Henoch Enters while Mine says the Hallel Prayers with Two Young Girls, 1876

Oil on cardboard (Grisalle)
Collection of the HUC Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA
from the Exhibition Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: Jewish Identity in Nineteenth Century Art,
YU Museum, Jan. 31 - August 31, 2001.

This painting is one of several illustrations Oppenheim created for the story Raaf's Mine, written by Salomon Hermann Mosenthal, a popular writer and author of numerous plays and opera librettos. The story was serialized in the popular magazine Uber Land und Meer between 1876-77 as part of a series called "Stories from Jewish Family Life," all illustrated with Oppenheim's grisailles.

Appearing in a secular publication, the stories were probably intended for both a gentile and Jewish audience. Oppenheim's illustration contains almost no clue that this is a Jewish household, and the only visual evidence lies in is the Hebrew letters over the door.[1] Regardless of their secularity, Oppenheim's Mosenthal illustrations are very close in tone and message to the Jewish lifecycle paintings series Scenes from Traditional Jewish Family Life. In keeping with that series, the scene in this particular painting is portrayed with family warmth and piety.[2] The woman in the picture is endowed with grace and dignity and is portrayed as the central figure in the family unit who presides over daily life and its ritual observances.