"Hear, O Israel . . ."

Never before had the workmen at Barillet's--the leading stained-glass studio of Paris--known anyone quite like the intense, wild-haired American artist who had come to them in 1958. Abraham Rattner, 65, was embarked on the most ambitious project of his life, and he seemed unable to tear himself away from it for a minute. He pored over Jewish holy books for inspiration, spent each day at Barillet's rejecting and selecting pieces of glass, watching every move the artisans made as they went about their centuries-old task. The result was worth the effort: a majestic stained-glass window that is to be dedicated after Yom Kippur in the New Synagogue in the heart of Chicago's Loop (see color).

The congregation of the New Synagogue could not have found a man more fitted for the commission, for though Rattner is not an orthodox believer, his Jewish heritage and faith are often the fire behind his art. Born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., the son of a moneyless baker who had fled from Russia in the 1880s, young Rattner gathered bits of coal along the railroad tracks to heat his parents' home, took whatever odd jobs came along. But what he remembers most vividly about the Poughkeepsie of his youth was the penalty of being Jewish. Only after a kindhearted Irish cop got him boxing lessons was Rattner free of bloody noses.

He started painting in earnest after World War I, when he settled in the French village of Giverny on the Seine. There he would spend hours watching his ancient neighbor Claude Monet paint his lily pond. He went to Chartres and was overwhelmed by the cathedral windows, in Paris became the friend of Picasso, Miro and Braque, before returning to the U.S. for good in 1939. He passed through an impressionist phase, dabbled in cubism. But the rise of Hitler convinced him that any art not primarily concerned with moral and spiritual issues was not for him.

Even now, Rattner speaks with bitterness in his special idiom of the "art burlesque stage of today the dehumanized designs that will "freeze one out of his livingness." His own canvases are often battlefields of hope and despair, evil and salvation--elongated figures imbedded in chunks of burning colors. By comparison, his window at first glance seems almost coldly abstract, but it is in fact a work of passion.

Each color has its meaning inspired in part by the Bible: green for youth, violet for age and wisdom, gold for prophecy. And the window itself is an intricate design of symbols whirring through the cosmos. To the left are the glowing symbols of the Eternal Light, the Flames of the Burning Bush, and the twelve tribes of Israel. In the center is the Tree of Life crowned by the seven branches of the Light of God. The Jewish symbol of the palm becomes a kind of ladder made up of the Hebrew character "shin," the first letter in one of the words for God. The third panel contains the Star of David and a sun surrounded by seven golden balls representing the seven days of Creation. Finally, in slightly distorted Hebrew letters that run along the bottom, is the holy declaration of the Shema: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One."

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