Rachel Wischnitzer

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Rachel Bernstein Wischnitzer (April 14, 1885 – November 20, 1989) was a Russian-born architect and art historian. She came from a middle-class Jewish family in Minsk and later lived in Warsaw. From a young age she learned Hebrew and showed interest in Jewish history and culture, as well as math and the sciences. She spoke several languages and studied at schools in several cities.

Wischnitzer studied at the University of Heidelberg in 1902–1903, then studied architecture in Brussels and at the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris, where she graduated in 1907 as one of the first women to earn a degree in architecture. She also studied art history in Munich in 1909–1910. After returning to Russia, she published scholarly writings on Jewish art, focusing on illuminated medieval Hebrew manuscripts in St. Petersburg.

In 1912 she married Mark Wischnitzer, a sociologist and historian who helped edit the Russian edition of the Jewish Encyclopedia. Her early writings on synagogue architecture and ceremonial objects appeared there. The couple moved to Berlin in the 1920s and launched the Hebrew and Yiddish illustrated journal Rimon–Milgroim, six issues published from 1922 to 1924, with Mark as general editor and Rachel as artistic editor.

Wischnitzer also served as art and architecture editor of Encyclopaedia Judaica from 1928 to 1934 and worked with the Jewish Museum Berlin from 1928 to 1938. She and Mark, along with their son Leonard (born 1924), fled Nazi Germany in 1938, moving first to Paris and then to the United States in 1940 (Mark joined them in 1941).

In New York, Wischnitzer returned to formal study at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and earned a master’s degree in 1944. She was a research fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Later she taught at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University from 1956 until she retired in 1968. She is remembered as one of the most important Jewish art critics of her century. Rachel Wischnitzer died on November 20, 1989, at the age of 104.