Richard Edelman, a local sculptor with an international profile, is to receive an award that has previously been granted to Elie Wiesel, Chaim Potok and Leonard Bernstein.
The Frank L. Weil Award for the Advancement of Jewish Culture in North America has not been granted since 1992, but the New York-based JCC Association has reinitiated the award for 2016. Edelman is to be granted the award at the organization’s North America Biennial in Baltimore in May.
“He works at a very high level,” noted Marla Cohen, spokeswoman for the JCC Association, the continental umbrella organization for the Jewish community center movement. A selection committee appreciated that “he worked both abstractly and figuratively,” she said.
Edelman, 67, has his work in a variety of public spaces, including in Poland, where his “Shofar Krakow” looms high as a 17-foot-tall stainless steel piece that naturally amplifies sound when a shofar is blown into it. The piece was installed in Krakow, Poland last year, during a Milwaukee Jewish Federation mission.
Edelman, of Fox Point, has created two amplifying shofars, with the first one installed at Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun of River Hills several years ago. The second one was Shofar Krakow.
He theorizes his engineering background may have helped him come up with the idea for a naturally amplifying sculpture.
“I am an engineer by training,” he said. “I like the idea of functional, mechanical things.”
Cohen said it’s not known why the award was not granted for 24 years – employees who might know are no longer with her organization. But they’ve decided to bring it back, as a nod to the importance of cultural and social aspects of Jewish community centers, she said.
The award was generally granted annually or every other year from 1951 to 1992. Awardees included Jacques Lipschitz, the sculptor, and Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel, the respected theologian and civil rights activist, along with Wiesel, Potok and Bernstein, among others. The Frank L. Weil Awards were established in 1950 in the name of JCC Association’s late leader, who served as president of the Jewish Welfare Board from 1940 to 1950.
“Wisconsinites are blessed to see Richard’s work regularly; whether it is Shofar Maccabi here at the entrance of the JCC or any of the numerous works throughout Milwaukee,” said Mark Shapiro, president and chief executive officer of the Harry and Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center in Whitefish Bay.
Leadership in the local Jewish community has taken an interest in art and in projects close to Edelman’s heart – he cited Shapiro and also Jody Hirsh, Judaic education director at the JCC, where Edelman has participated in the Milwaukee Jewish Artist Laboratory, and Hannah Rosenthal, president and chief executive officer of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation. But Edelman does not see himself as an exclusively Jewish artist. Rather, he seems himself as someone who tells stories through art.
“I do a lot of work that’s secular in nature. I’m not trying to give a particular religious expression,” said Edelman. “It’s storytelling for me. A lot of the stories I choose to tell come from the Bible because those stories interest me.”
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· He shares a birthdate, May 14, 1948, with the State of Israel.
· He founded anti-war publisher Hovey Street Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
· After a career in the steel business as the founder of Essex Trading Company, he became a sculptor about a decade ago.
· He is creating a sculpture for the Edmond J. Safra Science Campus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
· Edelman is a 1970 graduate in engineering and philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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