Market Day in Lublin - The Grodzka Gate, Podzamcze.

WEBER, KURT.

Austrian, (1893-1964)

Oil on canvas. Signed lower left. Gilt frame.

In the Old City of Lublin, the Brama Grodzka (Grodno Gate) was commonly known as the Jewish Gate, situated as it was in the Jewish neighborhood of Podzamcze, at the foot of the city’s medieval castle which separated the city’s Jewish and Christian sections. The first record of Jews in Poland’s Lublin dates to the year 1316. Over time the city became celebrated as a center of Torah scholarship and piety, in which resided such luminaries as Rabbis Jacob Kopelman (d. 1541), Shalom Shachna (1495-1558), Shlomo Luria “the Maharshal” (1510-73), Mordechai Jaffe (1530–1612), Meir ben Gedalya “the Maharam” (1558-1616), Shmuel Eliezer Edels “the Maharsha (1555–1631) and Yoel Sirkes “the Bach” (1561–1640). Later, with the rise of the Chassidic movement in Poland, leaders of stature such as the Chozeh of Lublin (1745-1815) brought fame to the city. The layout of many older Polish towns included the “rynek” or market square, as seen in the present painting, a version of which was also utilized as the cover image for historian’s Majer Balaban’s seminal Die Judenstadt von Lublin (1919).