The Jewish Picasso Of Tremont

Herbert Lagin stands before his 9/11 memorial. Inset: Abstract painting suggests the Holocaust. Sharon Udasin

Hidden behind rows of shoddy warehouses, auto-repair junkyards and single-room-occupancy tenements, the Museum of the People of the World is largely invisible to the sporadic passersby in its gritty Bronx location, just east of the Grand Concourse and down the hill from the jagged bedrock of Tremont’s Echo Park.

The museum of what, you say? Where?

In a city of museums — from one on sex to one on biblical art — you won’t find this one in any museum index or listing, in print or online.

The quirky, intensely personal museum, which carries the New Age-y subtitle “A Sanctuary for All Who Enter” and only recently opened to the public, is a testament to one man’s creativity, vision and, perhaps, obsession. It houses hundreds of works, in a dizzying array of media, all made by the hands of 91-year-old Herbert Lagin — a tinkerer, inventor and self-taught “outsider” artist. In a huge storage space adjacent to the lamp-manufacturing facility Lagin has owned and operated for the past 60 years, the works memorialize the Holocaust, 9/11 and religious refugees.

A nondescript door marked “4269” leads inside the facility, which occupies the rear of the bright-orange Western Beef factory outlet. Once inside, past the pastel blue corridor, its paint peeling, a sun-filled and brightly lamp-lit section of the warehouse contains tri-fold screens filled with abstract paintings, chain links dangling from the ceiling and original glasswork scattered here and there. Admission is free, and any donations go to various causes around the world, most recently Haiti.

“He actually redesigned the space with all sorts of machinery and everything — it’s really amazing he did this on his own,” says Lagin’s daughter, Robin Langsam, who is one of five children and is a teacher in Armonk. “He created the vision of it and really followed through.”

A widower, Lagin lives in Great Neck, L.I., but drives in to Tremont several days a week to work in his factory-turned-museum. He says he conceptualized this museum just in the past few years, has been creating artwork since the third grade, when he’d reproduce pictures from classroom textbooks. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Lagin graduated from Long Island University while working in a lamp factory and was poised to head to medical school when the Great Depression struck. Foregoing medical school in an effort to support his parents, Lagin continued working at the lamp-manufacturing facility and eventually opened his own factory in the 1950s and purchased other Tremont properties. In addition to his artwork, Lagin has been something of an inventor, acquiring patents for a lamp-mounting tool, a recovery pillow for open-heart surgery patients and forge-proof traveler’s checks, among other items, although never actually marketing these products.

“He’s always been ingenious and creative, even doing something as simple as taking out his little pocketknife and making handles on boxes,” Langsam says. She then maps her father’s artistic trajectory from mixed media to watercolors to copper to etched glass and today, to markers, Cray-Pas and collages.

“You find people who late in their life, when they finish what they’ve had to do for a living, really take on this amazing outburst of original and quite extraordinary artistic expression,” says Selig Sacks, a trustee of the American Folk Art Museum who in 2009 was named one of the top 250 collectors in Art & Antiques Magazine. Sacks examined 40 photos of Lagin’s work, at the request of The Jewish Week.

Near the entrance to the museum, a panel of photographs features twilight snapshots from Lagin’s Great Neck, L.I., backyard of what appears to be the Star of Bethlehem, the star that revealed the birth of Jesus to the magi in Christian tradition. Nearby is a wall spread of framed black-and-white photographs from the U.S. government’s Holocaust archives, to which Lagin has added color and replaced some of the victims’ heads with those of figures like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Islamic terrorists. “That’s [Ahmadinejad] — him as a Jew,” said Lagin, who may well be the only Jewish regular in the largely Hispanic and African-American Tremont neighborhood. “Everybody’s a Jew based on history.”

Around the space hang black chain links symbolic of wartime bondage, and behind the photographs mixed colors of paint trickle down the wall like blood. In a corner hangs a wooden cutout of a man, dangling from the ceiling on a hangman’s noose.  Continue reading…

**Also re-posted on Jewlicious.com

Snapshot from The Jewish Week’s homepage:

Watch my lovely friend Liron Mark give a speech at Hebrew University’s Yom HaShoah ceremony (still need to add English subtitles). She’s leading a special project working with Israeli Holocaust survivors, to help them properly fill out forms required to get them additional funds. For more information on that, you can read an article she wrote here (again, Hebrew only currently): http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/092/408.html.

Bayside’s Shoah Treasure, Not So Hidden Anymore

Queensborough Community College’s new Holocaust Resource Center. Sharon Udasin

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Huddled inside a bus station in Bayside, Queens, last December, Paul Cavalieri shuddered in the cold air and

watched the snow come down around him, hoping his bus would soon roll into sight. But then his brain reeled back 15 minutes to his interview with Queens Holocaust survivor Ethel Katz, who told him of her two-year escape from the Nazis. It was a perilous trek that at one point took her through knee-deep snow in nothing but a nightgown.
“I could sit here at this bus stop and freeze for a little while,” Cavalieri remembers deciding. “It put my problems into perspective.”

Along with other students, Cavalieri tells a similar version of the story on an LCD touch-screen panel in an exhibition at the new

Holocaust Resource Center at Queensborough Community College. The building, a starkly modern glass structure, stands out on a campus of sprawling parking lots, nondescript buildings and mobile classrooms.

Twenty-four years ago, the original center — essentially a basement library — grew out of a course taught by William Shulman, who said that his students needed a place to broaden their Holocaust research. There it languished until Queensborough Community College President Eduardo Martí took over in 2000 and decided that a cramped cellar was no place for Holocaust resources. With the help of the center’s director, Arthur Flug, he obtained funding from the state, a $1 million gift from Harriet Kupferberg and $2.8 million in private donations to open a new, 9,000-square-feet building last month.

“He saw the potential of connecting the Holocaust to young college students,” said Owen Bernstein, 87, a board member of the center who donated personal funds as well, said of Martí.  Continue reading…

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Video of my experience there:

Schindler’s Apprentice

Leon Leyson: Oskar Schindler “was an extraordinary human being, not just for us but for everyone who was in his company.”

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

More than 60 years ago, little Leon Leyson steadied himself on top of a box each morning, climbing the makeshift step stool to operate the controls of a metalworking lathe machine that towered over his skinny 13-year-old body. 

Today that pint-sized worker is 80, the youngest survivor of Oskar Schindler’s factory in Krakow, the workplace that saved more than a thousand Polish Jews from death. He shared his story with New Yorkers for the first time Tuesday evening, at an event organized by Chabad-Lubavitch of Midtown. Only after Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” premiered in 1994, did Leyson begin speaking about his experiences working in Schindler’s enamelware factory and how he and some of his family members were able to survive the Holocaust.

n Leyson’s opinion, “Schindler’s List” paved the way for the slew of World War II resistance films that have become popular in Hollywood today — films like “Defiance,” “Valkryie” and “Inglourious Basterds,” which tell of survival rather than victimization. “Defiance” particularly strikes a chord with Leyson because he grew up very close to the story’s location, he said.

“Ever since Schindler’s List came out things turned a little bit,” Leyson told The Jewish Week prior to the event. “There was more interest generated in those events like Schindler, those people who rescued Jews. Rescuers didn’t come out and admit what they had done until Schindler’s List came out.”  Continue reading…