The Jointnik Behind JDC’s Iconic Logo

Morris Wyszogrod’s connection to JDC spanned continents and decades. I had the privilege of knowing him during the final chapter of his JDC journey, when I met him in 2012 Jerusalem. Morris enjoyed a mutually rewarding partnership with JDC, a relationship that provided him with many opportunities. In return, JDC is indebted to this talented artist for its distinctive logo, created by Morris in 1956.

Morris’s Holocaust memoir, A Brush with Death: An Artist in the Death Camps (State University of New York, 1999) describes his childhood in Warsaw. His family home was filled with music and musicians. He recalls the cacophonous neighborhood where, as the oldest child, he led a gang of siblings and friends. Having dreamt of being an artist since childhood, he was, in 1938, one of a handful of Jewish students to graduate from the Piłsudski School of Graphics.

As a boy, Morris heard from his parents about the lifesaving assistance given to Jewish people by “Joint,” as JDC was commonly known. Born in April 1920, Morris was nineteen years old in 1939 when he was rounded up on the street to join a work detail, from which he escaped later that day. This experience revealed to him the unprecedented cruelty of the German occupier. He soon was helping his maternal uncle bring supplies to JDC-run soup kitchens in the Warsaw ghetto. He remembered when devastating hunger hit, and the misery with which his own family became JDC clients.

Morris’s memoir chronicles his own miraculous survival alongside the loss of almost everything and everyone he knew before. As he writes, “I was an orphan: my parents, my two brothers, and my sister had all been killed by the Germans. My friends, my relatives, my community, even my street, had all vanished.” The bulk of the book recounts his journey through Nazi camps, saved numerous times by his talent. Time and again he was singled out by his captors to create a sign in calligraphic script, or a unique birthday card, or to paint a portrait, among other assignments.

The book ends with a description of Morris’s return to Warsaw, aid received from and subsequent employment by JDC in Warsaw in 1946 and Paris in 1947. Upon his arrival at JDC Headquarters in Paris, Assistant Secretary Melvin Goldstein took him under his wing. Morris wanted to reunite with his uncle in New York and Goldstein shepherded him through the U.S. student visa application process, which necessitated admission to the Pratt Institute, an art and design school in New York. Goldstein made sure that all necessary affidavits were submitted, and that the JDC Emigration Department booked and advanced funds for his ship passage, as noted by his inclusion on a list of departures from Europe on August 10, 1947.

JDC’s New York office followed up on Morris’s case with the United Service for New Americans (USNA) to ensure his continued studies. His success was greeted with a joyous response from his former colleagues in Paris. In a letter to Melvin Goldstein he writes of his reunion in New York with his family, and his frustration that his student visa does not allow him to work.

Studies completed, Morris stayed in New York, where he worked for JDC as a graphic artist. One of the many credits to his name is the JDC logo, which originated in 1956. The logo has changed with the times, but the central elements of a raised three branch candelabrum incorporating “JDC” and standing for Rescue-Relief-Reconstruction (today, Renewal) has remained constant:

After losing his wife Helen, Morris made aliya to Jerusalem in his late 80s, to be near his daughter Dina Zlotogorski and her family. In 2012, I had the privilege to work with Morris on the translation of the catalog of JDC’s Warsaw Office collection held at the Jewish Historical Institute (JHI) in Warsaw. This was in preparation for making that material available on the JDC Archives’ website. Because Morris had worked in JDC’s Warsaw office in 1946, he was not merely doing translation work. The catalog awakened Morris’s memory. He took me on a journey to postwar Warsaw, providing detailed explanations of JDC’s work there.

It is hard for me to believe that when I worked with Morris, he was 92 years old. He was compact and energetic, a practiced raconteur who gave his full attention to whomever he was with. After his death, Morris’s grandchildren described him as telling them ‘Bube-meises,’ simultaneously illustrating these fairy tales on paper napkins. They later realized the basis for these stories was his experiences in the Shoah. Even I found myself included in the circle of receivers: when he told me his personal history, he used scrap paper to produce the kind of picture that reveals its subject after three assured pen strokes.

Morris died ten years ago, in March 2015, a month shy of his 95th birthday. The day before he was hospitalized, he’d spent a few hours having lunch and schmoozing with some of his friends at JDC. His daughter Dina wrote that Passover was a difficult holiday for him, the last holiday that his nuclear family marked together in Poland before they were separated forever. However, she wrote, Passover celebrates “the ultimate victory of faith, courage and fellowship over slavery and death.”

Morris’s artistic talent earned him rare commodities during the Shoah: occasional power in the face of inhuman tyranny, counterfeiting skills to help others, and a pair of boots in place of his clogs, which ultimately saved his life. The fact that the very same hands that created countless works of art for the Nazis also created JDC’s logo is a message of resilience that could hardly be more fitting for this organization.