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Esther Lurie (; 1913 – 14 February 1998) was an Israelis painter.
After studying at theatre set design and drawing in Belgium, and immigrating to Palestine in 1934, Lurie obtained work by painting and exhibiting her art in Tel Aviv. In 1941, while residing with family in Kovno, she was deported to the Kovno ghetto during the German occupation of Lithuania. While imprisoned at the Kovno ghetto, and later the Stutthof and Ľubica concentration camps, she continued to paint and draw art, both under the surveillance of the Germans and clandestinely.
After the war, in 1945, Lurie published reproductions of her artwork in the sketchbook Jewesses in Slavery. Her sketches and watercolors documenting the Holocaust also served as part of the testimony in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.
She is a two-time recipient of the Dizengoff Prize—she received it first in 1938, for The Palestine Orchestra, and again in 1946, for Young Woman with the Yellow Patch.
Lurie was especially inclined to depict musicians and dancers in her artwork. She held an exhibition of her work at the Cosmopolitan Art Gallery in Tel Aviv in 1938. The exhibit included Dancing, a painting which art critics praised and said it highlighted her developing artistic talent. After returning to Belgium to continue her studies, she moved to Kovno to help her sister Mouta and Mouta's son Reuben. She held several art exhibitions in Kovno prior to the German invasion of Lithuania in June 1941, including an exhibition at the Royal Opera House in 1940, where many of her works were bought by local Jewish institutions and the Kovno State Museum.
After receiving special permission to draw in the pottery workshop, Lurie asked Jewish potters to prepare ceramic jars that she could use to secure her artwork. She eventually used the jars to bury more than 200 works of clandestinely drawn art under her sister's house in 1943. When the ghetto was liquidated in July 1944, she was deported to the Stutthof concentration camp and then to the Ľubica camp, where she continued her work documenting life within ghettos. While a prisoner at Stutthof, she was asked by women to secretly draw their portraits in exchange for sliced bread.
None of the 200 original works that Lurie buried in the Kovno ghetto were recovered. However, photographs of her original artwork were taken beforehand for the Kovno ghetto's archive. Eleven of her sketches and watercolors and twenty of these photographs of her works were hidden in crates buried underground by Avraham Tory on behalf of the ghetto's Judenrat, which he took to Israel after the war. She used these photographs to reproduce most of her other works from the war.
Lurie returned to Palestine in July 1945. There, she married and had two children. While raising her family, she continued to paint and exhibit her work in Israel and abroad. In 1946, she again won the Dizengoff Prize with her sketch Young Woman with the Yellow Patch, which she drew in the Kovno ghetto.
Prior to the Eichmann trial in 1961, in an interview with Maariv, she said, "I am a local Israeli painter. It's time I stopped being the Ghetto Painter." Although she was not required to testify in the trial herself, her sketches and watercolors documenting the Holocaust were approved by the Supreme Court of Israel for their documentary value and served as part of the testimony.
Lurie donated much of her work from the time of the Holocaust, which can found in the collections of the Ghetto Fighters' House and Yad Vashem in Israel, both memorials to the Holocaust.
After the Yom Kippur War, her work mainly focused on depicting , especially that of Jerusalem. She died in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1998.
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