Page 2 - Michael Rogatchi News Today

Please note that the posts on The Blogs are contributed by third parties. The opinions, facts and any media content in them are presented solely by the authors, and neither The Times of Israel nor its partners assume any responsibility for them. Please contact us in case of abuse. In case of abuse, Jerusalem in artworks of Inna and Michael Rogatchi. The energy of these stones has provided the nourishment for many generations of the Jewish people, for all those who keep Jerusalem in their h...

‘All the Jews are Holocaust Survivors’ ‘To tell you the truth, all the Jews of the world are Holocaust survivors’ – said legendary Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, 83-year old, in his speech on the 76-th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. I always thought this way, ever since I learned about Holocaust in my early age. Holocaust lived in our family, as it lived in the families of everyone we knew, and those we did not.  It was personal, and it was not personal at the same time. I...

Cultural Diary series Perhaps one needs to live enough to realise that a genius is ageless.  Non-existent age of a genius has to do also with migration of souls whatever sceptics on the subject might be saying on this magnetic fact of the universe and experiences of our existence there.  According to the certain school of thinking in Judaism tradition, every soul bears its certain ‘age’, so to say, which defines the behaviour of the person in whose body it lives. This is what people mean ...

  Joy with Tears In Jewish tradition, we have ten major holidays annually, with only two of them, Simcha Torah and Purim, is about exalted joy. And on Purim, that joy comes after miraculous rescue from a mortal danger and prospect of total extinction.  Many of us knew in generations that our Jewish joy is so often a joy mixed with tears, so often it contains an essential drama in it. We are genetically aware of the complexity of our joy, and many of us, also in generations, value it as a more...

  Bar-Mitzvah in front of the Auschwitz entrance The scale of the Shoah prevents us from perceiving it in a whole. Human psyche’s self-defence mechanism is evoked, often blocking us from absorbing it in its enitre shocking volume. We know its methodic plan and idea. We also know the incomprehensible outcome of it. It comes as facts of history. But what connects us with our brethren perished in that unspeakable crime is the way of personal identification with real people from those six – an...

OSIP January 15th, 2020 has marked one of the most special commemoration dates in this year’s cultural calendar, the 130th birth anniversary of Osip Mandelstam, Russian poet of Jewish origin, vulnerable and hunted man who has created a cosmic, unparalleled quality of poetry that has become a distinctive mark of literature of the XX century in general.  This anniversary could well be his 300th or 30th one. He is from the category of eternal lights, and there are so very few of them. Michael R...

Artistic View: The Ancestors Family series Michael Rogatchi Contemporary Biblical Art  As central as the Jacob family is in Jewish spiritual life and narrative, as it is in Michael Rogatchi’s series of his contemporary Biblical art works known as Forefathers project. In the case of Jacob and his family, the artist sees it in two ways: as continuation of the line of the Patriarchs, of which Jacob was the last one; and as of fundamental beginning of the Jewish nation. “ We all are childre...