The National Campaign

Paintings with a Jewish Theme by Drew Kopf:

Jewish Laws and Customs have been important to me from a very young age. Some of my earliest memories are of the bearded Rabbi Mandel, my first grade teacher at HILI (the Hebrew Institute of Long Island, in Far Rockaway, NY, an all day academy, when he tried to make me feel welcome as a late addition to the class, by seating royally on my desk chair, and hooking my feet through the desk legs and lulling me around the class room and leading the other children in cheering me as their new class mate. I became familiar with the Jewish Holidays and the Sabbath and its foods and a certain gestalt feeling that ties the many parts of the Jewish way of life so special. I eventually left the in depth religious training in favor of public school, until I reconnected in Bar Mitzvah training classes and the mandatory Hebrew School that went with it, and became enamored with the study of the Torah, the bible, with the commentaries of the ancients. That passion led me to Yeshiva University High School for Boys of Manhattan, to which I transferred in my sophomore year of high school and where I stayed through my undergraduate studies as well. I had, at one time, planned to dedicate my life to bringing Jewish Content Theatre to the American Jewish Community. I still embrace that dream with plans to breath life into a not-for-profit organization, The Jewish Star Theater, Inc., which is currently in a state of suspended animation.

When I began painting in earnest after a trip to Paris, France in 2001, things Jewish became a frequent topic for me. It became my custom to create paintings for the children of family members and friends who were becoming Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah. It is my goal to create a complete series of such paintings and to make them available as gifts for children reaching that milestone of life.