Portraits That Are More Than Art

Menachem Posner

Dov Rosenfeld is what you would term a Lubavitch-friendly Litvak. His dining room wall sports photographs of various gedolim, including his mentor, Rav Henoch Leibowitz, Rosh Yeshivah of Yeshivah Chafetz Chaim in Brooklyn. They are all dwarfed, however, by a strikingly realistic painting of the Alter Rebbe. How did this come to happen?

Rosenfeld has been learning at Kollel Beth Yossef, a Chabad affiliated kollel in Montreal, saw there a beautiful painting of the Alter Rebbe hanging on the wall.

“Although I had never studied the Alter Rebbe’s chassidus until then, there was something about that painting that struck me,” he said. “Every time I would walk by the painting, I felt like I just wanted to own it one day.”

Unbeknownst to him, the painting was produced by Moshe Cohen of Moiko Art, a company that specializes in commissioning highly skilled overseas artists to hand-paint detailed custom artwork from photographs.

By divine providence, it just so happened that Cohen, who learns regularly at the Kollel after work, was Rosenfeld’s chavrusah, and the painting was for sale.

“One day I came at the painting was gone.” Rosenfeld continued. “I panicked. I immediately asked Moshe what happened to the painting, ‘my’ Alter Rebbe painting. Moshe told me that there was someone who was thinking of buying it, and he had taken it down to show it to him. Until that moment I had no idea that the painting I had been eying was produced by my Tanya chavrusah.

“Although I am not a rich man, nor a Lubavitcher chassid, I pulled out the cash needed, and purchased the picture on the spot. There is just something special…

“Now it hangs in my dining room. I placed in opposite my own seat. Since I work in my dining room, I face the Alter Rebbe for most of my day.”

Rabbi Maimon Pinto, Rosh Kollel of Beth Yossef, says that there were other times when the paintings of the Rabbeim at the Kollel struck people very deeply. “There was an Israeli man named Oren who had come to one of our events. He walked in, and I could tell that he was emotional. I asked him if everything was okay. He replied that he had just been talking to his wife about how they wanted a picture of the Rebbe for their home, and his wife insisted on black and white. As he walked into the Kollel, he saw a black and white painting of the Rebbe. In his eyes, it was Hashem’s immediate response to his prayers.” Needless to say, the painting now hangs in Oren’s house.

Although Moiko Art specializes in paintings of the Rebbe and other gedolim, Cohen is quick to point out that oil on canvas often has the same effect for others as well. “There is a woman in our community who had lost her father at a very young age. All she had was a small, grainy, black and white picture of her father taken before she even remembers. We were able to work with my artist to reconstruct the man’s coloring, give it a meaningful background, and make a painting many times larger than the original. When I brought it over to her house and hung it on the wall, she was in tears. It was like she was seeing her father for the first time in living memory.”

According to Cohen, her story is not unique. In the years that he has been producing paintings, he has seen many people touched the same way. He explains that in addition to the old-world feeling of a hand-crafted masterpiece, oil painting has the advantage of allowing the artist to make exactly what the purchaser wants from scratch, fitting to the décor of the customer’s home or Chabad house.

“There is a chassidisher Yid in our community whose father had passed away, and he was looking for a fitting way to preserve his memory. We met at a simchah and he showed me a small picture taken at his own wedding many years prior. I sent it to an artist, and she sent back a full sized painting. It was so realistic, you could literally see every hair on the shtreimel. He has since commissioned identical paintings for his brothers.

As a strong supporter of Shluchim, with a long history of catering to Shluchim’s needs, Moiko Art has announced that it will be offering a 20% discount on all original oil paintings for Chabad houses. Aside from original made-to-order paintings, Cohen says that he also has a wide array of giclée prints available including those displayed on his website, moikoart.com.