Ismar David, with fedora in lap, listens to speaker Alma Moldenke at the dedication ceremony for the Bible Gardens at Beth Israel Memorial Park, Woodbridge, New Jersey, 1957.
The dedication of the Bible Gardens at Beth Israel Memorial Park had been optimistically planned to coincide with the anniversary of the State of Israel on May 14, 1954,1The Central New Jersey Home News, November 1, 1953 but finally took place on June 2, 1957. New Jersey Secretary of State Edward J. Patten, Alma Moldenke, co-author of Plants of the Bible, and Rabbi Theodore Friedman of Temple Beth El in Orange, New Jersey spoke. Ten-year-old Marjorie Tzeses presented a bouquet of Biblical flowers to the indisputable headliner of the event, Eleanor Roosevelt.
After her time as First Lady, Mrs. Roosevelt remained politically and socially engaged, much admired and extremely busy. Her syndicated feature, My Day, which had been running six days a week since December 31, 1935 reflected not only her opinions on the issues of the day, but also, in a fairly perfunctory way, her daily schedule. Her June 4, 1957 column ends with these lines:
On my return to New York Sunday I stopped in New Jersey for ceremonies opening the Bible Gardens of Israel at Woodbridge. I unveiled a 12-foot-high bas relief mat-portrait of the Holy Land in Biblical times. These gardens are an important project that will make Bible stories more real for children, for the sponsors plan to grow there the trees and flowers of the Holy Land.2Eleanor Roosevelt,My Day, June 4, 1957, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Digital Edition (2017), accessed 8/13/2022.
Hortense Mendel and Ismar David were at Beth Israel that day, seated behind Mrs. Roosevelt. Hortense snapped a few of her signature woozy, yet atmospheric photos.
Under the rubricBroadway , New York Daily News columnist Danton Walker reported this item:
New York realtor Leon Shipper leaves for Israel July 24 to develop a new idea in cemeteries (a “Garden of Israel,” with token soil from that land).1Walker, Danton, Broadway, New York Daily News, July 14, 1953, p. 41BL.
Leon Shipper’s concept to make “an authentic ‘piece of Israel’ transplanted here as a permanent Land of the Bible exhibit”235 Tons of Sculpture from Italy Arrives for ‘Garden of Israel,’ Central New Jersey Home News, July 10, 1955, p.5. began around 1951. He consulted various experts, including landscape architect Allan Dalsimer, Harold N. Moldenke of the New York Botanical Gardens, Michael Yohary at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and Stephen Kayser at New York’s Jewish Museum, who introduced Shipper to an Israeli designer, Ismar David.
Traveling by car throughout Israel for four weeks in the summer of 1953, Shipper visited important Biblical sites, choosing and carefully documenting specimens of rocks, boulders and sand to be excavated and sent to the United States. He also selected marble from quarries in Jerusalem, Galilee, Mount Carmel and Mt. Giboa, to be finished in the Carrara studio of Bernard Zuckerman, a prominent sculptor of memorial works.3Hundreds of Tons of Biblical Boulders To Become Monument In Garden Of Israel, The Freehold Transcript and Monmouth Inquirer December 24, 1953, p.29. On October 28th of that year, the first shipment of material— one hundred tons of stone from Safed, the Red Sea, Elat, the Negev, the Ayalon Valley, Galilee and Gilboa—arrived in New York, but it was not until midsummer 1955 that the 36-tons (packed in 62 crates) of marble which made up most of the main feature, the Bible Archway, arrived from Italy. The 12-ton center monolith from Mt. Carmel, “the largest block of marble ever quarried in the Holy Land since ancient days”4Vineland Daily Journal, May 25, 1957, p.3 arrived at Pier 9 in Jersey City from Mt. Carmel on August 2, 1955.5Marble From the Holy Land Here for Woodbridge Garden, Central New Jersey Home News, August 2, 1955 The “world’s only bronze map-portrait of the Holy Land,”6Ibid. sculpted in the New York studio of Rochette and Parzini and cast in bronze by the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, arrived in late October.7Bronze ‘Portrait’ Shown Depicts Old Testament, Ridgewood Sunday News, October 23, 1955.
Ismar David designed many features for the Bible Gardens, including the 60 x 18 foot Bible Archway colonnade, featuring the twelve tribes of Israel, an inscription from Deuteronomy and the bronze Land of Israel map; and a wrought iron Moses.
In 1959, Beth Israel Memorial Park published a guide to the plants and features of its Bible Gardens.
