Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur

Gottlieb was 22 and living in Vienna when he painted this, reconstructing from memory the synagogue of his childhood in Galicia. He worked himself into the congregation several times over, as a grown man, as a boy, as an adolescent, spreading the ages of his own life across a single Day of Atonement. On the silver band of a Torah scroll he lettered a Hebrew inscription carrying his own name, worded as a memorial for the dead. Within the year he was gone, dead at 23 after an illness, and the mourning line he had written became his own. He belonged to two worlds, Polish and Jewish, and tried through his short life to hold them together. In this crowd he appears both as a living worshipper and among the dead being remembered.