Nathan Rapoport (; 1911–1987) was a Warsaw-born Jewish sculptor and painter, later a resident of Israel and then the United States.
Biography Natan Yaakov Rapoport was born in Warsaw, Poland. In 1936, he won a scholarship to study in France and Italy. He fled to the Soviet Union when the Nazi Germans invaded Poland. The Soviets initially provided him with a studio but then forced him to work as a manual laborer. When the war ended, he returned to Poland to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and immigrated to Israel. In 1959, he moved to the United States. He lived in New York City until his death in 1987.
Monumental art His sculptures in public places, with the year they were installed in, include: Monument to the Ghetto Heroes (1948), bronze, Warsaw, Poland Memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1976), bronze, at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem; a slightly modified replica of the Warsaw monumentElsby, Liz. Rapoport's Memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – a Personal Interpretation. Yad Vashem website. accessed 19 Oct 2021. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, bronze The Last March, bronze Monument to Mordechai Anielewicz (1951), at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, IsraelMonuments in Israel Commemorating the Holocaust, Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, 3 June 2001, accessed 19 Oct 2021. Monument to Six Million Jewish Martrys (1964), at the Horwitz-Wasserman Holocaust Memorial Plaza on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA. Scroll of Fire (1971) in the Forest of the Martyrs near Jerusalem Liberation (Holocaust memorial) (1985), bronze, Liberty State Park, Jersey City, New Jersey Korczak's Last Walk at the Park Avenue Synagogue, New York, NY. Ghetto Square Monument at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel. https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/general/warsaw-memorial-personal-interpretation.html
Gallery
References
Further reading Coen, Paolo, «L’artista reagisce in modo artistico. Questa è la sua arma». Riflessioni di valore introduttivo sul rapporto arte-Shoah, da Alexander Bogen e Nathan Rapoport a Richard Serra, in Vedere l'Altro, vedere la Shoah, with an appendix by Angelika Schallenberg, Soveria Mannelli, Rubbettino, 2012, pp. 6–68 Gilbert, Martin. (1987), The Holocaust, New York, Random House, 1987, 317–324. Sohar, Zvi, Fighters Memorial, Monuments to the Fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Sifriat Poalim, Workers' Book Guild, 1964. Yaffe, Richard, Nathan Rapoport Sculptures and Monuments, New York, Shengold Publishers, 1980.
External links
Rapaport's works in Central Jewish Library
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews