Esther Lurie

Esther Lurie was born in 1913 in Liepāja

Esther Lurie was born in Liepāja, Latvia, in 1913, into a religious Jewish family with five children. Her family moved to Riga in 1917, where she finished high school at the Ezra Gymnasium. From 1931 to 1934 she studied theatre set design in Brussels and then drawing at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

She immigrated to Palestine in 1934 and painted backdrops for the Hebrew Theatre, the Adloyada parade and the Levant Fair. She often painted musicians and dancers, and her first exhibition was held at Kibbutz Geva in 1937. In 1938 she won the Dizengoff Prize for The Palestine Orchestra and joined the Painters and Sculptors Association.

In 1939 she traveled to visit family in Latvia and Lithuania, and in 1940 she exhibited at the State Opera House in Kovno. After the German occupation in 1941 she was sent to the Kovno Ghetto, where the Judenrat arranged for her to document ghetto life. In 1943 she buried more than 200 works in jars, and none of them were recovered.

When the ghetto was liquidated in 1944 she was sent to the Stutthof camp and then to Ľubica. She was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945 and published the sketchbook Jewesses in Slavery in Italy. She returned to Palestine in July 1945, married, had two children, and won the Dizengoff Prize again in 1946.

Her Holocaust sketches and watercolors were used as testimony in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann. She died on 14 February 1998.