Bible Gardens of Israel
The Bible Retold Through Plant Life
and Works of Art and Architecture
Harold B. Pressman, 1913–2010, printing executive.
After graduating from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) in 1933 with a degree in printing management, Harold Pressman joined Pearl-Pressman-Liberty Co., the printing firm founded by his father, Charles Pressman, and his partner, Manuel Pearl. In 1952, the younger Pressman became President of the company and helped build it into one of the largest and most successful printing enterprises in the Delaware Valley1The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 29, 2010, p. B09.
Pressman was very active in printing and graphic arts organizations, serving as president of the Graphic Arts Association of the Delaware Valley, a member of the board and chair of the finance committee of Printing Industries of America, and a member of the board of the Graphic Arts Technical Foundation. 2Ibid.
In 1971, when Ismar David was searching for a publisher for his Psalms drawings, he had Harold Pressman make hand set two proofs of a double spread in two type variations.
Clayton Whitehill, son of a Philadelphia furniture manufacturer, graduated from the Columbia University School of Journalism, where he was president of the senior class. He edited “With the Intercollegiate” in The Maccabaean, a monthly publication of the Zionist Organization of America, and wrote book reviews for The American Hebrew. After graduation, he joined the staff of the United News in Washington, D.C., where he reported on political, labor and economic issues. However, he wrote a vivid and moving eyewitness account of the tragic collapse of the Knickerbocker Motion Picture Theater on January 28, 1922. He had happened to be passing by when its snow-laden roof collapsed, killing more than a hundred adults and children.
But by the end of the decade, Whitehill seems to have left journalism and, at some point, begun to work in advertising and typography. He taught advertising design at the then Philadelphia School of Industrial Art. By the 1940s, he was exhibiting his “subtle and imaginative”1The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 19, 1943, p. 58. paintings. In 1947, Barnes and Noble published his Moods of Type, which was still in print more than six decades later. Its blurb read, “Throughout history, in every period of advance in culture and design, the basic key to every change and progression is to be found in the forms and shapes of the letters used by men in the graphic communication.” Through the 1950s, Whitehill taught painting extension courses, gave lectures and was president of the Philadelphia chapter of Artists’ Equity.
Laura Lee enjoyed almost as disparate a career path as her husband. She hailed from Hutchinson, Kansas and got a degree in chemistry from the University of Chicago. Initially she worked as a chemist and bacteriologist, but in 1929, she joined the staff of The Evening Bulletin, becoming its movie critic in 1937. Post-retirement she continued to write occasional stories for the paper. During 1953 and 1954, the couple spent twelve months traveling and working in Europe. After their return, Clayton told a reporter that he felt a greater kinship artistically with northern Europe, but “[o]f course, Italy is a sublime place to live gloriously…” He and Laura moved to Perugia in 1958. Clayton continued to exhibit his work in the United States and Italy until his death in 1963. In 1964, a studio in the Jeanette W. Rosenbaum (his late sister) Art Center was named in his honor. In November 1965, Laura Lee was found in her gas-filled apartment in Perugia. Friends told police that she had been despondent since the death of her husband.2Special to The Inquirer, The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 20, 1965, p. 21.
The Print Club of Philadelphia showed Whitehill’s work, Song of Songs, in its Hebrew Tercentury exhibition in 19543Feinstein, Sam, Philadelphia, The Art Digest, volume 29, issue 4, November 15, 1954,p 15. and Whitehill seems to have been involved with a planned edition of the poem for the Jewish Publication Society. The Hebrew text was to be set in David Hebrew, either typeset by Photolettering or pasted up by Ismar David or set by Westcott and Thompson, if Intertype issued the face in time (as referenced in the note below).
In his preface to Moods of Type, Clayton Whitehill wrote, “The suggestion to write this book came from Dr. Leslie and Miss Hortense Mendel of the A-D Gallery, New York. For this and for their criticism and encouragement, I’m deeply grateful.” Ismar David and Hortense Mendel must have been invited to a send-off for the Whitehills on the Cunard liner Britannic on the eve of their year-long travels in Europe.
Letter from Clayton Whitehill and Laura Lee, 1953.
Robert Samuel Haas, 1898–1997, graphic designer, photographer, printer and educator.
