SHTTL

SHTTL: ECHOS BEFORE SILENCE.

Several years ago we were fortunate to host ADDY WALTER the director of the incredible film SHTTL and MOSHE LOBEL its lead actor, during its premiere at the ATLANTA JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL. 

These five oils are  based on stills that Addy gave me from the film. 

SHTTL is a cinematic masterpiece, a haunting meditation on Jewish life in Eastern Europe on the eve of its annihilation. In one long, beautiful but harrowing cinematic shot, the film captures the final day in a Ukrainian shtetl on the Polish border before it is ransacked by the Nazis during Operation Barbarossa. This stunning film offers a moment frozen in time, vibrating with complexity, devotion, doubt, humor, tension, and the ache of what is about to be lost. These paintings seek to carry that moment forward, giving visual permanence to fleeting expressions, gestures, and conversations that represent an entire world of Jewish thought, struggle, and identity.

The movie’s characters and those depicted in these images—rabbis, intellectuals, revolutionaries, simple townspeople, students, children—stand at the precipice of erasure, yet they are full of life. Their differences, debates, and inner divisions echo the fractures we feel today, both within the Jewish world and in the broader social fabric, especially in the wake of political divisions within the US,  recent violence in the Middle East, and rising antisemitism globally. Then, as now, Jewish people confront both external threat and internal tension. Yet what persists—what must persist—is a fierce attachment to truth, learning, memory, and one another.

Through these paintings, I hope to illuminate the beauty and tragedy of a world moments before its destruction, while inviting reflection on our own time. The questions these figures ask across the generations—of God, of each other, of their purpose—remain ours. And in this shared reckoning, we call again for strength, for clarity, and for unity in the face of fragmentation.