Special collection of Michael Rogatchi works from his famed Psalms Country series was a part of the national commemoration of October 7th in Finland skilfully organised by the Helsinki Jewish Community, with participation of The Rogatchi Foundation.
A very dignified, deep and sincere commemoration at the historical synagogue in Helsinki which was completely full, with very many attendees from different walks of life: community members, MPs, public figures, diplomats, people in absolutely all age categories, from 15 onward. The event also included a dedicated art exhibition in which a special selection of Michael and mine works, Psalms & Songs for October 7th, was presented.
Among the attendees were the Ambassadors of Israel H.E. Boaz Rodkin, Germany H.E. Stephan Auer , Austria H.E. Herbert Pihler , Hungary H.E. Klara Breuer, Charge d’Affaires of the US Embassy HE Christopher Krafft , the Israeli Embassy Defence Attache Lt-Col. Roy Horowitz, leading Finnish MPs Peter Östman and Atte Kaleva, chairman of the Finnish-Israel Friendship Organisations Association Risto Huvila, well-known pastor and supporter of Israel John Remes, and many others.
The collection consists seven artistic interpretations of the Psalms by Michael.
Michael’s artistic journey through the country of the Psalms , echoing the title of his series, Psalms Country, started in early 1990s. From then, he was returning to the theme periodically. The October 7th and the new reality it has marked has prompted Michael to return to the Psalms again.
In this commemorative artistic tribute, alongside previously existing interpretations of the Psalms, there are three new works, two of which were created by Michael as direct consequence of October 7th, Psalm 1 and Psalm 87.
Special selection of seven works from the Michael Rogatchi Psalms Country series has been presented by The Rogatchi Foundation at the national October 7th commemoration organised by the Helsinki Jewish Community in Finland, and several other countries world-wide.
The detailed presentation of Michael and Inna Rogatchi and the Rogatchi Foundation special artistic tribute international commemorative project is below.
Specially selected artworks include seven works from Michael Rogatchi Psalms Country series ( from 1991 onward) .
Some of the works in this artistic tribute have been created by Michael as a direct consequence of the October 7th 2023 massacre.
Psalms & Songs for October 7th special artistic tribute has been present at the various national commemorative events in several countries, including Finland, Lithuania, France, the US, the UK and the others.
The entire Psalms & Songs for October 7th collection in detail can be seen here.
The collection has evoked many positive responses world-wide:
A special selection from the Michael Rogatchi Psalms Country series has been reviewed in a special essay telling about an artistic tribute as the way of commemoration at the present anxious and volatile time.
When some people are insisting that one cannot compare October 7th massacre and the Holocaust, I can agree – putting aside the fact of very nature of attacking Jews which is the same core fact for the both crimes against humanity, 80 years apart – that one cannot compare the information which wide public in the world had in mid-1940s about the crimes committed during the Holocaust and the information which the same category of human beings worldwide have had on October 7th massacre, in a direct and full way. Did it help? It did not. This time the international public reaction is worse, much worse.
Michael Rogatchi (C). Psalm 69. 1992. Psalms Country.
Because of the freshness of the tragedy and because the tragedy is still unfolding for our people, because of the depth of the shock that we all went through as the result of October 7th, because the horror is so fresh, any reflection on October 7th and post-October 7th many open wounds is highly personal in any and every case of anyone who does it.
Michael Rogatchi (C). Psalm 1. 2023. Psalms Country.
– For the series of various commemorations of the date marking the new post- October 7th reality, there are seven works by artist Michael Rogatchi from his famed Psalms Country series.
Michael’s artistic journey through the country of the Psalms , echoing the title of his series, Psalms Country, started in early 1990s. From then, he was returning to the theme periodically. The October 7th and the new reality it has marked has prompted Michael to return to the Psalms again.
alongside previously existing interpretations of the Psalms, there are three new works, two of which were created by Michael as direct consequence of October 7th, Psalm 1 and Psalm 87.
Michael Rogatchi (C). Psalm 87. 2023.
– Any humanistic effort in the time of dangerous moral erosion, which is now, matters. It will bear fruit of decency, so the youth and children of today would know and would understand what is right and what is wrong, what should be lauded and what should be resisted, what is humanity and what is barbarity. And what is human life, the highest value of Judaism and humanity, is about.
Michael Rogatchi (C). Psalm 22. 1993.
In both of them, the sun is upset and disturbed. In both of them, humanity speaks out. True to himself in addressing unbearable, Michael opted for a laconic and understated way of expression, focusing on kindness and the humane core of human life.