After mustering out of the Austro-Hungarian army in 1918, Robert Haas studied electrical engineering at Vienna’s Technische Hochschule, while simultaneously taking classes in economics, history and music at the city’s university, and typography and lettering with Rudolf von Larisch at the Kunstgewerbeschule and Akademie der bildenden Künste. He had co-founded the ground-breaking graphics studio, Officina Vindobonensis, and already been a successful printer and graphic designer for some time, when he spent two years learning photography from Trude Fleischmann. While continuing his graphic work, Haas became a photojournalist, celebrity portraitist, official photographer of the Salzburg Festival and created the world’s largest (32 x 8 meters) photomontage for the Austrian Pavilion in the 1937 World’s Fair. The following year, he fled Austria for England.
He spent six months working in London before heading to the United States. North Carolina’s miraculous little Black Mountain College took him in, as it had fifty-one other refugees from Nazi Germany during those dark times,1Darwent, Charles, In World War II-Era North Carolina, A Haven for German Jewish Artists and Academics, Jewish Book Council, November 6, 2018. including Xanti Schawinsky. But, without enough work in Black Mountain, Haas moved to New York, where, in 1941, he founded the Ram Press on 25th Street in Manhattan. In addition to designing and printing for the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum, he helped Clark and Way, for a time, with printing the historically trouble-prone Frick Collection catalogue.
Haas taught calligraphy (and later typography) at Cooper Union, concurrently with Ismar David. The enigmatic note below was written long after both men had stopped working there. The reference to Haas’ brother is presumably to Georg Haas, a zoologist and paleontologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem since 1932, who had died eight months earlier.
Erich, later Eric, Mendelsohn, 1887–1953, architect. His spectacular Ufa Universum-Theater building opened in November 1928, the year Ismar David arrived in Berlin. Part of a larger complex of housing, shops and a cabaret on Kurfürstendamm in Charlottenburg, the Universum was one of a series of high profile buildings that made Mendelsohn one of the best known architects in Germany—and Europe—at the time.
Born in Allenstein (now Olsztyn,Poland), Eric Mendelsohn was the son of a milliner and the owner of a souvenir shop. His parents had not wanted him to study architecture, but after two semesters of economics at the University of Munich, he was able to persuade them to let him change course. He attended the Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg for two years, then returned to Munich to finish his degree at the Technische Hochschule there in 1912. After military service during the First World War, he settled in Berlin. His first and perhaps most famous building, the unorthodox, expressionistic Einsteinturm launched his career. Melding the emotion of expressionism and prevailing utilitarian concepts, Mendelsohn designed dynamic large-scale works, including the Friedrich Steinberg, Herrmann & Co. Hat Factory in Luckenwald; Schocken department stores in Stuttgart and Chemnitz, as well as private residences, like his own at Rupenhorn 6. In 1933, as the political situation in Germany became untenable, Mendelsohn left the country for Holland and then England. At the same time he began a partnership with Serge Chermayeff in London, he opened an office in Jerusalem and divided his time between the two cities. His first commission in Jerusalem was a house for Chaim Weizmann. He reunited with old friends, designing a villa and a library for one of them, Zalman Schocken, and tackled public work projects like the Hadassah Hospital and a plan for Hebrew University. In 1939, the Mendelsohns moved to Jerusalem full time, but in 1941, with the German Army approaching in Egypt and disillusioned professionally by various circumstances in Palestine, the couple migrated to the United States. At the end of the war, they settled in San Francisco. In addition to lecturing and teaching, Mendelsohn brought his bold fusion of art, spirituality and function to four American synagogues.
In 1921, Mendelsohn had lost his left eye to cancer. In mid November 1953, he succumbed to a recurrence of the disease. A memorial to the six million victims of the Holocaust, which would have been built in Riverside Park in New York City, remained unfinished at his death. Only few months earlier, Ismar David had written to him. They had been acquaintances at the Jerusalem Artists Club.
I have wanted for some time to send you greetings & only recently in a conversation with Mr. Paul Grotz of Architectural Forum when you name was mentioned I determined to write to you without further delay. It is possible that you may remember our meeting numerous times at the Jerusalem Artists Club or that you may recall my work as a graphic & industrial designer there. In the course of several visits to the United States I have had a wide variety of commissions. In 1951 to design a series of modern Hebrew alphabets for the Intertype Corp. in 1952 to design and supervise the installation of the Israel Exposition in N.Y. for the Bonds for Israel Organization. In connection with this last there were many smaller assignments and a second large exposition in Florida.
