The Four Questions from The Haggadah. Łódź, 1935. Source: Irvin Ungar

The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City will host a special lecture on the Polish-Jewish artist Arthur Szyk and his illustrated Haggadah, one of Szyk’s masterworks, by the world’s leading expert on his work.

The online talk, on Monday, April 8 at 7 pm, will be given by Szyk scholar Irvin Ungar and will explore “how and why Szyk is the artist of and for the Jewish people, and the ways his art and spirit remain eternal in the service of mankind,” according to the museum’s website.

Today, Szyk is perhaps best known for his The Haggadah, an “illuminated manuscript” which tells the story of the Passover Seder in a series of watercolor illustrations. It was thoroughly anti-Nazi, linking the oppression of Jews in Nazi Germany with the enslavement of Jews in Egypt and, ultimately, their Exodus.

Szyk’s Haggadah was one of the most expensive new books in the world upon publication in 1940, according to Ungar. The Times of London deemed it “worthy of being considered among the most beautiful of books ever produced by the hand of man.”

The talk will also explore how Szyk saw Hitler as the new Pharaoh and the Nazis as the new Egyptians who had come to annihilate his people, using an ancient text to deliver a modern message about persecution and freedom.

Written between 1934-1936 in the shadow of Hitler’s Germany, Szyk’s remarkably detailed visuals and impeccable Hebrew calligraphy combined to create a “visual commentary [calling] for heroism and emigration of Europe’s Jews to Palestine,” the site adds.

Born in 1894 in the city of Łódź during the Russian Partition of Poland, Szyk lived through a violent and epochal moment in history — an age of revolution, world war, and genocide — though his life ended prematurely in 1951. His works, from sketches of the Boxer Rebellion he drew at the age of six to his depiction of Hitler as Pharaoh — and later, Hitler as Anti-Christ — were expressive commentaries on troubled times.

After Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Szyk fled to England and then America, where he earned a reputation as a “soldier in art” for portraying the Nazis and Axis leaders as primal mad men and using irradiating imagery to alert the world to the plight of the Jewish people under Nazi occupation, an issue that affected him personally. In 1940, his mother, Eugenia, was murdered in the Chełmno extermination camp, just 30 miles from the city in which he grew up. Many more of his relatives — and his wife’s — were murdered during the Holocaust.