A fund to support Jewish art, originally set up about 20 years ago, is being resurrected in the community. Known as the Jewish Art Fund, it is housed at the Jewish Community Foundation and is governed by a committee led by Michael Klein.
Klein said Sybil Kahn and her late husband, Norman, were behind the fund’s inception. Norman, before his death in June, also led the charge earlier this year to bring the fund back to life. The fund’s original purpose was two-fold: to purchase Judaic items for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and to bring an exhibit from the Jewish Museum in New York to Kansas City.
Klein, who was also on the original committee, said the fund did purchase one item of Judaica for the Nelson and succeeded in bringing the art exhibit to Kansas City. After that, however, it sat idle.
“Shortly before his death, Norman Kahn wanted to reactivate the fund. So a new committee was put together,” Klein said. “We’ve done a little fundraising to build up a corpus and we would like to finance projects in the Jewish community dealing with art in the the broadest terms.”
Klein said the corpus of the fund is a little more than $25,000. Grants can be made solely from the fund’s income, which isn’t much at this time.
“That’s why they are currently seeking additional donations,” he said. “We hope that as people learn about the fund, that the corpus will grow and so will the income from it.”
The fund has already made a grant to Village Shalom. It funds an art therapist who works with residents on Fridays.
“She uses that week’s Torah portion as inspiration for the art projects. I think it is a wonderful project because it involves art with the intellectual stimulation of that week’s Torah portion in a creative way to bring out the meaning of that week’s portion,” Klein said.
Before he passed away, Norman Kahn personally asked Klein to take over the fund’s leadership responsibilities.
“The whole start of that committee was really Norman and Sybil Kahn, decades ago. It’s one of the examples of Norman and Sybil Kahn promoting Jewish art in the Kansas City community. That committee is one of their legacies, as is the Kansas City Jewish Museum of Contemporary Art,” Klein said.
Klein said the fund would like to become a clearing house for matching funders that “would like to do something with the arts in the Jewish community or Jewish art in the general community.” “We would like the funders to call upon the expertise that people on the committee have to make the donations effective for what the donors would like to see,” Klein said.
For more information about the Jewish Art Fund, contact Beatrice Fine at (913) 327-4618.