Revealing invisible realms in the Spiritual Universe: The Art of Abigail Sarah Bagraim

(Author: Ute Ben Yosef, Vol. 70, No. 1, Pesach 2015)

Abigail Sarah Bagraim is a mystical painter whose Jewish identity is intrinsic to her art. It is this distinctiveness that makes it impossible to align her work with any other South African contemporary art movement. In Marc Chagall (1887-1985), she found her freedom of expression, the outlet of her psychic energies. This transformation is expressed in Kabbalistic symbols. She can be regarded as an offshoot of the great master whose deepest emotional and spiritual roots were in the world of the Kabbalah and in Hasidism.

Apart from her artistic creativity, Abigail is a serious academic and student of Jewish mysticism. She has two Masters degrees, in Fine Art and in Social Science, and is currently working on her doctoral thesis. Creativity, according to Jung, springs from the collective unconscious and finds expression through archetypal symbols. Abigail’s archetypal symbols spring from realms of the Jewish religious experience. Like Chagall, she sometimes crosses boundaries to other religions. Chagall used Christian symbols with which he addressed the western world. Abigail has sought out far-eastern religions in her search for the feminine numinous presence. A compilation of her entire oeuvre and the interpretation of her art and symbolism can be found on her website: www.abigailsarah.co.za.

Abigail was born in London, the second child of Judith and Mark Bagraim. Her two sons were consecutive head boys of Herzlia Highlands and her brother, Michael, is a well-known politician, labour lawyer and community leader. When she was still a child, the family relocated to Cape Town. She studied Fine Art at Rhodes University in Grahamstown under Prof Robert Brooks, who had a deep understanding and admiration of this individualistic student.

In 1986, she completed her M.F.A degree cum laude. Her thesis, entitled The Hasidic Spirit as the foundation of the art of Marc Chagall,reveals her fine scholarship, profound insight into the background of Jewish mysticism and its all-encompassing influence on Marc Chagall. One of the outstanding features of Abigail’s thesis is the comparison between Chagall’s real life of poverty, hardship, antisemitism and pogroms in Russia and on the other hand, his radiantly joyful paintings noted for their defiance of gravity and relative time-space dimensions. Chagall reconciled ancient Jewish and especially Hasidic traditions of the belief in the omnipresence of G-d with the different styles of modern art, none of which he followed completely. In his paintings, the archetype of the Shekhinah reveals itself.2

Parallel to her studies, Abigail exhibited at prestigious galleries, participating in a group exhibition at the Natalie Knight Gallery, Johannesburg, and exhibiting in Cape Town’s Gallery International and Irma Stern Museum Town. In 1999, she exhibited under the theme “Jewish Mysticism” at the Parliament of World Religions in Cape Town, where she presented well-received lectures. Her paintings are reproduced in various prominent magazines and she has appeared on television interviews in which she explained the meaning of her symbols. In June 1999, she presented a paper in Jerusalem at the Sixth International Seminar on Jewish art, entitled, ‘The Hasidic Spirit as the foundation of the Art of Marc Chagall’.

Abigail continued her studies in comparative religion at the University of Cape Town where, in 1998, she completed a second master’s degree, in religious studies. Her thesis is entitled ‘Visions and Imagination in Jewish Mystical Texts’.In this profound research, she presents some of the central mystical texts in the Bible, apocrypha (non-canonical writings) and pseudo epigrapha (incorrectly attributed ancient writings) in which visionary revelations to Jewish mystics are described. She verifies that the visual element in mystical thinking has always been alive and well in Judaism and that it has been suppressed mainly due to the decree of the Second Commandment. Her thesis culminates in an examination of the Kabbalah (the Jewish mystical tradition) which became the essence of her art. The Ten Sefirot are the intangible phenomena, the structural elements of the Source of Being. She demonstrates how the kabbalists were obsessed with seeing the invisible and that their mystical sense of sight has held a very high position in their mystical experiences.

Abigail is presently working on her doctoral thesis on aspects of the Kabbalah, which represents the resurgence of a divine mystical tradition within Judaism. She bases her premises on the writings of Gershom Scholem, who found that mysticism has played a revitalizing role in Judaism.3 She explores the Bahir, the oldest classical work of Kabbalistic literature which originated in 11th Century Provence, and the Zohar – the ‘Book of Splendour’ – which relates mystical aspects of the Torah and analyses the Nature of G-d. The Zoharforms the basis of the Kabbalah. One of the most important aspects of Kabbalah is the introduction of the Shekhinah, the divine feminine substance of the G-dhead.4

Simultaneously viewed as mother, bride and daughter, Shekhinah represents radiance and light created by G-d, yet not as an entity separate from Him.The association of the Shekhinah with light sprang from an interpretation of the Biblical verse of Ezekiel 43:2: “and the earth was lit up by His Presence”.