At the moment I am occupied with a number of projects and am also assembling a small exhibit of my work for the Jewish Museum. This will be quite comprehensive, covering my work in calligraphy and lettering and the designs for books, advertisements and decorative object of all kinds including Jewish ceremonial pieces such as the menorah, Sabbath lamps etc. As a contemporary artist I have tried to retain the strength, beauty and simplicity of Hebrew traditional design but to strip it of the tasteless superfluities which have been added
It would give me pleasure to meet with you again. Will you be in N.Y. in the near future? Perhaps we can arrange an appointment either here or in the West to which I may be traveling. I look forward to hearing from you at your convenience and in the meanwhile with kind regards and many good wishes I remain sincerely
Yours Ismar…
Abyssinian House, later the Ethiopian Consulate Building, built between 1925 and 1928, one of a number of structures in the northwest of Jerusalem that are associated with the Ethiopian community.
Front of Abyssinian House on Ha-Neviim Street, Jerusalem. The Renaissance-style Italian Hospital building can be seen just beyond it, on the right. G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress
The devoutly religious Empress Zauditu of Ethiopia (1876–1930), first woman to head an internationally recognized nation in Africa, had Abyssinian House built not far from the Kidane Mehret Church. Brilliantly colored mosaics on the façade depict the symbol of the royal family, a crowned lion carrying a cross-topped flagstaff. The panel includes the motto , “The Lion of Judah is victorious,” written in Ge’ez. The building had been intended to serve as her residence when visiting Jerusalem, but she did not live to use it. Instead, the ground floor became the Ethiopian consulate and the two upper floors were rented out as apartments with the proceeds to benefit the Ethiopian monastery that had long been present in the city. An Ethiopian monarch did finally occupy the premises in 1936, after Italy seized Ethiopia and the Haile Selassie spent six months Jerusalem on his way to exile in London. After the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Ethiopia severed ties with Israel and the building’s a diplomatic function ceased.
At some point between his arrival in Jerusalem and moving into 8 KKL Street in Rehavia, Ismar David lived in Abyssinian House. His landlord or host was a Mr. Domowitz.1Summary of a meeting between Nahum Tishbi, Director of the Department of Trade and Industry with the Wolpert family, March 17, 1938. Central Zionist Archives S8\2292\1.
Susanne Suba, 1913–2012, watercolorist and illustrator.
A holiday card from Susanne Suba.
At the age of three, Susanne Suba begged for painting lessons from the head draughtsman in her father’s architectural studio. Rebuffed, she “turned to the medium of pencil on penny post-cards, recording our life in Budapest…”1Suba, Susanne, PM [An Intimate Journal For Art Directors, Production Managers, and their Associates]. New York: The Composing Room/P.M. Publishing Co., Volume 4, No. 10: December-January 1938-1939. In her youthful autobiography,2A collection of Suba’s childhood work is preserved in the Winterthur Library, Winterthur Museum, Delaware. she recorded her life from birth until her arrival in New York at the age of six with her American-born mother, pianist May Edwards Suba. Her father, Miklos (1880–1944), who joined them in Brooklyn a few years later, gave up architecture and became a well-known Precisionist painter.
After studying at Pratt (and decorating the walls of a corset shop, which she didn’t include in her professional portfolio),3 Suba, Susanne, PM [An Intimate Journal For Art Directors, Production Managers, and their Associates]. New York: The Composing Room/P.M. Publishing Co., Volume 4, No. 10: December-January 1938-1939. Susanne Suba began her career in earnest, with four illustrations for The Colophon. Her first assignment as a book illustrator, Life Without Principle by Henry David Thoreau, landed in AIGA’s Fifty Best Books of the Year in 1937. Many, many books followed, some by her then husband Russell McCracken. She designed book jackets, as well, and did numerous spot drawings, one cartoon and five covers for the New Yorker between 1939 and 1963.4 Maslin, Michael, The New Yorker Cartoonists N-Z The Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Brooklyn Museum have shown her work.
The Composing Room’s PM-AD Gallery exhibited her drawings in 1940, four years after Hortense Mendel started there. Suba, with her husband, playwright (most famously of Dark Victory) Bertram Bloch, exchanged seasonal greetings cards with Ismar and Dorothy David. Somewhere along the line, Suba tried her hand at ceramics.
In late 1957, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society announced their international assembly in New York City the following year. Jehovah’s Witnesses had held conventions at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx in 1950 and 1953, each time packing the stadium. In 1953, overflow crowds had to occupy tents in surrounding parking lots. So, with evident excitement, the organizers revealed that the 1958 event would take place simultaneously at the “excellent facilities of both Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds, situated just four city blocks apart. … From any part of the world, all are welcome to attend; and we already know that thousands are coming from the ends of the earth.” Duplicate programs were arranged so that speakers in the morning session in one arena would appear in the afternoon session of the other and vice versa. When repetition was not possible, a direct wire carried audio from Yankee Stadium to the Polo Grounds.”1 The Watchtower, December 17, 1957. Over 250,000 people attended the twin locations.
