If you had to stand outside through 40 years of Chicago winters, you wouldn’t look so good either.
That’s why a beloved piece of Chicago public art, the Chicago Jewish Mural, just underwent a major, much-needed renovation.
Four decades ago, artists, friends and activists, Cynthia Weiss and Miriam Socoloff, created a glass mosaic mural that depicts the history of Chicago Jews.
The mosaic, installed on a wall of the Bernard Horwich Jewish Community Center on the far north side of Chicago, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, tells the story of Jewish immigration to the United States, and Chicago in particular, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
A mosaic at the Bernard Horwich Jewish Community Center on the Far North Side tells the story of Jewish immigration to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Titled “Fabric of Our Lives” and created in 1980, its images and words portray challenges they faced, coming to Chicago and elsewhere, typically from Eastern Europe, with little money, no jobs and often no grasp of English.
Chicago’s murals & mosaics
This is part of an ongoing series of stories on public art in the city and suburbs. More murals are being added every week.
The 15-feet-tall, 13-feet-wide, glass-tile mosaic had suffered from the onslaught of decades of Chicago winters but restored in October at a cost of about $8,000 by Miriam Socoloff and Cynthia Weiss, the artists who originally had assembled the work in 1980.
Subscribe
This afternoon will be mostly cloudy with a high near 62 degrees. Tonight’s low will be around 49 degrees. Tomorrow brings rain, including some possible thunderstorms, with a high near 60 degrees. And more rain is in the forecast for Sunday, along with a high near 58 degrees.
Top story
Jim Zwit never forgot the hot, sticky smell of Vietnam. And he never forgot the eight Army buddies he lost there in an ambush in 1971.
He made it his life’s mission to track down each of their families, spread across the United States. And that was in an age before finding people was made easier by the likes of Google, email and social media.