Just as a hand held before the eyes conceals the greatest mountain,

so does petty earthly life conceal from view the vast lights and

mysteries of which the world is full, and he who can withdraw

it from his eyes as one withdraws a hand, will behold the great light

of the innermost world. Rabbi Nachman of Bratislava [Breslov].5

As in all the paintings by Abigail, this image (Fig. 1) is a multidimensional meditation piece, based on the understanding of Jewish Hasidism and Kabbalism. In it the Shekhinahappears as the Sabbath queen. She ushers in the eve of the holiest day of the week, descending from the evening sky which is rendered in the colour reminiscent of the deep blue dye used in ancient times by Jews, called tekhelet. This colour also appears in Chagall’s night scenes.

Light is reflected from Her numinous presence. In the same way as the moon reflects the rays of the sun, She has no light of her own.6 Accompanied by a host of angels from above, She appears in her splendour, the waves of her hair swirling within the vibrant atmosphere of the sky. She is magnificently attired in her flowing bridal robe, adorned with pearls which symbolize the soul, and with stars which had tumbled down from the universe. She is crowned with the atara (diadem) and with Her hand sprinkles the jewels of her light whose rays contain all the commandments. She holds a festive bouquet of arum lilies of the South African Cape in one hand and a flowing branch of lilies in the other. She faces the viewer directly, thus involving the outside world with her presence and with the Sabbath ritual which is unfolding.

Fig. 1. Sabbath Queen. 2007Acrylic on Canvas. 90x60cmSgd. Below right: Abigail Sarah 07

We see a rabbinical figure in a landscape, dressed in a white garment. From the 16thCentury the kabbalists of Safed, dressed in white, went out into the orchards on Friday afternoons to welcome the Sabbath bride and with that to usher the female presence of the G-dhead into their midst. They sang hymns, the most famous being Lecha Dodi. Then the men would return home to be received by their wives, the earthly representatives of the Shekhinah.7 In Abigail’s painting the Shabbat ritual takes its course in the lower sphere. The mother, dressed in white, blesses the candles over the challah. Rays emanating from the Sabbath bride touch her. Outside, within the dark realms of outer space, the ritual is repeated in the deep blue night sky within the wings of angels. Between the grid of the Hebrew word baruch (blessed) the family gathers one by one and soon the husband will be chanting the song of praise to the “woman of valour”. The painting exudes a state of complete peace within the radiance of the Shekhinah who at that moment encompasses the opportunity of redemption of the world.

The artist has captured this moment of the onset of the Holy Shabbat and its universal harmony, peace and beauty in which the ritual is elevated to the sphere of the numinous.

THE HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL SERIES

At the end of this year (5775/2015) Abigail is scheduled to hold an exhibition of a series of her works under the auspices of the Cape Town Holocaust Centre which will also be brought to the Johannesburg and Durban Holocaust Centres.

The series is based on visits to Holocaust monuments and memorials in eastern and western Europe by Abigail and her father, and Israel by herself. She has captured her experiences in a highly individualistic manner expressive of her feelings, visions and sensations as they were conveyed by each individual monument. This forms the core of the painting. She surrounds the monuments with pictograms, or hieroglyphs, which have to be decoded by the viewer. Each one generates in the artist a different mood or insight. Many of the pictograms, especially the self-portrait of the artist, repeat themselves in different paintings. Most of Abigail’s images are based on symbols of Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah. Some are based on archetypal symbols of the collective unconscious.

Symbols

The dark side or, in Kabbalistic terms, the Sitra Achra, is represented by the evil female or Terrible Mother archetype.8 In Abigail’s paintings she can also appear as the witch or the sorceress. Symbols of terror and destruction are: fire, the souls of the murdered victims and black for the colour of the abyss.

The artist, recording

In most of Abigail’s Holocaust series the emblematic figure of the artist appears at the bottom of the painting, sometimes seated in in the lotus position, or with paintbrushes and canvas. She is recording the scene of memorialisation together with her reflections and visions.

