Luca Wax nee Filar

Luca (Leah) Wax nee Filar was a member of the Revisionist Movement, an Irgun fighter, an Israeli artist and sculptor and a recipient of the 'Yakir Award' of the city of Tel-Aviv-Yafo. Luca was born in 1912 in Ciechanow, Poland, to Rivka and Yosef Cahana. She studied psychology in Warsaw where she met her husband, Yisrael Wax, who was the secretary of Ze'ev Jabotinsky. There was a woodcut of the book-cover of "Shimshon" written by Jabotinsky, which was translated to Yiddish by Yisrael Wax, in Luca's library. They married in 1934 and one month later moved to Israel. They lived in Tel-Aviv on Shenkin Street #74, where their son, Avraham Uzi was born (1937). Close to the outbreak of WWII Luca and Avraham, their two year old son, went to Lodz, Poland to visit her parents. On September 1, 1939, at the time that the German troops invaded Poland, Luca succeeded to return to Israel, because of the Palestinian (British) passport in her possession. She and her son sailed on the last ship that left the shores of Poland to Israel. Her parents, sister and brother and most of her family were murdered in the Holocaust. In 1944, when Menachem Begin, commander of the Irgun, declared a return to an armed struggle against the British Mandate, the Wax family's apartment in Tel Aviv became a hiding place for Irgun members. It was in their house that the meeting between Menachem Begin and Moshe Sneh, the Head of the Haganah's National Headquarters took place. The meeting was the initiative of Ben-Gurion, hoping to convince Begin to stop the Irgun activities against the British rule. The meeting was not successful. Apart from the meeting with Sneh, many other meetings, with Jews and non- Jews, took place in their house, including with: Natan Yellin-Mor (a founder of the Lohamei Herut Israel – Lehi, "Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), Yitzchak Greenbaum (a member of the board of the Jewish Agency and later the Minister of Interior), Jorge Garcia Granados and members of the UN Special Committee on the Question of Palestine (UNSCOP) and foreign journalists. In addition to these meetings, the family's mail box functioned also as a depository for the Irgun headquarters. The letters were collected, almost daily, by Chaim Landau (the head of the staff) when he passed by. To differentiate the envelopes from mail for the family, the letters for the Irgun were marked with a small dot on the side. When asked if she was not afraid of being arrested, Luca Wax replied that after losing her whole family in the Holocaust, she stopped being afraid. After her husband passed away in 1991, Luca began to study and to paint and sculpt. Her sculptures depict memories of her childhood and youth in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. She said that she wanted to preserve the image of the Jews and their world that was destroyed (shtetl): "their way of life, their professions-tailor, baker, milkman, shoe-maker -the torah scholars, Jews praying, women lighting the Shabbat candles, match-makers and other Jewish figures." Most of her sculptures are ceramic and bronze and she mostly painted in oils. In 1998 she was awarded the 'Yakir Award' of the city of Tel-Aviv-Yafo. She also received the Begin Prize for 2001 in recognition of her activities in the Underground against the British rule, her works of art and her commemoration of those murdered in the Holocaust in her works. On the occasion of her 100th birthday, surrounded by friends and acquaintances she said, "I am a 2000 year old Jewess!" (This sentence was the title of one of her exhibitions). Luca Wax passed away in October 2013 at the age of 101. Read more