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Yiddish Book Center, Talk
January 9 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm EST
The Art of Jewish Papercutting with Deborah Ugoretz
Join us for a free virtual talk on Thursday, January 9, 2025 @ 7:00 p.m. ET
Artist Deborah Ugoretz first discovered Jewish papercutting forty-seven years ago. Since then she has worked with textual sources like the Bible, rabbinical teachings, and poetry, converting them into visual language as a way to communicate their profound meaning. “Discovering Jewish papercutting, a folk art that has been practiced for hundreds of years, was pivotal in my life as a Jew and as an artist,” Deborah writes. “These simple creations served the community as signposts of marriages, religious observances, and folk beliefs . . . This is how I innovate while staying grounded in tradition.” In this session, Deborah will briefly present the iconography of papercutting and illustrate how “ordinary folks” created particularly Jewish papercuts. She will show antique papercuts from 18th-century Eastern Europe, Italian Ketubot, and samples of her own work.

Deborah Ugoretz was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In the 1970s, she became fascinated with Jewish papercutting and the art of decorated Jewish marriage contracts, ketubot. She taught herself these forms by studying antique Jewish papercuts and interviewing master papercut artists in New York and Israel. In 1981 Deborah moved to Teaneck, New Jersey, and for eight years was the president of the Teaneck Cultural Arts Coalition, an arts organization that celebrated cultural diversity. The New Jersey State Council on the Arts recognized her as a master papercut artist. She was the co-coordinator of the Artist Beit Midrash, a study group of rabbis, scholars, and artists who create visual interpretations of Jewish texts. Since 2011 she has lived in Brooklyn and has a studio in the harbor neighborhood of Red Hook. In 2024 she became a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Folk Arts, an award that recognizes the contribution of folk artists to their community. For the past ten years she has co-curated the art exhibitions at Yiddish New York, a celebration of Yiddish music, culture and language. She is currently working on creating an eternal light for a congregation in North Carolina.