Chaim Livshitz and the Memory of the Minsk Ghetto

Chaim Moiseevich Livshitz spent nearly fifty years carrying the idea of a painting he could not complete. Born in Vitebsk in 1912 to a merchant family, he had trained at the Vitebsk Art College and later at the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where his thesis work "On a Dairy Farm" was recognized as among the best in his class. By 1939, he had completed his first large-scale canvas, "Speech by Y. M. Sverdlov at the I All-Belarusian Congress of Soviets." But the war destroyed that painting, along with other early works, during the Nazi occupation of Minsk.

The German invasion brought direct tragedy to Livshitz's family. His son Misha later confirmed through his sister Asya that a relative was killed with her children in the Minsk ghetto. However, according to Misha, this family tragedy was not the primary impetus for creating "Prayer in Minsk."

In 1942, shortly before his conscription, Livshitz married Chava Kaganova. He entered military school and served as a junior lieutenant in the Red Army, assigned not to the European front but to the Far East. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, he fought in the Manchurian campaign against Japanese forces in northern China. He was demobilized in 1946.

The First Sketches

It was during the war years, in 1943, that Livshitz made his first sketches for what would eventually become "Prayer in Minsk." By 1944, when detailed accounts of the genocide had begun to reach Soviet forces, he attempted a painting titled "The Atrocities of Fascists in Belarus." Exhibition organizers rejected it. According to producer Arkady Shulman, they told him: "We won the war, and you have such a sad topic. It ain't going to work."

Livshitz returned to approved Soviet subjects for nearly four decades. After demobilization, he settled in Minsk—the city that had been a Jewish metropolis in the nineteenth century and was now largely destroyed. He taught at the Minsk Art College from 1947 to 1953, and later at the Belarusian State Theater and Art Institute beginning in 1955. He produced the expected works: paintings of workshops and weavers, portraits of composers and fellow artists, landscapes of Belarusian villages. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1950, received medals and diplomas from the Supreme Council of the BSSR, and earned recognition as a prominent artist in Belarus.

Around 1980, Livshitz completed another painting about the Holocaust, "Children Hostages." The work was exhibited in Minsk and drew considerable interest from the local Jewish community. It remains in the possession of an art foundation in Minsk. This painting demonstrated that by the late Soviet period, some space had opened for addressing Jewish suffering during the war, though the subject remained sensitive.

Throughout these decades, Livshitz held onto the memory of what had happened in the Minsk ghetto. His primary source was Girsh Smolyar's book "Ghetto Avengers," published in 1947. One passage in particular stayed with him, describing the Sunday roll calls the Germans called "appeals." Under threat of death, the entire ghetto population had to assemble at Jubilee Square. Gestapo supervisors would deliver warnings: Jews were forbidden to buy food, to walk on sidewalks, to speak loudly. Everything that suggested human existence and dignity was prohibited. The recurring theme was always: do not join the partisans, you will die in the forests, the guerrillas hate Jews.

After each roll call, the Gestapo attempted what Smolyar called "gilding the pill." A singer named Gorelik was forced to perform Jewish folk songs. An orchestra of German Jews played popular melodies including "Letters from Mother" and "Kol Nidre."

Completion in Exile

In 1979, Livshitz was forced into retirement from teaching. The reason was simple: he had given his son Misha permission to emigrate to the United States. Until that year, Misha had worked as his father's apprentice in his Minsk studio. Twelve years later, in February 1991, Livshitz and his wife, along with two daughters and their families, joined Misha in Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.

At seventy-nine years old, living in a country whose language he did not speak, Livshitz finally completed the painting he had conceived in 1943. Father and son spent considerable time together in Chicago, and Misha recalls extensive discussions about the content and meaning of “Prayer in Minsk.”

The finished canvas measured 97 by 147 inches. The orchestra of German Jews appears in the composition, as do men in prayer shawls. But they are not crying. Some pray with arms stretched upward. In the lower right, a woman in a red dress with gray hair—Livshitz's wife posed for this figure—stands among the condemned.

The artist painted himself into the scene as well. A figure in a hat and earflaps, standing at full height with memorial candles in his hands, stares directly outward. The self-portrait suggests a Soviet intellectual who does not understand how such a catastrophe could have occurred. Around this figure, hundreds of people sing, cry, pray, and play flutes, oboes, and violins, while an idyllic Minsk landscape stretches behind them, indifferent to their fate.

The finished canvas was first exhibited at the Skokie Public Library in February and March 1994. Rabbi Reuven Frankel of Congregation B'nai Tikvah in Deerfield, Illinois, had visited Livshitz's studio in 1992 and 1993, following the work's progress. The painting was subsequently shown at B'nai Tikvah, then at Bnay Emunah synagogue in Skokie, and later at other synagogues in the area. After construction of the Skokie Holocaust Museum was completed, Rabbi Frankel invited museum officials to view the painting. They declined to include it in their exhibit.

Final Work

Livshitz had discovered the Skokie Lagoons near his new home, wetlands that reminded him of Russia. He spent many days painting these midwestern landscapes. From February to August 1994, he worked on a final large canvas measuring 72 by 108 inches. Illness prevented him from completing it. He painted his last still life two weeks before his death on September 4, 1994.

The principle he had learned from Pavel Filonov in Leningrad in the early 1930s—"getting done," meaning maximum completeness in painting—had remained his artistic creed. He had described his method as harsh discipline and deep reflection, painting as a process of thought conducted with brush against canvas. After nearly fifty years, he had finally completed the reflection that the war had demanded of him.