Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur

Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur is a painting by Polish-Jewish artist Maurycy Gottlieb in 1878. It depicts Jews in the middle of the Yom Kippur service, on one of the holiest days of the Jewish calendar. Yom Kippur is the Jewish holiday of repentance, a time for Jews to repent for their sins and reflect on their behaviour in the past and the coming year. As Soussloff writes in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, "Yom Kippur is also the occasion in the Jewish year when the dead are solemnly commemorated (in the service called Yizkor), and Gottlieb has injected into this picture several prominent self-memorials." In his book Painting a People, Ezra Mendelsohn confirms this: "Nathan Samuely, who discussed the work with Gottlieb in 1878, does specifically connect it, in his German essay on the artist published in 1885, with Yom Kippur, and informs us that the artist himself had the idea of painting it during the days of repentance preceding this holiday." The painting is composed of glazed (semi-transparent) oil paint. Gottlieb used the technique of impasto (wide, three-dimensional brushstrokes), and physically created patterns from the paint. This contributes to the painting's richness and depth.