István Irsai

Pesach Irshay (1952)

István Irsai ( Hebrew פסח ער-שי, born October 6, 1896 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary ; died July 31, 1968 in Tel Aviv ) was a Hungarian-Israeli architect and graphic artist.

Life

István Irsai was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army from 1914 to 1918 during the First World War and was seriously wounded. From 1918 to 1925 he studied violin and music education at the Music Academy and architecture at the Technical University of Budapest . He was violist in a Budapest string quartet that also performed abroad.

In 1925 he went to Palestine as a Zionist , where he worked as an architect and graphic artist. During that time he designed stage sets and created the “Haim” print font for Ivrit . He married Arany Levkovitch and returned to Hungary with her in 1929. In Hungary he worked as a graphic designer and ran a poster printing company.

In 1944 he was deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with his wife and two children . They were exchanged with one of the Kasztner transports to Switzerland at the end of 1944.

Irsai emigrated to the State of Israel and worked as a graphic designer in Haifa .

literature

• Jörn Wendland: The warehouse from picture to picture. Narrative series of images of prisoners from Nazi forced camps . Vienna: Böhlau, 2017, ISBN 978-3-412-50581-3 , pp. 201f.
• Bergen-Belsen Memorial (ed.): Postcards from Bergen-Belsen: István Irsai and his graphic work . With contributions by Ladislaus Löb , Thomas Rahe and Miryam Sommerfeld-Irsai. Celle: Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation, 2014 ISBN 978-3-9813604-2-4

Web links

• Literature by and about István Irsai in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about István Irsai in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Pesach Irshay , at the Israel Museum
• Pesach Steven (Istvan) Irsai , at Yad Vashem