New Wiki: Shalom Moskovitz

Meet Shalom Moskovitz.

I edit wikipedia entries if I’m already readying and see that I can add something of value. Often this is additional citations or interlinks. I’m motivated to create new articles only where I feel a sense of missing collective knowledge.

Recently I searched for the name of an artist whom I thought of as well known and certainly would have a wiki in English for me to learn more about them. They DNE. (An extensive wikipedia entry in Hebrew already existed). This instigated an itch to compose a wiki from scratch.

Shalom of Safed. “Scenes from the Book of Ruth”. 1955-60.
The Jewish Museum (New York).

Meet Shalom Moskovitz (also known in English as Shalom of Safed), an Israeli visual artist who didn’t paint (in a formal sense) until he was 55. He did not acquire great fame (a google trends check results in “Hmm, your search doesn't have enough data to show here.”)

Writing a wiki from a blank template reminds one that most people do not have independent, English language sources to cite about them. Did they exist at all if no source composed in the present lingua franca says so?

Thankfully, Moskovitz was interesting enough that Elie Weisel had him illustrate a book in the seventies. MoMA keeps an artwork of his buried somewhere in a warehouse in its archives. With these sources at the ready, Sholem, (if I write your wiki I reserve the right to call you by your first name), you now have a succinct, if somewhat impersonal, interlinked and well cited, wiki.