berson left London, the committee contained personalities with complex and developed attitudes towards the role of art in life. Although Berson had been the force behind the Ben Uri for its first year, it was quite a different sort of enthusiast who proceeded to lead the society through the next decade. Like many East European Jews present in 1910s London, Berson turned out to be a transient member of the community, for whom the British capital served as a stopping point between Europe and the United States. The sustenance of the Ben Uri fell to those art-lovers who Berson had brought together over 1915. It is to these individuals who, unlike Berson, were permanently involved in the London Jewish community, that we now turn. It is important to attend to their personal stories, or as much as we know of these, as these were the people that kept the society going over the 1920s, and their own experiences of life as first-generation London Jews shaped the society’s aims and achievements.

Judah Beach and Edward Good Judah Beach had come to London in 1905 from Rava, a shtetl on the border of Poland and Ukraine, to escape Tsarist political persecution. He set up as a tailor and by 1915, aged 33, he had a shop selling bespoke ladieswear near Baker Street, a house in West Hampstead, and a wife and baby daughter 34. Like most of his contemporaries, operating in a bilingual and to an extent a bi-national environment, Beach used several names. Judah Beach was an anglicisation of Yehudah Pshibish, which in turn was also transliterated from the Hebrew script as Yude-Y Bietsh 35. He was deeply committed to the Yiddish language, and contributed many Yiddish stories and articles to periodicals such as Loshn und lebn over his lifetime, some of which were published in book form in 1952 36. Beach was the keeper of the Ben Uri society in several respects. He had taken on the role of honorary secretary in January 1916, replacing Bezalel 37.

As well as storing the growing collection of artworks purchased by the society at his home for long periods between 1916 and 1930, he acted as unofficial archivist, keeping his own minutes, handwritten in Yiddish, of the meetings between 1916 and 1921, and compiling several volumes of press cuttings and correspondence pertaining to the Ben Uri between 1915 and the 1950s. Without Beach’s records, we would know very little of the society’s first decade, indeed little was known until they were discovered in New York’s YIVO archive; David Mazower draws on them for his 2001 article, and their recent translation into English has made them a wonderful resource for non-Yiddish-speaking historians.

Although without access to Beach’s Yiddish writing of his later years it is difficult to explore his personality, there are various clues in the Ben Uri archives. At the Hanukah Banquet celebrating the society’s first six months, a record of which was written up for the Yiddish newspaper The Daily World and preserved in Beach’s cuttings book, many speeches were

34 Mazower ‘Lazar Berson’ p. 45.

35 He is listed as such in Prager op. cit. p. 157.

36 Draft obituary of Beach by Barry Fealdman, 27th October 1964, Ben Uri archive. The collection is called Sheydvegn:

dertsaylungen and published in Britain by Loshn und lebn; a copy exists in the British Library (under the author name Yehudah Y. Bietsh); unfortunately it has not been translated from the Yiddish.

