Ljuba Monastirskaja

Ljuba Monastirskaja
Ljuba Monastirskaja circa 1926
Born	(1906-09-25)25 September 1906 Riga, Russian Empire
Died	30 November 1941(1941-11-30) (aged 35) Rumbula

Ljuba Monastirskaja (25 September 1906 – 30 November 1941) was a Latvian textile artist. She was a victim of the Rumbula massacre in 1941.

Biography

Monastirskaja was born into an secular Jewish family. Her father was a merchant who had moved to Riga from Chernihiv, Russian Empire (today Ukraine) to escape a wave of pogroms.

Her upbringing in Riga during the later parts of 1910s was affected by events like World War I. As a teenager, Monastirskaja studied at the Jewish secular school in Riga, where she graduated in 1924. Approximately two years later, in October 1926, she began studies at the Bauhaus School of Art, Design and Architecture in Dessau, where she had teachers such as Josef Albers, Gunta Stölzl, Marcel Breuer and Georg Muche.

Like most other female students at Bauhaus, she was placed at the textile factory. There she could develop her skills with textiles and industrial weaving techniques adapted for mass production, mostly inspired by constructivism. She was photographed during her time at Bauhaus; one well-known photograph shows female students standing on the stairwell inside the Bauhaus building, where she can be seen standing besides Gunta Stölzl and Otti Berger. A few of her creations are still in existence, such as the sample held by the Textile Museum in Tilburg, Netherlands.

Once she had completed her education, Monastirskaja started working for two well known textile producers firstly in Mössingen and then Sagan. A certificate of 18 April 1932 stated that her job responsibilities included the preparation of the artistic designs of “decorative and padding fabrics in formal and technical terms”. Her ambition was to continue to live and work in Germany, but the rise to power of the Nazi's stopped that; she was quickly arrested and deported to Latvia.

A short time after returning to Latvia, she married architect Natan Kirsh in 1934, who also had a Jewish upbringing. Following political unrest in Latvia, she had trouble establishing herself and her career as a textile producer; since she was Russian-speaking and Jewish, she belonged to a minority that was marginalised by the regime in Latvia. Her German educational background was also a disadvantage.

In 1941, once the Nazi's had invaded Latvia, the persecution of Latvian Jews begun. Monastirskaja was placed along with over 40,000 Jews in a specially made ghetto in Riga. Her husband had earlier been moved to Biķernieki.

Death

On 30 November 1941, Monastirskaja, along with 12,000 others, was moved from the ghetto to a forest ten kilometres south of Riga. She was here forced into a mass grave and shot dead, in an atrtocity that would later become known as the Rumbula massacre. This massacre was carried out by the Nazi Einsatzgruppe A. Most of her belongings and artistic works were destroyed or lost.

External links

• Media related to Ljuba Monastirskaja at Wikimedia Commons