Jan van Erkelens’ puppets

Jan van Erkelens (born 1918) is a famous Dutch marionette artist. He began to create puppets as a reaction to a family trauma. As a puppeteer he became famous for his fairy tale performances, often presented in rhymes. The marionette used as motif by Abigail (with his permission) in her painting Warsaw – Home of Chopin and Endlösung der Judenfrage(Fig. 3) is “the evil sorceress”.9

Abigail’s highly original angle and content reveals the insight of the younger generation into the Holocaust. A monument, in the concept of Western civilization, is an object of glorification of a specific person or event. It addresses itself to the viewer with the summons to emulate the person or event which is honoured in a positive way. A Holocaust monument represents the exact opposite. It is a memorial to unspeakable suffering, to unimaginable horror, caused by genocide and crimes against humanity.10 The philosopher Theodor Adorno felt that to aestheticize the Holocaust would be barbaric.11 On the other hand, many have felt that a Holocaust monument relieves a community of its traumatic memory process.12 Abigail’s paintings are visual messages between the monuments and herself as artist representing her generation. Her responses to them are addressed to the contemporary viewer, a generation removed from the direct experience of the event in question, with a different concept and reception to that of the survivors. Her motifs are symbols of an interactive dialogue. For Abigail, these monuments fill in for the absence of graves and tombstones and act as substitutes of remembrance.

Abigail with these paintings represents a generation in search of catharsis. For her, the act of memorialisation is directed towards the future. She describes this Holocaust series as “art about art” because its visual core was conceived by another artist. Based upon this she renders her personal interpretation of the monument and the historical events which it represents. Her images are intentionally naïve, even childlike. Only on this level of guilelessness is she able to grasp and transmit the sheer enormity of the cataclysmic event. Unique to her paintings and perhaps extraordinary to many viewers is her belief in the concept of gilgul, the Kabbalistic notion of transformation and reincarnation of the human soul. Abigail simply cannot accept the notion of finality through mass murder.

Stylistically, these paintings are characterized by a paradox between flat rigidity and a restless vibrancy. Her picture plane is divided by a horizontal line separating sky (or universe) which is the spiritual realm – and a lower realm, that of the earth.

The pictograms are arranged in a particular order across the canvas and are connected by vibrations oscillating through space and time. They form an echo of the universe, which is permeated by spiritual beings, seraphs, butterflies, souls of the departed and those who enter the afterlife in a mystical cycle of life, death and transformation as for Abigail death is not the end. The paintings are suffused with the presence of the Shekhinah. She is revealed by rays of light or by its opposite, darkness and mourning, as in the maternal reflection of Rachel weeping for her children (Jeremiah 31).

Germany

An example of a memorial site captured by Abigail is the Holocaust monument in Berlin. In Germany, monuments to the Holocaust are taken very seriously. The on-going debates about Holocaust monuments are memorials in themselves. Germany’s Holocaust monuments are ambiguous by their very nature because they direct an appeal to the nation to remember the victims of crimes which this nation itself perpetrated.13 The Holocaust monuments of Germany demonstrate how the German nation has incorporated the Shoah into its national history and consciousness.

2. Alone with the spirits at the Jewish Memorial in Berlin. 2013Acrylic on Canvas. 90x60cmSgd. below right: Abigail Sarah Batsheva ‘5773

In the epicentre of Berlin, very close to Hitler’s bunker, Peter Eisenmann, the minimal sculptor of virtual space and time, conceived within an area of nineteen thousand square metres 2711 concrete stelae, arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. Varying in height, they are grey, like a huge field of charcoal. Beneath the memorial, which was inaugurated in 2004, an information site holds the names of every known Jewish Holocaust victim. Abigail turned the memorial site into an image of transformation, in which gilgul, the transfiguration of the souls of the murdered Jews of Europe, takes place.

Above the charcoal coloured stelae golden angels float. In the middle ground, at a higher level, butterflies, symbols of metamorphosis, rise upwards into the sky. In the realms of the central heavenly sphere hovers the female numinous being. Her abundant hair sheds roses in an eternal swirl of space and time. In the centre of the sky on the top, a phoenix (symbol of resurrection) rises from the ashes. It is flanked by two mirror images of the artist in a long garment holding a light of six flames.

This painting once again is a scene of meditation in which the viewer is drawn in to witness the commemoration of the event and the artist’s vision of reincarnation.