37 Letter from Berson to Beach, January 1916, BU Archive.

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given in a convivial and jubilant atmosphere. After dinner Beach said a few words, alongside fellow member Mr Magdil: They both stress[ed] how distant they used to be from their people and how the events of the recent years moved them to do some soul searching and how the result thereof was their return to their people, their language and their culture.’ 38 The distance that Beach speaks of is as much spiritual as geographical – the preoccupation seems not to be with the shtetl left behind some ten years earlier, but with the Jewish cultural identity he had perhaps let lapse in the interim. The reference to ‘events of recent years’ can be taken as the outbreak of the First World War, which figured largely in his later recollections of the beginnings of the Ben Uri. In his 1930 account of the founding of the society, he located the conception of the Ben Uri ‘in the early stages of the Great War, when mankind was engaged in writing one of the darkest pages in the history of the world, and large numbers of people were forced to leave their homeland and seek refuge in foreign countries’ 39. This was a third wave of displacement for East European Jews, subsequent to the turmoil of the failed 1905 revolution which had propelled Beach himself to London, and also to the terrible pogroms of the 1880s which resulted in many inhabitants of the Pale of Settlement descending on the East End over the next 20 years. Beach’s contextualization is certainly accurate, and it also serves to associate the Ben Uri very concretely with a people in search of an identity, among whose number he had professed to be. There is no doubt that the Ben Uri provided them with such an identity. Another of Beach’s recollections conjures up the great passion of the Ben Uri committee very eloquently: The word ‘art’ had some kind of a sacred ring to us. We weaved our loveliest dreams around the treasures we had collected… we saw luminous visions for our future. 40 Beach was certainly not the only committee member to have visions. To encounter more, let us turn to another crucial figure in the history of the Ben Uri, that of Edward Good. Good had set out from Poland aged 18 to seek his fortune in 1903, arriving in Whitechapel with nothing but an interest in jewellery. After four lonely years apprenticed to watchmakers around London, he returned to Poland with his savings but was unable to buy exemption from conscription into the Russian army and once again fled. His savings enabled him to rent his own premises on New Oxford Street in 1908, at which point he was prompted by the signpainter for his new business to anglicise his name from Goodack. As he recounted in his autobiography, he came to regret this and adopted a new Yiddish penname, Moshe Oved or ‘humble servant’, soon afterwards 41. Judging by his writing and his activities Good was a vivacious, industrious and gregarious figure. He bankrolled most of the Ben Uri’s early acquisitions with the proceeds from his successful and long-standing antiques and jewellery shop, Cameo Corner. Like Beach, he was passionate about Yiddish literature and counted many of the leading European Jewish 38 ‘The Hanukah Banquet of Art Society Ben Uri’, cutting from The Daily World, 5th December 1915. PR 01/01/05.

39 Beach ‘The Ben Uri’ p. 12.

40 Judah Beach’s speech, ‘Fifteenth Anniversary of Ben Uri’, undated cutting, source unknown, PR/01/01/53.

41 Oved Visions and Jewels pp. 51-2.

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writers of the time, such as Scholem Asch, as friends. When he began writing his own prose in 1917, he was not afraid of approaching the respected intellectual and Zionist Nahum Sokolov for a review, which came back lukewarm 42. He also suggested to Israel Zangwill that he translate the manuscript into English, and was politely declined 43. Nevertheless Good was buoyed along by his own confidence and sufficient funds to pay for both a translation to English and a print run in both English and Yiddish of his first book, Out of Chaos (1917), with the East End Yiddish printer (also a founding member of the Ben Uri and printer of their album) Israel Naroditzky.

Out of Chaos describes a quite extraordinary experience that Good had in 1916, quite possibly on his return home to Hackney from an evening committee meeting at the Ben Uri Studio.

In the autumn of 1916 I was riding all alone on the top of a bus, from the west to northeast of London. A dark, twilight drizzle accompanied the bus, and covered me.

My ever-scattered thoughts, which beat against the fringes of all subjects, like fragments of a shipwreck, on that twilight became concentrated in a vision which lasted the whole forty minutes of the journey. The vision was as follows: I was writing a book, an appeal to all nations to forgive one another the greatest sin they had committed – that of not having forgiven one another until now. And I thought that the whole world was listening to my words and was living in love, and at peace.

When I got off the bus I felt, for the first time in my life, that I had been, for forty minutes, in a world of truth, wherein I had lived a full life and had been of some use. There, in the mighty rock-world, I had built an abiding dwelling place for myself. 44 The result of this vision is an extended sermon, a series of psalms and orations, framed as instructions from God. They are shot through with Jewish mystical motifs, but also remarkably accessible to the unversed reader. Good, who signed this book with his adoptive Yiddish name ‘Moysheh Oved’ for the first time, wonders aloud why God has chosen him, ‘a weak and sinful man, a child of chaos, a child of sorrow, a child of the most unfortunate of peoples, with a broken speech of exile’ 45. For ‘that very reason’, replies God, ‘thou art the man for whom thyself has waited and hoped, that he should deliver thee’ 46. Perhaps this speaks to Good’s ‘arrival’, his successful establishment as a London businessman after a slow climb up from ‘greener’ status. If so, it is an ascent echoed in the book, in the opening metaphor in which we may recognize Good on his eastbound bus journey, climbing to the top deck of the bus and looking out over the autumn gloom of a city.