Today, 1001 Jerome Avenue, an art deco building designed by Sugarman & Berger in 1937, faces gate 2 of the new Yankee Stadium (opened in 2009). When Ismar David and Hortense Mendel lived there, the House that Ruth Built was a short walk down the street. The monumental influx of people for the Divine Will International Assembly from July 27–August 3, 1958 would have been impossible to overlook, even for a neighborhood used to hoards of baseball fans. The festivities proved irresistible for (probably) Hortense and her camera.
Josefine Pola Weinbach Stout, 1902–1984, interior and textile designer.
Rex Todhunter Stout, 1886–1975, “banker, barker, bookworm, bookkeeper, yeoman on the Presidential yacht Mayflower, boss of 3,000 writers of propaganda in World War II, gentleman farmer and dirt farmer, big businessman, cigar salesman, pueblo guide, hotel manager, architect, cabinet maker, pulp and slick magazine writer, propagandist for world government, crow trainer, jumping‐pig trainer, mammoth-pumpkin grower, conversationalist, politician, orator, potted‐plant wizard, gastronome, musical amateur, president of the Author’s Guild, usher, ostler and pamphleteer,”1Johnston, Alva, Alias Nero Wolfe – II, The New Yorker, July 23, 1949, p.30. novelist and creator of detective Nero Wolfe.
Rex and Pola Stout preparing barbequed chicken at their home. Photos by Hortense Mendel
Rex Stout’s career was as prodigious as the girth of his most famous creation. A precocious child, he read the bible (twice!) before the age of four. At age 13, he won the Kansas spelling bee championship and entered Topeka High School, where he captained the debate team and was senior class poet.2 Rex Stout, Map of Kansas Literature, He skipped college and served in the navy for two years. Then he tried various cities around the country and assorted occupations, including writing stories for pulp magazines, until 1916, when he both married and devised the Education Thrift Service, a savings program for school children. Within a decade, royalties made him financially independent, allowing him to write in earnest and travel to Europe. His first novel (that had not been initially released in serial form) was How Like A God, published by Vanguard Press, which he had co-founded in 1926 to re-issue left wing classics and publish new works that could not get released elsewhere. The Great Depression quashed his fortune and he turned to mystery writing to earn a living. Nero Wolfe made his first appearance in 1934 and his last in 1975, however literature took a back seat during the Second World War, when Stout threw himself into support for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the war effort. As president of the Author’s League, he took a strong stance against McCarthyism.
In late 1931, while Stout was building his self-designed modernist home, High Meadow, on the Brewster, New York-Danbury, Connecticut boarder, he met Pola Weinbach Hoffmann, who ran an interior design business with her husband Wolfgang. A year later, Stout and Weinbach Hoffmann married in a civil ceremony at High Meadow.
Born in Stryj, then Austria-Hungary, Pola Weinbach began constructing fashions for her dolls as a child. Despite the objections of her parents, she left university in Lemberg to study at the Vienna’s Kunstgewerbe Schule. During her four years there, the Wiener Werkstätte accepted many of her designs. She lived in Paris and then Berlin before marrying the son of her former teacher in Vienna and immigrating to New York.
After her divorce from Wolfgang Hoffmann, Stout returned to textile design, helping to pioneer the revival of weaving in the 1930s. She collaborated with leading fashion houses and created collections for textile companies in Great Britain. In 1940, she headed an eponymous division of Botany Worsted Mills. Stout enjoyed the opportunity to design for a wider segment of society: “I like to make American fabrics for American women.”3 Pope, Virginia, Blends Color Harmonies Into Fine Garment Fabrics, New York Times, March 17, 1940. She used color theory to design fabrics that could be used in combination with each other and manufactured her fabrics for beauty and durability. In 1946, she formed an independent company, Pola Stout Designs/Pola Stout Colors, with its own textile mill in Philadelphia.
Pola Stout often worked from her second floor studio in the expansive home she shared with her husband and two daughters. “While she is spinning yarns in one wing of their hill-top farmhouse, he is spinning his yarns about Nero Wolfe in another.”4Ibid. Ismar David and Hortense Mendel visited Rex and Pola Stout at High Meadow, sometime during the 1950s.