Poland

On her visit to Warsaw, Abigail created a complex painting which is not without some wry Jewish humour. She comments, “I was trying to show that in Poland they had this amazing music genius as well as this horrific evil towards the Jews. They were sophisticated and yet savage.”14 The painting records the Warsaw ghetto monument by Nathan Rapoport (1911-1987) floating in the right hand centre of the sky. Abigail reflects on the cultural side of Warsaw prior to the Holocaust. On the top left-hand corner the great composer Fréderic Chopin, who did not like Jews, is surrounded by his glorious music notes. Floating on a golden swing he holds a marionette on a string. This is the image of the “Great Sorceress”, a creation by Jan van Erkelens from his series Toverspegel (magic mirror).

3. Warsaw – Home of Chopin and Endlösung der Judenfrage (the final solution of the Jewish question). 2014Acrylic on canvas. 76x51cmSgd. Below right: Abigail Sarah Batsheva ‘5774

Below the puppeteer’s sorceress, the mother and child figure representing Abigail and her baby empathises with the Jewish mothers of Warsaw and the looming danger to their children. A delicate arch of white birds in flight protects her. Her right side is embellished by an assortment of pink roses, but their leaves are dry and dead. A thin flame rises up beside Nathan Rapoport’s monument. Various space-time dimensions are encompassed in this one scene and the viewer is called upon to meditate on the different pictographic images.

Lithuania

The Ninth Fort was part of the great prison of Kovno (Kaunas). After the occupation of Lithuania by Nazi Germany, it was used as a place of execution for Jews, with massacres on an enormous scale being perpetrated. Fig. 4 is a very personal painting for Abigail. Kovno was the birthplace of her grandparents, who luckily left Lithuania in time. They are depicted under the Holocaust memorial by Alfonsos Ambraziunas (1984). The scene is encapsulated by a teardrop which forms the inner core.

Since the memorial by Abraziunas has been erected on the bare premises of the Ninth Fort, Abigail painted a Jewish cemetery with tomb stones for the nameless thousands who had no grave. Her grandparents stand side by side as a beacon of steadfastness within the cataclysm. Once again the artist, even in the title of this painting, emphasises her conviction that the souls of the murdered victims of the Ninth Fort of Kovno live on in triumph over their oppressors. The emaciated figures of the dead souls ascend under tears and a weeping female head within a mandala and a white cherub at the top. Large butterflies, symbols of transformation, flit inside and around the inner core. Outside the precincts of the teardrop, beside the quiet gaze of the all-seeing eye of the G-dhead, two figures entwined with cloudy schemata (the souls of the departed) toss down red roses. These come to lie between the image of the artist below, who on the left casts light upon on the scene with her candle. On the right her mirror image is seated at her easel, turning around to face the viewer, whom she draws into the spectacle of death and transformation.

With this painting Abigail invokes the words of Ezekiel (37:11-12): “Then He said to me: ‘Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel’. Behold they say, ‘Our bones are dried and our hopes are lost’ … Therefore prophesy and say to them thus says the Lord God, ‘Behold O my people, I will open your graves and … bring you into the land of Israel …’”15

4. The Ninth Fort of Kovno, 1941 – our souls survive. 2012Acrylic on Canvas. 92x61cmSgd: below right on Abigail’s canvas: Abigail Sarah Batsheva ‘5772

The Kindertransport

The Kindertransport (German: ‘children transport’) was a British rescue mission that took place in 1938 during the nine months prior to the outbreak of World War II. As the only country in the world, the UK took in nearly 10 000 Jewish children, ranging from infancy to the age of seventeen. They came from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Free City of Danzig. Their parents were not permitted to accompany them to England. The children of the Kindertransportwere placed in foster homes, hostels, schoolsand farms. Often, they were the only members of their families to survive the Holocaust. The transport saved their lives, but it was traumatic for them, and for their parents. The children had to face a different world in which they could not speak the language and had no idea who was going to care for them. Some were brought up in hostels; some were fortunate to be adopted. A small number were not well treated by their foster parents.

‘Kindertransport’ (Fig. 5) is once again a very personal painting by Abigail. The two monuments to the Kindertransport by Frank Meisler at its core were erected on the central Berlin railway station at Friedrichstrasse. There they are placed back to back but in Abigail’s painting both sculptures face the viewer. Like the sculptor Abigail’s uncle, Rabbi Bernd Koschland, was a Kindertransport child, and she dedicates this painting to him.

