Excerpt from
William Kurelek: Jewish Life in Canada

William Kurelek (1927–1977), a beloved Ukrainian Canadian painter, is celebrated for works shaped by his deeply felt immigrant experience and compassionate vision of humanity. In 1975, he created Jewish Life in Canada, a suite of sixteen jewel-toned paintings honouring his friend and art dealer, Avrom Isaacs, drawing on archival photographs to portray the traditions, families, and communities that shaped Jewish life across the country. William Kurelek: Jewish Life in Canada brings this series into focus through scholarly essays by David S. Koffman, Sarah Milroy, Ian A.C. Dejardin, and John Geoghegan, an artistic response by Natalka Husar, and more than fifty images—including the complete suite and previously unpublished source material—offering a comprehensive look at this remarkable body of work. The following is an excerpt from David S. Koffman’s essay, “Painting Jewish Life in Canada“: 

I’m not sure how much William Kurelek knew about Canadian Jewish history in 1973, when he first got the idea to paint Jewish Canada. I can imagine, though, the conversations he had with his collaborators, Abe Arnold, the Winnipeg-based historian of Canadian Jewry and a founder of the Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada, and his friend Abe Schwartz, an engineer by trade and a fellow Winnipegger. Together, over the course of two days the following winter, they offered Kurelek a kind of immersive tutorial. Arnold brought Kurelek a raft of archival photographs of Jewish communities across Canada, and the two must have riffed on them, sketching scenes of Jewish life. The two Abes also furnished Kurelek with details about Jewish religious traditions, immigrant experiences, Jewish occupational niches, the tribulations of antisemitism, and the rich history of Jewish community building . . . . 

Pay attention to Kurelek’s gaze—to the aspects of Jews and Judaism that he saw and chose to highlight. As a Catholic, he had a particularly Christian understanding of Jewishness. He describes Mary, for example, as “a Jewish maiden” in the introduction to the 1976 book, and he has a penchant for quoting Hebrew scripture. If the conclusion of Kurelek’s own introduction to his paintings gives us a clue as to his deeper motivations for the paintings (beyond his act of homage to Isaacs), his painting Jewish history might very well have been to serve as expiation of shame for Christian Europe’s long hatred and ultimately genocidal persecution of Jews. “Another reason I had for doing the painting,” writes Kurelek, was “to do my bit in undoing some of the injustices Jews have suffered at the hands of Christians.” Indeed, half of his short introduction is devoted to antisemitism—Christian religious anti-Judaism, Nazi antisemitism, and Canadian-born anti-Jewish animus. These paintings, he writes, were intended to help fellow Canadians “at least show respect for and interest in another people’s traditions.”