In the mournful days of Nicholas the Second, William the Second and George the Fifth, in the third year of the great world-war, I cast my eyes Eastward and beheld, through a 42 Oved Visions and Jewels p. 66.

43 Prager op. cit. p. 718.

44 Oved Visions and Jewels pp. 62-63.

45 Mosheh Oved Out of Chaos London: Printed for the author, 1918, p. 84.

46 Ibid.

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mist, a ladder standing in a welter of human blood, and the top of it reached to heaven.

Immediately I took my wanderer’s staff and my lantern, the perpetual light, and sought a way to the ladder. But the further and more anxiously I sought, the thicker the mist, and the ladder of fire almost disappeared from me. 47 The mist would have been all the thicker for the war. Zeppelin and aeroplane raids had been taking place over the capital since 1915 (indeed one Ben Uri members’ meeting in that autumn of 1916 was dissolved at the news of zeppelins spotted over London once more 48). London’s gaslights were tinted blue so as to give off only a ghostly glow, with little light spilling out from the black-out blinds of windows or shops 49. The wartime context provided an immediate premise for Good’s sermon, a sense of crisis to precipitate his vision and a ‘chaos’ from which to emerge. Aside from his stance of peace and reconciliation, though, the book contained some direct messages to Jews, including, in the form of a commandment, an instruction to found ‘a great national temple of art’ ‘when you come into the land of Israel’ 50. A vindication of the Jewish creative talent follows, with an exhortation to make monuments commemorating Jewish history. Good sets out his confidence in art as the basis for contemporary Jewish spirituality: Art consoles and heals, art preaches and reforms, art chases away gloomy foreboding and drives out evil thought. Art sanctifies and makes divine, for not in schools and churches am I God, but in real works of art, in laws of justice and in hearts of love.

There shall you seek me, and there shall you find me, thus says God. 51 While it may seem extraordinary to find a respectable jeweller, literary enthusiast and bon viveur producing such a fervently religious treatise, one at marked odds with the style and tone of his autobiography, it is an important indication of the way in which an alertness to the spiritual and metaphysical could underlie the everyday lives of ordinary, busy people like Good.

Like Good, Beach was capable of finding meaning in the mundane, particularly when engaged in Ben Uri matters. He recorded a meeting in June 1916 when the group met on Hampstead Heath as a change from their usual venue: And when the trees are dipping [sic] in the glitter from the sun and spread enchanting reflections of all sorts of shapes by their sheer movement and the birds burst into song for nature, our business is discussed.

But as if for spite, the weather changed and disrupted the noble ideas of how to immortalise Jewish life through art.

47 Oved Out of Chaos p. 9.

48 1916-21 Minutes. Committee meeting 15th September 1916, p. 47.

49 Fermin Rocker The East End Years: A Stepney Childhood London: Freedom Press 1998, p. 137.

50 Oved Out of Chaos p. 36.

51 Oved Out of Chaos pp. 36-37. NB in the British Library’s copy, the word ‘schools’ is crossed out and ‘synagogues’

written in in Oved’s hand.

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But the determination of the supporters of Jewish art overcame the negative spirits and after a lengthy march through various paths we finally found a place for our meeting.52 A certain amount of pathetic fallacy is attributed to the June weather by Beach, who romanticises the quest for a sheltered spot by linking it to ‘noble ideas’. This gives a good indication of the general tone of Ben Uri meetings, in which Berson and members were prone to verbosely lyrical reflections on Jewish identity. As the quote from Kenig so aptly puts it, they may not have been rich, but they had a wealth of idealism.

