The Columbia Paper

HUDSON–Photographer Jacob Elbaz’s gallery at 711 Warren Street displays Mr. Elbaz’s photographs, along with paintings, drawings and photographs by a variety of artists in a variety of styles. The gallery is part of the Three Rivers Art Project, a not-for-profit corporation Mr. Elbaz started in 2015 for the purpose of providing Middle Eastern artists with funds, supplies and resources, promoting their artwork and fostering opportunities for them to meet American artists, art collectors, and arts representatives. It has three branches: Sde Nehemiah in northern Israel, 77 Mercer Street in Manhattan, and Warren Street.

Mr. Elbaz, a dual citizen of Israel and Canada and a permanent resident of the United States, was born in Morocco in 1945 and moved to Israel when he was about 8. There, he spent most of his youth on Kibbutz Sde Nehemiah, where three rivers meet. Dyslexia made reading difficult for him. But his first girlfriend’s father was a photographer and awakened in him an interest in photography.

Shortly after completing his compulsory military service as a paratrooper, Mr. Elbaz bought a camera and took pictures as an amateur. “I taught myself. I never studied photography or art in an institutionalized way,” he says in a book about his pictures. Read more…

SOCIETIES’ TREATMENT of their unfortunates is an old and usually sad story. In 1972 TV reporter Geraldo Rivera dealt with this in a shocking report on conditions in Staten Island’s Willowbrook State School, which housed children with intellectual disabilities. As Mr. Rivera and others reported, its residents were housed in filthy conditions and sometimes subjected to physical and sexual abuse.

New York State’s earliest attempt (as a state) to care for its poor and mentally ill came via a 1784 law mandating that each town elect two overseers of the poor to distribute money to the needy. Subsequently, an 1824 law attempted to promote more regulated humane treatment of the state’s unfortunates. County Boards of Supervisors had to purchase land on which to construct tax funded poorhouses. From a contemporary perspective, several of the law’s provisions, including use of solitary confinement to deal with difficult inmates, would be quite controversial. Also, although inmates were denied voice in the decision, they could be farmed out to private, outside employers. The employers had to give suitable support for such persons. This was not slavery, but it was arguably close to it.

The county’s first poorhouse, a part of which was a farm, was established in 1830 in Ghent. In 1857 the racially segregated facility was the subject of a comprehensive report which noted that it consisted of a brick main building and some two-story wooden ones, all unventilated. Paupers occupied 18 rooms of the main house, which was warmed by stoves. The basements were occupied as kitchens, etc. Also, a 204-acre farm, yielding an annual revenue of $1,400 was connected with the almshouse. Read more…