5. „Kindertransport”, including my uncle Bernd Koschland. 2014 Acrylic on Canvas. 61x46cmSgd. below centre: Abigail Sarah Batsheva ‘5774

Bernd Koschland was born in Fürth, Bavaria, in southern Germany.16 He witnessed the vacillation of his parents as they agonised over whether to let him go or keep him with them. After the final decision, his mother accompanied him to Hamburg, seeing him for the last time when the SS Manhattan left the harbour. He was eight years old. His parents also managed to send his older sister to England, where she found work as a domestic. Bernd was placed in a strictly disciplinarian hostel in Margate where, after the declaration of war, he was told that he was not to keep any letters from Germany. The letters his parents wrote to him were destroyed, which distressed him greatly.

In Margate, Bernd forged a friendship with a fellow Kindertransport child, Joe Fertig. With the bombing intensifying, the children were evacuated to the rural village of Hammerwich, where they were accommodated by a kindly English couple. There, Bernd and Joe attended a day school, before they were abruptly separated. Bernd moved to Tylers Green, an Orthodox Jewish hostel near rural Wycombe, where he received his religious upbringing under the fatherly directorship of Rabbi Munk, for which he is very grateful. He has remained close to his schoolmates and teachers. After the hostel disbanded in 1947, he studied for the Rabbinate and later became a high school teacher, also becoming involved in educational activities within the community and in interfaith work. He and his beloved wife Ruth, of blessed memory, had a son and a daughter and he is blessed with grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. Rabbi Koschland believes that the children of the Kindertransport can best repay their survival by trying to make the word a better place. After his retirement he assumed a hospital and a local police chaplaincy. He has remained in close contact with the Kindertransportcommunity and is the editor of their newsletter. Abigail in her painting commemorates with deep feeling the fate of her uncle Bernd and all the Kindertransport children who have so bravely carried on with their lives.

In the painting, against an eerie blue background, angels descend from above, some holding a red rose as a gesture of rachamim (compassion) towards the children in the monument by Meisler, setting out on their journey to an unknown future. They are accompanied by their toys, their only reminder of their homes and their parents. Abigail is seated in the posture of eastern meditation, inviting the viewer to identify with these children who in this monument meet their destiny with obedient fatalism.

Babi Yar

“Here in this gorge of hell the history of a great Jewish world has ended – the world of the Ukrainian Jews, from whose midst the first dreamers of Zion came forth, the best Jewish poets and writers, the great pioneers and trailblazers of Zionism” (Yitzchak Rabin).

On the former outskirts of Kiev, there is a ravine where, in the course of two days beginning on Yom Kippur, 1941, 33 771 Jewish men, women and children were shot dead by members of the German Wehrmacht. This terrible massacre then sunk into historical oblivion. During the Soviet Union’s initial commemorations of the Second World War, Jews were not mentioned at all. Only after the death of Stalin (1953), was the great Russian poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko able to arouse a national awareness about what had befallen the Jewish people with his 1961 poem Babi Yar: “No monument stands over Babi Yar/A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone/ I am afraid/Today, I am as old/As the entire Jewish race itself.”

Yevtuschenko’s universal outcry against antisemitism through the ages up until the massacre of Babi Yar was transposed into choral music in 1962 by the great Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich in his 13thSymphony, entitled “Babi Yar”. It ends with these words: “There is no Jewish blood in my blood/But I feel the loathsome hatred of all antisemites as though I were a Jew –/And that is why I am a true Russian.”17

And still for decades any plans for Holocaust memorials in the Soviet Union were smothered by surges of post-war Russian antisemitism. Only after 1991, when the Ukraine became independent, did the genocide of the Jews during World War II begin to be commemorated. One of the memorials, created by Valeriy Medvedew in 2006, was devoted to the children who had perished at Babi Yar. As the shooting of children was too terrible to visualise, the artist substituted broken children’s dolls in bronze.

With her painting of Valeriy Medvedew’s memorial (fig.6), Abigail chose the motif of the children in their different ages in frontal portraits, festively arrayed in the beauty and purity of their childhood, prior to their brutal murder. The artist depicts the memorial with the souls of gilgul (reincarnation) fluttering in a white semi-circle from the hands of the main figure. She is seated below turning her back to her easel and facing the viewer, thereby involving the world in her reflections of this cataclysmic event. In the painting on the left easel she depicts the numinous presence of the Shekhinah within the web of the universe. On the canvas to her right a four-winged angel floats between the universe and two monuments in honour of Janusz Korczak in Warsaw, rendered in the form of hieroglyphs. These evoke the spirit of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The horrific memory is frozen in time confronting us with a ghostly rigidity, as an intense reminder of zachor: ‘remember’.