But , importantly, the standing questions posed by the overwhelming shock of the October 7th massacre in many of its aspects are tangible in these works expressing deep reflections, thoughts, unanswered questions, and that unmistaken sadness that we are living in for a year by now.
The entire Psalms & Songs for October 7th collection or artworks by Michael and Inna Rogatchi can be seen here.
Michael Rogatchi six homages to his dear friend legendary Leonard Cohen has become a part of The Rogatchi Foundation new exclusive charitable art calendar for 2025:
This new calendar is unusual not only because it in its entirety is our artistic homage to the great Leonard Cohen, in commemoration of his 90th anniversary ( which occurred in September 2024), but also because it is dedicated to the dear friend of both Michael and Inna Rogatchi, the person who loved and knew Leonard’s legacy deeply and by heart, founder and long-time director of the Vilnius Jewish Public Library in Lithuania Zilvinas Beliauskaus.
Michael and Inna Rogatchi, who were close friends with Zilvinas for many years, did run with him his last project to commemorate Leonard Cohen in the autumn 2024. Tragically, Zilvinas died prematurely, being only 66, due to the severe illness, in the summer 2024.
In the calendar, there are two pages explaining in a bit more detail the idea of Michael and Inna’s homage to Leonard, and the idea of this special dedication of the project to their friend who was an international renowned cultural personality:
The pages of the calendar looks like the illustrations below:
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The Rogatchi Foundation has produced and published Michael Rogatchi HOMAGES & NOCTURNES exclusive museum art card set for charitable purposes of the Foundation in a new 2024-2025 season.
The set presents ten museum double art-cards with images of Michael Rogatchi’s well-known recent artworks which are homages to the outstanding musicians, such as brothers Yves Montand, Mina, Chet Baker, Charles Aznavour, and Astor Piazzolla.
In September 2024, a new bi-lingual art catalogue Shtetl Stories & Memories in Lithuanian and English was produced and published in cooperation between The Rogatchi Foundation and The Grigory Kanovich Public Library of Jonava Municipality, Lithuania.
The catalogue has been published on the occasion of the opening of the inaugural exhibition of a 25-piece special Shtetl Stories and Memories collection of artworks by Michael and Inna Rogatchi which The Rogatchi Foundation has donated to the Library in commemoration of the 95th anniversary of the outstanding writer and friend of the Rogatchi family Grigory Kanovich.
The leading essay of the catalogue is written by Dr Michael de Saint-Cheron ( Paris, France), a close disciple of the famed French philosopher of the Litvak origin Emmanuelis Levinas, a close friend and colleague of Elie Wiesel, founder and president of the Andre Malraux Association, and the author of recent monographies on Pierre Soulages and Anselm Kiefer. Among other contributors are Dr Hannu Takkula, a long-term MEP and Member of the EU Audit Court, and well-known Lithuanian artist and art curator Alexandra Jakovsyte.
The catalogue provides an art experts contextualised study of Michael and Inna Rogatchi art series included into Shtetl Stories and Memories collection.
Both artists have contributed their personal introductions to the special project.
The catalogue includes 26 full-page art plates with all works from the collection.
After the inaugural exhibition at the Grigory Kanovich Public Library of Jonava Municipality ( until November 25th, 2024), the exhibition is planned to travel throughout Lithuania to be shown at different cultural institutions from the beginning of 2025 onward, with the catalogue to accompany the forthcoming exhibitions and events.
The donated by the Rogatchi Foundation to the Grigory Kanovich Public Jonava Library collection includes:
On September 12th, 2024, artist Michael Rogatchi and his wife writer and artist Inna Rogatchi participated in the Inaugural Opening of their dual Shtetl Stories and Memories exhibition at the Grigory Kanovich Public Library in Jonava, Lithuania, the native place of the outstanding modern writer ( 1929 – 2023) of an international appeal.
Shtetl Stories and Memories exhibition at the Grigory Kanovich Public Library in Jonava, Lithuania. September 2024. (C) The Rogatchi Foundation Archive.
The 25-piece collection has been donated by the artists and The Rogatchi Foundation to the Library in commemoration of the 95th anniversary of the great writer and friend of the Rogatchi family Grigory Kanovich ( 1929 – 2023).
The opening of the inaugural Shtetl Stories and Memories exhibition was part of the rich program of the events celebrating the annual European Days of Jewish Culture, with their Family theme for year 2024.
H.E. Ambassador of Israel in Lithuania Hadas Wittenberg Silberstein at the celebrating events of the European Days of Jewish Culture 2024 at the Jonava Grigory Kanovich Public Library. September 2024 (C). The Rogatchi Foundation Archive.
