BOGEN, ALEXANDER

BOGEN, ALEXANDER (1916– ), Israel artist. Bogen was born in Poland and during his youth studied painting and sculpture at the Faculty of Art in the University of Vilna. Bogen fled to Russia as the Nazis advanced in 1941. Captured near Minsk, he was taken back to the Vilna ghetto, escaped, but returned to organize resistance. He was a commander of a partisan group in a forest in Belarus and helped some 300 young Jews escape and join the partisans. During the war he made drawings of the partisans, now displayed at the Ghetto Fighters' House Museum and Yad Vashem Museum. After the war, he returned to Vilna, and was appointed art professor in Lodz and Warsaw. In 1951, he immigrated to Israel and established an art school in Tel Aviv. He recovered some of the drawings he had made in the ghetto and the forests. His late works were in many ways reminiscent of his war paintings. (Shaked Gilboa (2nd ed.)