At the Rebbe's Tisch– Siegmund Forst

 "The Messiah Crossing"

Siegmund Forst, illustrator was born 1904 in Vienna, Austria. Forst began his artistic career in commercial package design and advertising along with Ketubbot, bookplates, B'nai Brith honor scrolls and private commissions which he illuminated with self-made ink and gold lettering. After immigrating to America in 1939, Forst gravitated to the Jewish publishing world where he illustrated Jewish texts and American-Jewish children's books. Forst's art became a powerful cultural transmitter of Jewish values intertwined with modern ideals and had a strong influence on the Jewish visual arts of his time.

 

Siegmund Forst introduces his illustrated Haggadah in the following way: "This . . . old Jewish book . . . speaks of sorrow and hope . . . It appears in contemporary dress, illustrated by one who himself has suffered the flames and escaped them" (1941).

The central Jewish cultural conflict in these drawings lies between the Jewish socialist revolutionary and his elderly ultra-orthodox Eastern European forebearers.
In the 1958 version, the wise old man lives by his faith in God and the Torah but his age and his defensive posture reflect his threatened status in a changing world. He looks worriedly to Heaven for salvation. The wicked bespectacled, self-hating intellectual tramples the Torah displaying an adolescent resentment against the old, dying order. The simpleton dressed in a business suit and the child without questions wearing his American baseball cap provide an attentive audience.