6. Babi Yar Memorial. 2014Acrylic on canvas. 90x60cmSgd below off centre: ‘5774 Abigail Sarah Batsheva

RedemptionAccording to Saul Friedländer, there is a mythic link between the Holocaust and the birth of Israel.18 Yet immediately after the Holocaust, when the traumatised survivors arrived in the Jewish state, they experienced rejection because they did not fit in with the image of the sabra, the name conveying the strong and hardy image of the typical Israeli pioneer as symbolised by the desert plant of that name. To the regret of the present generation, they were criticized for having allowed themselves to be led “like sheep to the slaughter”.19 By contrast, Israel had become the place of redemption, the end of Jewish life in the diaspora that, according to David Ben Gurion, deserved to be forgotten. Gradually, however, the Shoah became central to the self-image of the Israeli state.20

Abigail regards the State of Israel as the country of rebirth of the Jewish people.

7. Mordechai, hero of the Warsaw Ghetto, at the eponymous Kibbutz Yad Mordechai. 2014Acrylic on Canvas. 90x60cmSgd. Below left: Abigail Sarah Batsheva. Right: ‘5776

Fig.7 bears witness to this view. The central part of the painting is the monument to Mordechai Aniliewicz (1919-1943), the commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (which took place from 19 April-16 May 1943). It was created by Nathan Rapaport and erected at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai in Israel. However, it does not resemble the real hero of the uprising. Aniliewicz was a small, emaciated, bespectacled intellectual, but here is portrayed as an idealised, muscular, robust youth standing erect in the style of Michelangelo’s David, dressed like a kibbutznik with a grenade in his hand. With this monument the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto insurrection was transferred to Israel’s soil, to the southernmost part, where a small number of kibbutzniks fought the Egyptian army during the Israeli War of Independence of 1948 and became part of a memory of resistance and heroism.21

The central meaning of this painting is the redemption of the Jewish people. At the foot of the monument a tombstone rises from the earth. On its left a weeping mother and child form the counterpart to Abigail, who is painting her vision of the deliverance. Butterflies, symbols of metamorphosis and transformation rise up, past Rapoport’s monument, into a sky of souls of the deceased of the Holocaust and of Kibbutz Yad Mordechai. A figure signifying resurrection is ascending. The ultimate destination, the city of Jerusalem, floats in the right hand top corner. The message of the painting is that of redemption through the establishment of the Jewish State.

SUMMARY

The Holocaust/Shoah is not a popular topic among today’s younger generation. Yet Abigail, even though she finds it a painful subject, believes that to forget would be an act of historical extinction of the Jewish people. She has chosen to approach the topic vicariously as ‘art on art’ through monuments created by other artists. She has thus collected together a large body of work by a variety of other artists who have already portrayed the harsh realities of the subject, and presents their interpretations to the viewer. She then adds her own further, personal interpretation which recognises the fact that she is from a subsequent generation who, although they did not directly experience the horrific realities that were collectively perpetrated upon the Jewish people, live in its shadow and are the candle-bearers of its horrors. This series of work represents Abigail’s mystical message from a longer term cosmic viewpoint sometime after the terrible events. Her portrayal is less immediate; it memorialises the victims and points to their ultimate triumph over their oppressors in the events that followed almost simultaneous after the Shoah, namely the demise and destruction of the Nazi Third Reich and the birth of the State of Israel as the home of the Jewish people. It celebrates the memory of the victims, whose souls live on in peace in her work despite their earthly extinction, and it honours the lives of the survivors who somehow managed to continue despite their immense suffering and losses.

Three chief characteristics can be crystallised from these paintings by Abigail:

-The embrace of the presence of the Shekhinah, the female entity of the G-dhead.

Abigail’s art is rooted in that of Chagall, the essence of whose painting is love, through which the world can be redeemed. His loving couples are reflections of the G-dhead’s union with his female numinous presence. For Chagall, the Shekhinah assumed her presence in a world steeped in patriarchy. Abigail is more directly outspoken about the Shekhinahthan was Chagall. Perhaps she was inspired by the explosive re-awaking of the female consciousness within the contemporary world.

