Chaim Goldberg

Chaim Goldberg (March 20, 1917 – June 26, 2004) was a Polish-Israeli-American artist, painter, sculptor, and engraver.

He is known for being a chronicler of Jewish life in the eastern European Polish villages (or shtetlekh) like the one in his native Kazimierz Dolny in south-eastern Poland.

He witnessed the colorful life, began to draw what he saw as the recurring art colony atmosphere became the highpoint of his self actualization dreams seeing himself become an artist like the ones who visited the village.

He yearned to experience life as they did for himself, and later undertook the mission of being a leading painter of Holocaust-era art, which to the artist was seen as an obligation and art with a sense of profound mission.

On a crisp day in the fall of 1931, Dr. Saul Silberstein, a student of Sigmund Freud who was doing post-doctorate work on his book, Jewish Village Mannerisms came into the Goldberg cobbler workshop to have his shoes repaired.

As he waited for his shoes, he noticed the numerous artworks that were attached to the wall with shoe nails and inquired who the artist was.

Silberstein spent the entire night reviewing the young artist’s work.

In the morning, they went by foot to Lublin, a distance of 26 miles, and Dr. Silberstein obtained the opinions of several respected individuals of the work by Goldberg.

He then got him several small scholarships based on these letters of recommendation.

This helped finance his early education at the "Józef Mehoffer School for Fine Arts", in Kraków, from which he graduated in 1934.

Dr. Silberstein was able to interest several other wealthy sponsors, such as the honorable Felix Kronstein, a judge, and a newspaper publisher who supported the artist through his graduation from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.

At 17, he was the youngest to be admitted and studied under the Rector of the Academy and Professor Tadeusz Pruszkowski, Kowarski, Władysław Skoczylas and.

The beauty of Kazimierz Dolny had long ago been discovered by artists who had flocked there in large numbers over the years.

Between the First World War and the Second World War, Kazimierz Dolny became known as an Art Colony as well.

Prof. Tadeusz Pruszkowski had built a summer studio in the mountains and attracted his students to come down and paint outdoors.

many of these artists as well as older ones painted the life they saw and the landscape.

Goldberg became stimulated by this traffic of artists and began to do art as well.

When he was discovered he had not attended any school or private lessons.

He watched what the other artists did and was encouraged to do the same; set himself up with a home-made easel and painted outdoors.

When he was discovered at the age of 14, his collection included landscapes as well as paintings of the vagabond types that frequented his home as guests.

Goldberg was conscripted into the Polish army in the fall of 1938.

He was assigned to the artillery brigade that guarded Warsaw.

After the Polish army surrendered to the Germans, he was taken into custody as a POW (Prisoner of War) and held in a labor camp.

He managed to escape and tried to rescue his parents and family, who would not believe that the Germans had any intention of hurting the Jews.

He could not motivate them to flee with him.

So Goldberg, his future wife, her sister, and their parents became exiles escaping to Russia on foot.

They kept moving north as the German armies advanced and ended up in Novosibirsk.

Following World War II he emigrated to Israel and in 1967 to the United States.

He and his family became US citizens in 1973.

He died in Boca Raton, Florida, in 2004.

Goldberg was born in a wooden clapboard house built by his father, a village cobbler.

The house stood on Blotna Street as it was called at the time, due to the fact that the creek would overflow and the road turned to a muddy area.

As a young boy of 6 he gravitated to creating little figurines carved from stones which he gave away to his friends.

Later he took up drawing and painting with basic shoemaker paints that he found at his father's workbench.

He was the ninth child and the first boy after eight girls.

He grew up in a religious home in Kazimierz Dolny.

He would observe and draw the beggars and klezmers who frequented his home as guests.

His father would encourage their stays by letting it be known that the humble Goldberg home was open for those who could not pay for their night stay at any of the inns.

They were surely welcome there.

These characters became Goldberg's early models.