Miron Sima

Miron Sima (1973)

Miron Sima (also Miron Simah or Meron Simah ; born January 22, 1902 in Proskurow ( Podolia Governorate ); died December 20, 1999 in Jerusalem ) was an Israeli painter and graphic artist of Russian origin.

Life

The father, Benjamin Sima, was a respected architect and calligrapher. The parents offered their children a humanistic upbringing and encouraged Miron Sima's talent at an early age. But his childhood was mainly shaped by severe pogroms and war. In 1920 the family fled to Odessa after another pogrom, and Miron Sima began studying art there. In 1921 he fled to Poland, his parents and siblings followed him in 1922. In 1923 his parents emigrated to Palestine .

From 1923 to 1933 he lived in Dresden. In 1924 he began his studies at the Dresden Art Academy , where he was a student of Ferdinand Dirsch , Max Feldbauer , Otto Gussmann , Ludwig von Hoffmann and Otto Dix , whose individual pupil Miron Sima later became and with whom he had a lifelong friendship. The result was the woodcut series The outcry about the experiences with the pogroms. In 1926 the portfolio Orientreise was published about a stay in Palestine, 1927 began his friendship with Lea and Hans Grundig , Paul Berger-Bergner and Otto Griebel . In 1930 he participated in the Saxon Art Association with the works Kind im Stühlchen and Dunkle Gasse . In 1932, against the resistance of the National Socialist members of the Dresden Art Cooperative, he received the City of Dresden Art Prize for the picture file cutter .

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, he was subjected to house searches, denunciations and threats. Finally, in 1933, he was expelled as a stateless person and in the summer Miron Sima emigrated to Palestine . In order to be able to pay for the crossing, he had to sell the picture Feilenhauer .

In Palestine, he first lived in Tel Aviv . From 1939 he worked as a set designer for the Habima Theater and the Ohel Theater and joined the Haganah, a Jewish self-defense army in Israel. In the same year he took part in the world exhibition in New York, a few months later he became an art teacher at the Jerusalem Bezalel School of Art and Crafts (since 1969: Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design ).

In 1948 he took part in the defense of Jerusalem in the Israeli War of Independence , in 1956 he had a solo exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in Haifa .

As the only licensed artist, Miron Sima took part in the Eichmann trial as a court draftsman in 1961 . The drawings that were created in the process were published as a book in 1968, together with witness statements, and achieved world fame. There were exhibitions in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa, and in 1969 the book was published in German on behalf of the German government. The films that were made during the process remained under lock and key and only became known to the general public in the 2000s.

In 1963 Sima was made an honorary member of the Academy of Arts in Florence .

In 1985 he met Erhard Frommhold in East Berlin. The possibility of an exhibition in Dresden was considered, but the letters to the Lord Mayor of Dresden, Gerhard Schill , went unanswered.

In 1991, after a visit by the then Lord Mayor Herbert Wagner in the Jerusalem studio, he was invited to an exhibition in Dresden, so that in the following year (and thus for the first time in 58 years) there was again an exhibition of Miron Sima's paintings in Dresden (in the Rähnitzgasse gallery ). The picture Feilenhauer , which the heirs of the previous buyer made available for this exhibition, could also be shown again.

Miron Sima died on December 20, 1999 as a highly honored artist in Jerusalem. "Erhard Frommhold had referred to him as the Dresdner in Jerusalem , because the connection to the city, which shaped him artistically and whose art development he had helped determine, was never completely broken." (Project Shalom of the CJD)

literature

• Christa Guse (ed.): Miron Sima - A painter in Dresden and Jerusalem - paintings and graphics from the artist's private collection. Exhibition catalog. Cultural Office of the City of Dresden, Rähnitzgasse Gallery, Saxon Printing and Publishing House, Dresden 1991, DNB 921365179 .

Web links

Commons : Miron Sima  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Miron Sima in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Biography ( memento from April 13, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) on juden-in-mittelachsen.de
• Miron Sima on whoswho.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Miron Sima: In view of the sad symbol: Portrait of a court, drawings from the Eichmann trial Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1969. WorldCat , accessed June 4, 2018.