The Ben Uri in wartime London The Hampstead excursion may have been to celebrate the publication of the first part of the Ben Uri album 53. Beach reflected at a member’s meeting in July 1916 that the Ben Uri had created much of ‘spiritual value’ during its first year, in particular ‘our album which one can rightfully say is the only existent Jewish work of art and as such, the Ben Uri Society seeks to democratise’ 54. In other respects, though, the committee was beginning to lose patience with Lazar Berson, who pleaded the artist’s excuse of lack of inspiration to account for not having completed the artworks necessary to finish the album. Over July and August, the sustainability of the society came under question, as committee members puzzled over how to obtain a consistent income. Berson’s contributions as recorded in the minutes became less and less ambitious and more practical – possibly this shows a concern to try and establish the society on a more secure footing before, unknown to his colleagues and for reasons still unknown to us, he planned to leave Britain for good. Part of Berson’s strategy seems to have been to link the society to other worthy East End organizations. In August 1916 he recommended the society take a stall at the Bazaar of the Million Penny Fund, which raised money for the relief of Jewish victims of the war 55, and that September saw him attempt to involve the Ben Uri in another organization advocating for the rights of Jews, this time British Jews, for exemption from conscription, the Foreign Jews Protection Committee. In spite of the fact that it went against the original non-political clause in the Ben Uri statutes, Berson argued that the FJPC represented ‘a question of life or death for the Jewish youths, and therefore it also affects the Ben Uri’ 56. This was the meeting cut short by news of a Zeppelin attack; the next time the committee met, only a week later, it would be reeling at the news of Berson’s departure for the United States.

The war, by that time, had had a great effect on London life. After the momentous Somme Offensive in the first week of July 1916, the capital was flooded with war casualties, arriving daily at the London stations for transfer to overcrowded and improvised hospitals around the city. The ever-elastic Defence of the Realm Act, responsible for many infringements of civil liberties during this period, was extended to ban whistling for taxis anywhere in the city, in 52 1916-21 Minutes. Committee meeting 4th June 1916, p. 28.

53 Beach wrote to Dr Jochelman a note accompanying the ‘first issue of our album’, pointing out that it was as yet

incomplete, and requesting financial support on May 31st, 1916. BU Archive: archive_translation_3_notice_31_1916.doc.

54 1916-21 Minutes. Members’ meeting 2nd July 1916, p. 32.

55 1916-21 Minutes, meeting 25th August 1916, p. 44.

56 1916-1921 Minutes. Members’ meeting 23rd September 1916, pp. 44-47.

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case military invalids be disturbed 57. The city was also paralysed by fear of Zeppelin attacks, which had commenced in 1915 but were yet to return in the summer of 1916. One Australian visitor to London commented on the extent of the city’s paranoia in July 1916: The Zeppelin scare is just as if the whole place was in imminent fear of an earthquake.

At night the whole of London is in absolute darkness, every window heavily screened, no street lamps, no lamps on vehicles, all trains with windows closed and blinds drawn, constant street accidents and traffic blocks, and a bewildering pandemonium of confusion in the streets. 58 Despite these measures, fleets of Zeppelins were once more successful in bombing London in two raids at the end of August and beginning of September, though the raid causing the most damage was that mentioned in the Ben Uri’s minutes, on the night of 23rd-24th September. The fact that two of the eleven airships were spectacularly shot down that night did not make up for the devastation they had caused – twenty six dead, seventy three injured, and thirty fires, including serious conflagrations in the East End 59. Such physical damage was not the only result of the war to overshadow the East End. Since conscription had begun in early 1916, many East End Jews, for whose families the horrendous threat of conscription into the antisemitic Russian army had been a major motive in fleeing the Pale of Settlement, had sought exemption. In May conscription was extended from single men to all men between the ages of 18 and 41, and talks began between the British and Russian governments on a convention that would funnel all non-naturalized Russian men resident in Britain (mostly Jews) into one or other army. It was to protest this eventuality that the Foreign Jews Protection Committee was set up in June 1916 by Solly Abrahams/Bezalel, who chaired it, along with Lazar Berson, Jacob Kapitanchik, Jacob Pomerantz and Yankev Meir Salkind, to mention the Ben Uri associates who were involved 60.

