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Lionel S. Reiss, U.S. artist, was born in Jaroslav, Galicia, and was taken to the U.S. as a child. He worked as a commercial artist for newspapers, publishers, and a motion picture company. He traveled, making ethnic studies of Jews in the fast-disappearing ghettoes of Europe and published My Models were Jews (1938). He illustrated many books including the English edition of Bialik's poems (1948). He visited North Africa and the Near East including Erez Israel and the fruits of his journey include New Lights and Old Shadows (1954).
Many of his most poignant etchings and drawings, including The Ghetto Gate of Lublin, 1922, and Blessing of the New Moon, 1922, depict life’s hardships along with its sweetness. Within lives of extreme poverty and persecution were the comforting rituals of tradition. His works from his first journeys to the shtetyls of Europe in the 1920s and ’30s appeared in his first portfolio, My Models Were Jews: A Painter’s Pilgrimage to Many Lands, in 1938. In 1971, many of those works and others from New Lights and Old Shadows, appeared in A World at Twilight: A Portrait of the Jewish Communities of Eastern Europe Before the Holocaust by Milton Hindus of Brandeis University.
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