Nathan Jacob Rapoport

Nathan Jacob Rapoport (7 November 1911, Warsaw – 5 June 1987, New York) was a Jewish sculptor, painter and photographer whose work commemorated those murdered in the Holocaust, those who resisted, and the passage from destruction to renewal. Every member of his family was killed in the Holocaust, and that loss remained an essential presence in his art. His monuments gave Jewish communities, Israelis and visitors from around the world tangible images of memory, courage and liberation.

From Warsaw to the world of art

Rapoport was born into a religious Jewish family in Warsaw, the son of Chaya, née Koplewitz, and Jacob ben Shlomo Zalman, of a family of kohanim. He studied at a Talmud Torah and at the Jewish boys' secondary school La-Or on Nalewki Street, at the heart of Warsaw's Jewish life. When his father fell ill, he left school to help support the family, but in 1927 he enrolled in sculpture studies at the city's municipal school.

In 1928 he joined the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement and remained active in its Warsaw branch until 1933. He continued his studies at the Academy of Art, received a scholarship that enabled him to visit museums in Italy and France, and in 1938 won another scholarship to study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

An early incident demonstrated the independence of his artistic and moral judgement. In 1936 his sculpture The Tennis Player won first place in a competition, but the prize was withdrawn after he refused to send the work to an exhibition in Nazi Germany. From the beginning, he regarded art as an expression of identity, conscience and personal choice, not merely as a professional achievement.

War, flight and the birth of public memory

When the Second World War began in 1939, Rapoport fled Poland for Białystok, then in territory occupied by the Soviet Union. During his time in the Soviet Union he produced monuments and busts of prominent Soviet figures. At the same time, he began translating his wartime memories and his knowledge of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in late 1942 into sculpture.

In 1946 he travelled from Moscow to Warsaw and presented Jewish community leaders with his plaster model for a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In 1947 he completed the final design in Paris so that it could be cast in bronze. On 19 April 1948, the fifth anniversary of the uprising, the monument was unveiled on the site of the former ghetto's centre.

The monument presents Jewish figures standing upright, struggling, bearing arms and looking forward. It commemorates not only death but also the decision to resist and the dignity of people who fought under impossible conditions. A copy, not entirely identical to the original, was installed in the plaza at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and became one of the best-known symbols of Holocaust remembrance and Jewish resistance.

The art of remembrance in Israel

Rapoport immigrated to Israel at the beginning of 1949. He began his work there with an unusual commitment to community participation. While working on a statue of Mordechai Anielewicz at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, he prepared two plaster models, each about 90 centimetres high, and invited kibbutz members to choose between them democratically. The model not selected remains on display at the Shoah and Revival Museum in the kibbutz.

Two years later he worked on the Defenders' Monument at Kibbutz Negba. Before the members chose between two models, he gave evening lectures on the visual arts so that they could take part with a fuller understanding of artistic language and the alternatives before them. The creation of the monument thus became both a communal encounter and an educational act.

The statue of Mordechai Anielewicz at Yad Mordechai was unveiled in 1951, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Israel's Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day, beside the water tower. The Defenders' Monument at Negba, unveiled in 1953, depicts three defenders — a woman, a man and a soldier — and expresses the connection between the defence of a community, kibbutz life and military struggle.

From destruction to renewal

Rapoport's work moved between the memory of catastrophe and the construction of new life. In 1972, the Fire Scroll Monument, also known as the Scrolls Monument, was unveiled near Kisalon in the Martyrs' Forest. The immense monument consists of two bronze scrolls: one depicts the Holocaust and the other renewal in the Land of Israel. Its paired form gives visual shape to the historical movement from loss and survival to immigration and rebuilding.

His Israeli works also included the relief Youth at Beit Menahem in Kibbutz Ma'abarot, busts of Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Joseph Trumpeldor at the Museum of the Jewish Defence, the statue of Gad Manela at Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak, and Brotherhood at the Magen David Adom campus in Ramla. Each work connects a person, a place and a communal memory, reflecting Rapoport's belief that public art could give meaning to the spaces in which people lived and remembered.

Liberation: Jewish memory in America

In 1959 Rapoport emigrated to the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1965. He lived alternately in Manhattan and Ramat Gan, continuing to work within the two cultural settings that had shaped his life.

In 1985 his monument Liberation was unveiled at Liberty State Park in New Jersey. It depicts an American soldier carrying a concentration-camp survivor in his arms and symbolises the role of the United States Army in liberating the Nazi concentration camps. The work widened the language of remembrance beyond a solely Jewish narrative, connecting the suffering of survivors with the military action that brought liberation. It placed Holocaust memory in a prominent American public setting and made it part of a broader conversation about freedom, responsibility and release from oppression.

For his contribution to American sculpture, Rapoport received the Herbert Adams Memorial Medal from the National Sculpture Society.

An artistic and material legacy

Rapoport worked as an artist for more than five decades, from 1936 to 1987. Alongside his major monuments, he left hundreds of illustrated letters, hundreds of drawings for sculptures, prints and hundreds of photographs documenting his works. The estate, preserved in the Hashomer Hatzair Archives at Yad Yaari, makes it possible to follow not only the finished monuments but also the thinking, planning and labour that produced them.

His studio on Rokach Street in Ramat Gan, Beit Nathan Rapoport, continues as an art centre. It holds several of his smaller sculptures and some of his tools. The site preserves the direct relationship between material, craft and memory, allowing visitors to encounter Rapoport not only through monumental public works but also through the working environment in which they were made.

Rapoport died in New York in 1987 and was buried in Petah Tikva. He was survived by his wife, Sima, née Cherniavsky, whom he married in 1938; their daughter, Nina Wolmark, who lives in Paris; and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Why Nathan Jacob Rapoport merits inclusion in the archive

Nathan Jacob Rapoport merits a prominent place in the archive because he transformed the memory of the Holocaust and Jewish resistance into public art encountered in cities, kibbutzim, memorial sites and international settings. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument and the Fire Scroll Monument gave generations of Jews and Israelis powerful images of resistance, survival and renewal. His statues at Yad Mordechai and Negba connected the memory of fighters with the communities that carried it, while Liberation in New Jersey extended the conversation to American society and to the meaning of freedom.

His importance also lies in his method. He did not simply create symbols for communities; he invited them to choose between models and used art to encourage discussion, learning and shared responsibility for remembrance. His legacy is therefore both artistic and civic. Moreshet and Moreshet.com include Rapoport as part of the continuing story of the Jewish people and the State of Israel — a story in which art preserves the past, gives it form and helps communities carry it into the future.