In a week when Jews around the world mark Yom Yippur, the Day of Atonement, my featured artist is Michel Fingesten, a creator of bookplates, born in the Habsburg Empire to a Czech-Jewish father and Italian-Jewish mother, whose life followed the tragic course of East European Jews of his generation. Fingesten studied art in Vienna and traveled the globe before settling on the eve of World War I in Berlin. He achieved recognition in Germany for his ex libris mixing erotica with social satire, but fled to Italy in 1935, when the Nazis denounced his work as "degenerate art." Fingesten was sent as a "foreign alien" to an internment camp in the Calabria region in 1940, dying shortly after its liberation in 1943 by Allied forces. Like Marc Chagall, his contemporary, Fingesten viewed Jesus as a prototype of the Suffering Jew and used Crucifixion motifs in ironic ways to symbolize social injustice and systemic violence, as we see in this etching of death taking a figure down from the Cross, holding the numerals of the fateful year, 1939, found on the new Fingesten biosketch page in the Sacred Artists section. (John Kohan)