The events were attended by the Israeli Ambassador to Lithuania H.E. Hadas Wittenberg Silberstein, member of the Seimas MP Eugenius Zabutis, leaders of the Jonava municipality, writers, publishers, patrons of the Library, artists, honorary guests, public and students.
After the inaugural exhibition at the library ( September 12 – November 25, 2024) the Shtetl Stories and Memories exhibition will start to travel throughout Lithuania being exhibited at different cultural and educational locations in the country.
Participants and guests of the special multidisciplinary event at the Grigory Kanovic Public Library in the Jonava Municipality, Lithuania. September 2024. (C) The Rogatchi Foundation Archive.
A special professional bilingual Lithuanian-English catalogue featuring the Shetl Stories and Memories special collection by Michael and Inna Rogatchi has been published by the Library and The Rogatchi Foundation.
In commemoration of the 95th anniversary of an outstanding writer and friend of the Rogatchi family late Grigory Kanovich ( 1929, Lithuania – 2023, Israel ) and marking the European Days of Jewish Culture 2024, with its designated theme Family, the Rogatchi Foundation has donated a 25-piece special art collection Shtetl Songs to the Grigory Kanovich Public Library of the Jonava Municipality District, Lithuania.
The collection consists of Michael Rogatchi’s 15-piece Shtetl Stories collection and Inna Rogatchi’s 11-piece Shtetl Memories series and includes both original works by both artists and exclusive museum prints of their works produced for the project specifically.
The Rogatchi Foundation has also donated to the Grigory Kanovich Public Jonava Library licensing rights for the images of the artworks in the donated collection in support of the Library cultural and educational projects.
All works by both Michael and Inna Rogatchi visit the theme of Jewish heritage, focusing on reminiscences to shtetl. The theme is well-known to both artists due to their respective families’ stories and origins. Inna and Michael Rogatchi both tell about it in their introductions to the collection in the Shtetl Songs art catalogue which has been published for the occasion of the donation of the collection and its inaugural exhibition at the Grigory Kanovich Public Library in Jonava, Lithuania.
15 artworks by Michael Rogatchi represents the artist’s well-known series on various themes of Jewish history and heritage, including his Shtetl Stories, Jewish Melody, Psalms Country, Daily Miracle and In the Mirror of the Shoah. 11 works by Inna Rogatchi are from the artist’s Songs of Our Souls and Shtetl Memories series.
The entire collection has been donated by the artists and their The Rogatchi Foundation to the Grigory Kanovich Public Library of the Jonava Municipality in Lithuania at the special ceremony on September 12th, 2024. The ceremony was part of the extensive program of the annual European Days of Jewish Culture, which has FAMILY as the theme in 2024.
Michael Rogatchi is touring his exhibition at the inauguration for the Israeli Ambassador to Lithuania H.E. Hadas Wittenberg Silberstein and the Embassy delegation. September 2024. (C) The Rogatchi Foundation Archive.
The Rogatchi Foundation also licensed all images of the donated collection to the Library with the purpose of the ongoing support of their wide and versatile educational and cultural activities.
The 25-piece Shtetl Stories and Memories collection will be exhibited in the Library in Joanav until the end of November 2024, after which the exhibition will travel throughout Lithuania from 2025 onward. After its tour, the Rogatchi Collection will return to the Jonava Library as part of the Library Permanent Art Collection.
In September 2024, Michael Rogatchi conducted an IMAGINATION master-class during a series of multi-disciplinary events of The Rogatchi Foundation in Lithuania.
Michael Rogatchi leads his master-class in Jonava, Lithuania. September 2024. (C) The Rogatchi Foundation archive.
The artist’s master-class was conducted at the Grigory Kanovich Public Library in Jonava, Lithuania. His students become 15-17-year old students of the Jonava schools.
Michael Rogatchi conducts his master-class in Jonava, Lithuania. September 2024. (C) The Rogatchi Foundation Archive.
During a very engaging master-class, the artist spoke about the crucial role of imagination in the process of visual art and its practical application, referred to mutual influence of different arts to the process and especially the role of music in the process of creation, and taught his students special details during practical application of creating new artworks.
Michael Rogatchi with his students after the artist’s master-class in Jonava, Lithuania. September 2024. (C) The Rogatchi Foundation.
Due to a strong public demand, the master-classes of Michael will continue with and via the Foundation Lithuanian partners in a near future.
Michael Rogatchi (C). The Wind of Sorrow. POST-HARMONY. Pencil on cotton paper. 2024.
Now it is almost a year since the shocking morning of October 7th, 2023, the day on which all the Jews in Israel and world-wide were supposed to celebrate the Simchat Torah, the uplifting celebration rounding the High Holidays in 2023.