It is not difficult to see how the fraught wartime environment in which the Ben Uri society was attempting to celebrate a year’s achievement in the arts, and creation of ‘spiritual worth’, was leaking into the organization’s proceedings. It is possible to sympathize with Berson’s championing of the FJPC against a very real threat to Russian-born Jews in September 1916 – both he and Bezalel would face deportation to Russia should a convention be signed. Their involvement with this cause was uncomfortably at odds with Ben Uri’s non-political stance, however, and objected to by members 61. Though there is no mention in the archive of naturalization or exemption, we might assume that the committee members who opposed Ben Uri’s involvement in such a political cause were themselves already naturalized Britons, and were either over 41 or (presumably in the case of Beach and Good, respectively 34 and 31 in 1916) exempt from military service.

57 Jerry White Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War London: The Bodley Head, 2014, p. 168.

58 Letter from General Sir John Monash, quoted in White Zeppelin Nights p. 170.

59 White Zeppelin Nights p. 171.

60 Kadish op. cit. pp. 197-198. Mazower ‘Ben Uri and Yiddish culture’ p. 42.

61 1916-21 Minutes. Members’ meeting 23rd September 1916, pp. 46-7.

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When Berson suddenly absconded to America in September 1916, there was consternation. It became clear how closely allied the organization was with Berson’s persona and activities. A new venue for committee meetings had to be sought, and it is likely that these moved to the nearby Notting Hill residence of the committee’s chairman, tailor Isaac Braydburg 62. The society withdrew its membership of the Protection Committee 63. Several meetings were spent reviewing letters from Berson, who had made no mention of his departure at a meeting two weeks beforehand, with members lining up to denounce his action as irresponsible and profess their disappointment. But by November the society was beginning to chart its new post-Berson course. On Sunday 12th November a members’ meeting was held, and inspired by a visit from Morris Myer, the Di Tsayt editor who spoke of the need for greater cultural cohesion on ‘the Jewish street’ (that is, the East End), members agreed to drop the emphasis on ‘decorative’ art from the name, and include sculpture and painting in the society’s remit 64. It had already been decided that the collection, such as it was, must remain in London 65. Berson had taken material that committee members felt belonged to the Ben Uri, and presumably they were worried that he would send back from America for more, or try and start another branch of the Ben Uri there 66. Now the mood was strongly in favour of establishing an institute for Jewish art. The minutes were taken by Beach, who while showing the influence of Berson’s rhetoric, also revealed his personal preoccupation with a spiritual Jewish culture.

It was also reported during the discussion that the Jewish people exists at the moment in an irrational (sic) state and in order to emerge from these difficult times, there is only one way; the way of creativity.

To change oneself by transformation of renewed spirit, to wake up a feeling for the beautiful and good is the main aim of the Ben Uri, however, if it can not create this on its own, it should make provision for it.

At the same time to strive to create a centre where the creations of Jewish artists could send their creations to a Jewish place. And Jewish youth could appreciate it as well as draw future artistic inspiration for their own future creative talents, and to put this in motion we established a Jewish Museum Fund on behalf of which a collection was made for £3 and 13 shillings. 67 The members left the meeting in a good mood and ‘high spirits’ 68, perhaps feeling a little liberated in Berson’s absence. This concrete commitment to a Jewish Museum would linger on the Ben Uri’s agenda for the next sixteen years, with various financing schemes essayed and dropped, until the society moved into the new Jewish Communal Centre at Euston, where a 62 The first few committee meetings after Berson’s departure are recorded as chaired by Braydburg but the location is not

given; on 30th December 1916 the committee meeting chaired by Braydburg took place at 236 Lancaster Road (1916-21 Minutes, p. 65). This address was given for Braydburg on an advertisement for tickets for a Ben Uri boat trip in 1920 (BU Archive PR/01/01/04).

63 Meetings on 23/09/16 and 30/09/16, from 1916-1921 Minutes, pp. 46-7, 49.

64 1916-21 Minutes. Members’ meeting 12th November 1916, pp. 55-57. There is some confusion over dates at this point in the minute book; the translator notes that in many cases the dates 1916 and 1917 were later amended (presumably by Beach) to 1918 and 1919; I think it safe given the chronology to assume that these amendments were inaccurate.

