Art and designנתן רפופורט

Nathan Rapoport

Nathan Rapoport was a Warsaw-born Jewish sculptor and painter, known for monuments to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Holocaust.

1911 to 1987Warsaw Ghetto Uprising monumentHolocaust memorial sculptureMordechai Anielewicz statue at Yad Mordechai

Born: 7 November 1911, Warsaw
Died: 4 June 1987, New York City
Occupation: sculptor, painter, artist
Education: Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw

Nathan Rapoport was born in 1911 in Warsaw

Rapoport was born in Warsaw in 1911 to a religious Jewish family. He studied at a Talmud Torah and a Jewish high school, but left school to help support the family when his father fell ill. From 1928 to 1933 he was a member of the Hashomer Hatzair movement.

He began studying sculpture in 1927 and later attended the art academy, where a scholarship let him visit Italy and France. In 1936 his prize was taken away after he refused to send a work to an exhibition in Nazi Germany. In 1938 a second scholarship took him to study in Paris.

When World War II began in 1939, he fled to Soviet-held territory, where he made busts and monuments. His entire family died in the Holocaust. In 1946 he came to Warsaw with a model of his ghetto monument, which was unveiled in 1948.

He immigrated to Israel in 1949 and made monuments at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai and Kibbutz Negba, letting kibbutz members choose between models. In 1959 he moved to the United States and became a citizen in 1965. He lived in Manhattan and Ramat Gan, died in New York in 1987, and was buried in Petah Tikva.