-The belief in the reincarnation of the soul which in the Jewish Kabbalah is known as gilgul neshamot.

This is the cyclical revolving of souls. The message of Abigail’s Holocaust series is that the catastrophe has transmitted its darkness upon the following generations in a process that could be described as collective osmosis. Some deal with it through repression, seeking a life free from the burden of memory. Others deal with it through catharsis. Prominent post-Holocaust artists, such as Mark Rothko, have expressed themselves in the style of abstract art; others, such as Samuel Bak, through metaphor and symbols of death and transformation.

Abigail turned to the mystical sources of the Jewish religion, the Kabbalah. The Kabbalists, especially Rabbi Yitzchak Luria (1534-1572), believed that the doctrine of reincarnation is firmly rooted in the Hebrew Bible. For example: Daniel 12:13 “But you, go on to the end; you shall rest, and arise to your destiny at the end of days”.In the Midrash it is stated that every Jew who ever lived and who will ever live, stood at Mount Sinai when the Jews received the covenant from G-d. The Hassidic pan-en-theism (G-d is everywhere) to which Chagall adhered, and which has influenced Abigail Bagraim’s thinking, devotes itself to the attachment of the divine omnipresence. Thus for Abigail the mass death that occurred in the Shoah cannot exist as a finality.

The notion of reincarnation of the soul, is not, however, an essential principle of present Orthodox Judaism.

-Abigail Bagraim’s paintings are to beunderstood as visual connecting points between past, present and future.

The artist relates with the viewer from a realm in which the prophets of old have conveyed their visions. Her paintings are extremely personal and she addresses herself to the viewer with a bewildering directness.

Judaism is central to the creativity of this mystical artist. Stylistically she is part of the contemporary art movements, to which, however, she has remained unaffiliated due to her extraordinary individualism. Abigail Bagraim’s style and message have an astonishing freshness, and she has boldly pursued her totally new direction. Her work has meanwhile asserted itself within the sphere of contemporary painting.

Dr Ute Ben Yosef, a regular contributor to Jewish Affairs, has a B.A. in Librarianship (University of Pretoria) and a Ph.D (magna cum laude) in History of Art from the Art Historical Institute of the Free University of Berlin. Over the years, she has served as Senior Lecturer in History of Art at Pretoria University, as art critic at the Feuilleton of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in Switzerland and as Head Librarian of the Jacob Gitlin Library in Cape Town. She has published various papers and monographs on contemporary Jewish artists.

NOTES

The author is indebted to Gwynne Schrire for editing this article and for her scholarly advice and support.
Neumann, Erich, Art and the Creative Unconscious. Princeton, Princeton U.P. Bollingen Series 61, 1959.
See Scholem, Gershom, On the Kabbalah and its symbolism(London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965) and On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead. Basic concepts in the Kabbalah (New York, Schocken, 1976)
Abigail Bagraim, excerpt from unfinished thesis.
Quoted by Erich Neumann, 1959:106.
Gershom Scholem, 1965:151.
Related by Abigail in her tractate: Sabbath Queen. www.abigailsarah.co.za
Erich Neumann, 1985: 147ff
The author is indebted to Herbert von Erkelens, Jan’s son for all the information on father’s puppets.
Andreas Huyssens, ‘Monument and Memory in a postmodernage’, in James E. Young (ed), The Art of Memory: Holocaust memorials in History, 1994, p13.
“Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. ‘An Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society’, Prisms 1949:34.
Young, p20.
James E. Young, 1993:21 ff.
www.abigailsarah.co.za
Ibid.
Koschland, Bernd, in Bertha and Shmuel Lowensohn, I came Alone: The Stories of the Kindertransports, Sussex, The Book Guild, 1990, 173ff. e-mail to Abigail Bagraim 13.1.2015.
Andrew Huth translation. Insert: Dmitri Shostakovich. Symphony No. 13 in B flat minor op 113 ‘Babi Yar’. Concertgebouw. Bernard Haitink. DECCA 1993:19.
Saul Friedländer in collaboration with Adam Seligman, Memory of the Shoah in Israel: Symbols, Rituals and Ideological Polarisation, Young, 1994, p152.
Hoffman, Eva, After Such Knowledge, London, Secker and Warburg, 2004, p250.
Ibid.
Andreas Huyssens op.cit in Young (ed.), 1994, p15.