65 1916-21 Minutes. Committee meeting 28th October 1916, p. 53.

66 Ibid.

67 1916-21 Minutes, members’ meeting 12th November 1916, pp. 57-58.

68 Ibid.

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Jewish Museum was founded. Even then, the Ben Uri retained a separate gallery for its artworks, and continued to seek a permanent home over the rest of the twentieth century. But a shift had occurred in the Ben Uri’s main purpose, from being an organ promoting the pursuit of creativity among Jews, through learning craft and drawing, to being an institution promoting Jewish art and artists through exhibition.

The committee continued to meet over the remainder of 1916, invigorated by the members’ meeting of November 12th. Two lectures on Jewish art were organised by the society in the East End that December. The radical intellectual Dr Salkind spoke on Arabic art at the Old King’s Hall, Commercial Road. Leopold Pilichowski, a well known Polish painter who had arrived in London in 1914 and was made an honorary founding member of the Ben Uri, gave a talk on the history of Jewish art featuring some of his own work. For the latter, Beach wrote a notice for publication in Di Tsayt advertising its ‘spiritual worth’: We are convinced that this lecture will awaken the Jewish masses of London and bring them closer to their Jewish artists and create the possibility that their work could find a place with us and not somewhere else. Thereby the Jewish National existence can be enriched. We hope that everyone will take advantage of this opportunity and arrive in masses... 69 It is not known how many followed Beach’s exhortation to attend, although the talk was warmly praised by committee members afterwards and a move was made to acquire one of Pilichowski’s paintings 70. Braydburg was also in touch with another artist, already of some British renown, Alfred Wolmark, about buying some of his work 71. Wolmark was a Warsawborn painter who had come to England as a child in the 1880s, and to the East End in the 1890s.

By the 1900s he was exhibiting, working in studios around London, and visiting Cracow for artistic inspiration 72. Wolmark has been called the father of the Whitechapel Boys, a generation older than them and already noted for his scenes of East End Jewish life. The discussion around these potential acquisitions, and the fact that committee members were bringing particulars of rental properties to meetings in February 1917, shows that the society was seriously looking to consolidate its holdings. But after a committee meeting in April, there is a gap in the records of over two years 73. It is clear from subsequent recorded meetings that activities had continued

69 Text of announcement in Di Tsayt in 1916-21 Minutes, p. 61.

70 1916-1921 Minutes, text of thank-you note from Beach to Pilichowski, p. 64; committee meeting 13th January 1917, p. 67.

The painting was not acquired in the end, partly through lack of the necessary £100, and partly due to the artist’s own attachment to the canvas. This may have been ‘Hear O Israel’, which was acquired finally in 1924.

71 1916-21 Minutes, committee meeting 13th January 1917, p. 67, and committee meeting 24th February 1917, p. 69.

72 Peter Gross ‘Mr Wolmark, The Painter of the Ghetto’ (chapter of unpublished PhD thesis 'Ostjuden and Westjuden: art and Anglo-Jewish identity') pp. 3-4.

73 This is the first of several gaps in the BU 1916-21 minute book. It is complicated by Beach’s tendency to alter dates after the event, evident in the manuscript version and noted by the translator. Perhaps having noticed the long lapses between recorded meetings, he seems to have gone back and changed the year of several meetings to bring them forward in time.

Cross-referencing with other archive notices and cuttings, and a check of historical calendar dates where weekdays are mentioned, allows for some clarification of these dates, though one meeting, dated Sunday 5th June, could not have been in 1917, 1918 or 1919 – it may have in fact been Sunday 15th June, 1919, given that Leo Kenig, soon to bring the journal Renesans under Ben Uri’s control, is mentioned. BU Minutes 1916-21, pp. 55-71.

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for some of that period, but it is likely that, as in many other organizations in 1917, the Ben Uri committee members were overwhelmed by current affairs.