Since that morning, we all have been living in a new reality, a painful, dramatic, tragic and shocking one. The reality which we did not live through before. The reality which resembles to me the reality in which our parents and grandparents lived, the one of the Shoah and post-Shoah, when innocent people of all ages and in all conditions were attacked in unimaginably cruel ways for a sole reason of being Jewish. I do recognise many differences in circumstances of the annihilation of Jews by the Nazis in the 1940s and attacking the Jews in Israel eighty years later in the 2020s by the Hamas terrorists, but the core of the attacks against innocent people, on their own territory, in their own country, is the same, in my understanding. It is the crime against humanity which is prompted by animalistic racial hatred. Which is indefensible.
The shock caused by the barbaric attacks committed against innocent people in Israel on October 7th, 2023, did not cease for almost a year after the massacre. On the contrary, we are hit by more and more terrible news about more murders, the desperate situation with the hostages, and more suffering all the time in the unprecedentedly difficult for every Jewish person world-wide situation of the unleashed hatred against us. Because of what? Because it has always been there, for all 3 300 years of our people’s existence, and now, the barbarity committed against us on October 7th, 2023 has re-opened the doors which were supposed to be shut down after the Shoah. They were not shut down for good, as we have learned so painfully now.
Michael Rogatchi (C). The Cry of Silence. POST-HARMONY. Pencil on cotton paper. 2024.
What happened on and after October 7th, 2023 in Israel matters to me and my wife essentially. Our family members and many of our friends live in Israel, and we love Eretz Israel whole-heartedly. When people in Israel are threatened, we are alarmed and deeply worried. It is our pain, and it does not go away.
What can we do, each of us, to confront this terror? These thoughts were overwhelming me for a good while, after initial shock, horror and bewilderment caused by the October 7th massacre and following consequences of it.
Each of us reacts to the existential threat of our people and country in its own way, in the way which we are capable of. I am doing it in the way of my art, my language of expression.
The scenes of October 7th and thereafter did evoke the scenes which I witnessed as a child and which never left me. Walking with friends, and also on my own, in outskirts of our Karaganda city in Kazakhstan where our family was exiled after the arrest by the NKVD of my father in his young age just after the end of the Second World War and sending him to GULAG in the place called the Valley of Death, where I was born, and previous brutal liquidation by the NKVD of my Hungarian Jewish grandfather before the war, we founded every now and then in the grass of the Kazakh steppe an odd subjects. Human skulls with holes in it, human bones, detached limbs. Those ‘discoveries’ , always sudden ones among the tall grass, and often many, have never left my mind ever since.
Michael Rogatchi (C). Beyond Tears. POST-HARMONY. Pencil on cotton paper. 2024.
After October 7th, 2023, this backside of my memories came back. What I conveyed in these 36 black and white drawings of the POST-HARMONY collection, is my Kaddish. And it also is my Psalms, my lament to all the victims of the barbarism which has been committed against the innocent people on their own territory, in their own country, their families, their friends, everybody affected by this ongoing horror.
The thing is that the low cowards who attacked our people in Israel on October 7th, 2023, and those apologists who are permeating vile racial hatred to blossom in the XXI century, do not know, nor do they understand us, Jews. They do not have a clue of our history which can be also expressed as a history of resilience. The resilience of humanity, kindness, help and resolve. Resolve to live and to prevail over the darkest circumstances. As my people always did, as we are still doing, and as we always will do.
Throughout our mourning, we also live in resolve. Through our Kaddish, we also are resilient and committed to life, light and loving memory.
“Chazak! Chazak! Venichazeik!”, “Be Strong! Be Strong! And may we be strengthened!” – is pronounced loudly in our synagogues at the end of the reading of each of the five books of the Torah at our liturgies throughout the circle of a Jewish year. Every year. Three thousand and three hundred years and counting. This is my favourite line from our Book. The book of life, not death. The book of light, not darkness. The book of good, not evil. This disposition to life has made us who we are. This disposition to life has made us strong. That’s how we endured unimaginable trials.
Michael Rogatchi (C). Gearing Up. POST-HARMONY. Pencil on cotton paper. 2024.
And this what will keep us going in this gloomy, difficult current reality of post-October 7th, amidst our ongoing tragedy, longing for so many innocent lives lost, witnessing and going through so much suffering around us and within every one of us.
How to live in all this, which is Post-Harmony? Post-Normality? Post-Mercifulness?
I have no other recipe of survival in this pulsating turmoil of the XXI century than our ‘Chazak!’ attitude, which has been proved right by the entire history of our people.
