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Known as the father of Israeli art, the Lithuanian-born Boris Schatz adopted Jerusalem as his home in 1906 at the age of 40. Though he would go on to found the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts now known by the decidedly more highbrow name, the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Schatz's life traversed a long and winding road from the bitter winters of Lithuania to the community of aesthetes in a Jerusalem undergoing dramatic changes.

Born to an Orthodox Jewish family marked by rabbinic lineage, the young Schatz, then known as Shlomo Zalman Dov Baruch, was sent to yeshiva in Vilna in the hopes that he would keep up the clan's illustrious traditional profession. But the yeshiva life was not for him, and Schatz soon left that world for the art world, studying painting and sculpture, first in Vilna and later in Warsaw. Like a moth attracted to the light, Schatz was soon drawn to Paris, where he studied with the sentimentalist Russian sculptor Mark Antokolski and at the Cormon Academy, where he studied painting.

Schatz's reputation rapidly spread, and he was soon hired to be the court sculptor in Bulgaria, where he founded his first art school, the Royal Academy of Art in Sofia. In Bulgaria, Schatz' marriage dissolved, and his interest in Israel grew. In 1903, Schatz met Theodor Herzl and was sold on the idea of creating a Jewish art school to be named after the first artist mentioned in the Bible, an initiative which he soon presented to the Zionist leadership of the time.

In 1906, Schatz realized this dream, opening the Bezalel School in Jerusalem. Though at first the school contained only a fabric and crafts department, it soon expanded to include - among other disciplines - silver design, brass work and lithographs. Although the Bezalel School has become a bastion of contemporary art, Schatz's own work was more traditional, based on the styles he learned in Europe, and imbued with Jewish themes.

Schatz began promoting the school throughout the world in 1909 and was generally received warmly. Schatz's active love affair with pre-Mandate Jerusalem was not to last, however. The ruling Turks closed down the Bezalel School during World War I, Schatz himself arrested and deported to Syria. He would later return to live on the Sea of Galilee, where he wrote a long-form utopian essay called The Rebuilt Jerusalem (subtitled A Daydream), imagining himself transported to the Holy City in 2018 and being shown around town by the Bezalel School's namesake.

After the war, Schatz returned to Jerusalem and the school re-opened, but to a great extent, he was forced to rebuild the institution from scratch. Indeed, he passed away in 1932 in Colorado while on a fundraising trip, with Bezalel having been closed due to financial difficulties for three years (it would reopen three years folowing his death). Today, Schatz's grave sits atop the Mt. of Olives, and the school he founded remains one of Jerusalem's most vibrant cultural institutions, its historic city center campus at the corner of a street bearing his name.