Gallery Show—Paintings by Dvorah Fogel Smith" runs through Aug. 31 at the

Brookline Senior Center's second floor gallery, 93 Winchester St., Brookline. For

information, call 617-730-2770.

A panorama of the past brings beauty and memory to Brookline walls

By Susie Davidson

Boys bent over a Torah scroll. A Polish tzaddick emanating untold years of

wisdom. An ebullient bride and groom under an ornate chuppah.

Thanks to artist Dvorah Fogel Smith, you can step back in time to a Jewish world

on the threshold of the modern era. Her paintings line the walls of the Brookline

Senior Center, where they will be on exhibit through Aug. 31.

Fogel Smith’s art is rooted in her childhood, growing up among Holocaust

survivors in Israel.

The Coolidge Corner resident was born in post-war Europe. “My parents went

through the Shoah,” she said. They both came from Sighet, a small village in

Transylvania, now present-day Romania. “The town was also the birthplace of Elie

Wiesel,” said Fogel Smith. “My mother knew his parents.”

“On the eve of Passover, early in the war years, the Nazis showed up at my

mother’s parents’ home, told them to collect their belongings, and loaded them

onto cattle cars bound for Auschwitz,” Fogel Smith said. At the camp, her

grandmother and aunt were sent to the gas chambers, and her grandfather and

uncle went to a men’s camp, never to return. Her mother worked at an Auschwitz

ammunitions factory.

“My father lost his wife, two young children and his parents,” she said. “He was in

a labor camp, and he survived because he had the skills of a baker.”

Fogel Smith’s parents had known each other before the war. Her mother bought

bread at the bakery in Sighet her future husband ran with his brothers.

“My father and mother did not want to talk too much about the details of the

Holocaust to me, to spare me their hurt,” she said. “Their silence and resistance

was reflective of their deep suffering.”

After the war, her parents reconnected when they returned to their hometown

searching for other survivors.

“I was actually the first Jewish girl born in Sighet after the war,” said Fogel Smith.

Her father and his two surviving brothers (a third was killed in the Holocaust) had

resumed their bakery business. But the ruling communists made business difficult.

Her family fled to Austria, where with the help of the Jewish Joint Distribution

Committee, they traveled on to Israel. They arrived in October 1948, just months

after the birth of the Jewish state. At 14 months old, Fogel Smith was a baby, too.

The family settled in Safad, the famed mystical and artistic center. Fogel Smith’s

best friend was the daughter of Irene and Azriel Awret, Holocaust survivors known

for their Israel posters, sculptures and prints, and sketches of concentration camp

inmates.

Fogel Smith’s father went back into the bakery business along with his two

brothers in Safad. “My father and his brothers worked all night for many, many

years,” she said. “When they visited America once to see us and my husband took

them to a bakery, they couldn’t believe the modern equipment here.”

Fogel Smith met her husband, Joel Smith, while he was spending his junior year of

college in Jerusalem.

They went through the Six Day War together in June of 1967, when she was called

up to the reserves, and served in the Israeli Navy, mainly doing clerical work. After

marrying, they moved to the States.

Fogel Smith studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York, the Worcester

Art Museum and the Brookline Art Center. She earned a bachelor’s degree in

Jewish education at Hebrew College in coordination with Boston State College.

Meanwhile, her husband graduated from the Cantorial School of the Jewish

Theological Seminary and earned a doctorate in special education at Boston

College.

He served as a cantor at Agudat Achim, a conservative shul in Leominster, for

more than 20 years, while working rehabilitation programs for disabled persons.

Today he is executive director of the Autism Services Association in Wellesley

Hills. The couple have a daughter, Roni, who is a nurse.

Fogel Smith, who mainly works in acrylics and oil, exhibited last year at Brookline

Town Hall and, two years ago, submitted a painting for auction at her shul,

Congregation Kehillath Israel.

She said her work is influenced by the artists she grew up with in Safad. “Many of

the artists were Europeans who went to European schools,” she said. “The artists

during that time were inspirational in developing a new Israeli art style.”

Among their subjects were Jews who came from North Africa in the 1950s. “They

were very old-style, and were often marketplace beggars, or people who sold knick

knacks,” said Fogel-Smith.

“Many painted about the Jewish world before the Holocaust, as well,” she

said. “They painted new images of the Israeli, the kibbutz persona, the landscape.”

Safad held regular festivals of music and art. “I would visit the artists,” Fogel

Smith recalled, “and run home to paint and draw.”

And she continues to do so today.