1917 saw the onset of a generalized war-weariness in London, as historian Jerry White documents. Food and fuel shortages left most Londoners at a low ebb. The embattled atmosphere bred outbreaks of anger and grievance, and men who appeared to be of fighting age were regarded with suspicion and hostility. Zenophobic aggression, which had been focused on German and Austrian Londoners up until 1917, turned in May of that year to East End Russian Jews. One night 640 young men were rounded up from East End restaurants, dance halls and billiards rooms by heavy handed police and soldiers and accused of conscription-dodging, for only nine to be found guilty 74. That number would have increased in July, when the convention to deport non-naturalized Russians who refused to sign up for the British army was eventually signed between Russia and Britain. The Defence of the Realm Act was used to undo the FJPC, justifying a raid on its office in late July and the deportation of Bezalel who had in any case been monitored by the local constabulary for some time (he was dubbed, fondly, ‘Beelzebub’ by the police; any further information is now out of the historian’s reach as the Home Office subsequently destroyed their file on him) 75.

If East End Jews were suffering in their domestic circumstances, international events were also pressing on them. Though the Russian Revolution of March 1917 had met with a euphoric response from Russian émigrés, many of whom entertained the possibility of returning voluntarily to what could only be a better society, the Bolshevik coup of October complicated things. On one hand, the Bolshevik administration soon proved to be almost as bad for Jews at the Tsarist regime, with many pogroms occurring in the Pale of Settlement in the name of the revolution 76. On the other, because there were a number of Jews in Bolshevik positions of power, there was an international propensity to perceive of Jews as Communists. In Britain the ‘Red Scare’ was strong, and even Anglo-Jews suspected Russian Jews of Bolshevism if they chose to return to Russia rather than sign up to the British army 77. As Sharman Kadish has pointed out, the 3000 men who did return to Russia under the convention represented ‘the radical cream of the Ghetto’, leaving the East End a slightly less politically active place 78.

The one item in the archive from this tumultuous summer of 1917 is a communiqué from the committee to Ben Uri members, calling them to attend a meeting on July 1st at a Kensington address.

Esteemed Member, we have not called you for a long time because we thought that the daily, current questions, which have embraced everyone’s thoughts like a fever, allow no time to attend to national problems. However, time has shown us that the national

74 White Zeppelin Nights p. 86.

75 Kadish op. cit. p. 199; Colin Holmes ‘Government Files and Privileged Access’ Social History 6:3 (Oct 1981), pp. 333-50,

p. 341.

76 Kadish op. cit. p. 190-191.

77 Kadish op. cit. p. 211.

78 Kadish op. cit. p. 209.

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sentiment is strongly manifesting itself everywhere, and we think that an art society is an important element that a nation can be proud of. 79 Presumably the ‘daily current questions’ were those of hunger, fuel shortages, transport chaos and increased anti-semitism that accompanied the third year of the war. But the communiqué also speaks to the Zionist currents flowing now stronger than ever through European Jewish communities. It seems likely that when the Ben Uri committee said national, they meant Jewish national.

A great deal is being said about national greatness, but what constitutes greatness if not collecting valuable art objects of the Jewish creative genius of bygone generations and also of the present time. 80 In a few months, the Balfour declaration would set Zionist hopes soaring with a promise from the British government to establish a home for the Jews in Palestine. This is not mentioned in the Ben Uri minutes, except, early in the 1920s, to preface a petition for funds from the Bezalel School of Art in Palestine 81. Furthermore, we do not know what was said or decided at the 1917 Kensington meeting. The archival silence for the whole of 1918 suggests that the society was struggling to maintain momentum in wartime circumstances, and still righting itself after the departure of Lazar Berson in 1916. But as Part 3 will show, the post-war period ushered in a fruitful period for the Ben Uri.

79 ‘National Jewish Art Society “Ben Uri” invitation to members meeting on Sunday 1st July 1917. BU Archive.

80 Ibid. Members who turned up were promised an image of one of the items in the collection, which at that point was exclusively Berson’s work.

81 Minutes of the Executive Council January 1924-July 1926. Monday 7th April 1924. BU Archive.

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