By Darcy Grabenstein
As you approach Ari Goldberger’s Margate home, you’re greeted by skeletons and spooky decorations in progress. Preparations for his annual over-the-top lawn display, which he has dubbed Margate Mischief Night — and his epic, invite-only, erev-Halloween party (this year’s theme is “Saturday Fright Live”) — are in full swing, even though it’s just past Labor Day.
When Goldberger takes on a project, he is all in. That’s why he’s spending around eight hours a day — in addition to working as a domain name attorney — tracking down paintings by his grandfather, Leon Lefkowitz (Lewkowicz). These paintings, like his own family members, became victims of the Holocaust. “It’s a big project for me,” Goldberger said.
Items related to both projects fill his living room-turned-office. On the floor, large cardboard boxes are piled high, containing effects that will transform his spacious house into a haunted house. And strewn across a 6-foot folding table are photographs, documents and binders of memorabilia, including letters and poems that his mother, Ruth, managed to save. “I’ve always been a collector — comic books, magazines,” Goldberger said.
The son of a rabbi, Goldberger’s grandfather was born in a Polish shtetl but left the village life for Krakow. Leon Lefkowitz did not want to follow in his father’s footsteps; he wanted to be an artist, and in Krakow, he studied at the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts. By the 1930s, Goldberger said his grandfather was exhibiting widely, becoming known for his portraits of Jewish children, wanderers and exiles. One of Lefkowitz’s paintings, of his wife in a nun’s habit, stumps Goldberger. “I’m not sure why my grandfather, the son of a rabbi, painted his wife, Leonora, as a nun.”
It was these intimate portraits — of the same people targeted by the Nazis — that Lefkowitz would later use to bribe Nazi guards as they escaped to Russia. “He painted Jews and Gypsies [Romas], seeing a common thread in their homeless existence, never being accepted into the societies where they lived,” Goldberger said. “The faces in his paintings foresaw what was coming. The irony is that when he escaped to the Russian side, the victims he had painted aided him when he became a victim himself.”
Lefkowitz’s fame was short-lived. In the fall of 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, he and his older daughter, Hanka, fled to the Soviet-controlled side of Poland. “When the Germans came, he said he wasn’t going to wear the Jewish star,” Goldberger said. When the Nazis invaded in 1941, father and daughter escaped further into the Soviet Union; they ended up in forced labor camps in Chemkent, Kazakhstan, living in terrible conditions. Even in exile, Lefkowitz continued to paint, producing haunting portraits.
His wife, Leonora, stayed behind with daughter Ruth (Goldberger’s mother), who was too young to make the treacherous trip. Leonora was murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp.
It wasn’t until 1950 that Leon and Hanka, not allowed to leave the Soviet Union, discovered that Ruth had survived the war. Just as Leon and Ruth reestablished contact through letters, he died suddenly while at work. In 1978, Goldberger’s mother traveled to the Soviet Union, reuniting the two separated siblings after 37 years.
Goldberger’s father, Adam, is also a Holocaust survivor. Living in Krakow, 15-year-old Adam was among 20 Jewish mechanics the Gestapo kept as prisoners to work on German vehicles. Near the end of the war, Adam was driving a jeep for the Gestapo. When they stopped for the night, he managed to drain the radiator while the Germans slept. He then convinced them he had to walk into town to get water for the radiator, using that opportunity to escape. Goldberger helped his father edit a book about his experiences, “Prisoner of the Gestapo: How I Survived the Holocaust.” Ruth and Adam married, immigrated to Israel and then to the U.S. in 1958, where Adam parlayed his mechanical prowess into a career as a truck mechanic and later as a foreman for a trucking company, and where Ari and his sister, Leora, were born.
Today, Lefkowitz’s paintings hang in national museums in Krakow and Warsaw. In 1990, after Goldberger’s aunt died, one of her friends brought three of Lefkowitz’s paintings to the U.S. That inspired Goldberger and his father to travel six years later to Krakow, where they saw the paintings on display and cataloged about 50 additional paintings. Goldberger estimates that at least 30 to 40 paintings are still on display in Polish museums. But many remain unaccounted for. “Like the Roma themselves,” Goldberger said, “these paintings are like nomads with no real home.”
To date, Goldberger has 36 of his grandfather’s paintings in his Cherry Hill home. (Goldberger primarily lives in Margate but spends part of the year in Cherry Hill.)
He prefers not to disclose how much he has paid for any of the works, reluctant to put a price tag on these family and artistic treasures. “I participate in many auctions,” he said. “I’m always the winner.” He has launched a website, leonlefkowitz.com, to aid in his search.
Goldberger’s “Referred Pain” project includes creating a documentary series and companion book, “Second Story,” weaving together his grandfather’s paintings, his mother’s poetry, his aunt’s letters, his father’s photographs and his own perspective as a second-generation survivor. He describes it as both a personal and historical journey, illustrating how memory, art and trauma are carried across generations.
Goldberger lost his sister to cancer in 2009. “She was always into horror movies,” he said. And so, after COVID, he began holding his annual Halloween party. As with his current project of tracking down his grandfather’s paintings, Goldberger makes it his mission to memorialize his departed relatives.
“The paintings have survived to tell the story of ‘never again’ and warn the world what could happen if we forget the past,” Goldberger said. “This is my legacy.”
Darcy Grabenstein is a freelance writer.