Ephraim Moses Lilien

Maurycy "Ephraim Moses" Lilien (; ; 23 May 1874 – 18 July 1925) was a Polish-Jewish Art Nouveau illustrator and printmaker particularly noted for his art on Jewish themes and his influence on the Bezalel school art movement. He is sometimes called the "first Zionist artist."

Biography Maurycy Lilien was born in 1874 in Drohobycz, Galicia, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1889–1893, Lilien learned painting and graphic techniques at the Academy of Arts in Kraków. He studied under Polish painter Jan Matejko from 1890 to 1892.

As a member of the Early Zionist Movement, Lilien traveled to Ottoman Palestine several times between 1906 and 1918, but did not settle.

Lilien attended the Fifth Zionist Congress, held in Basel, as a member of the Democratic Fraction — a group formed in opposition to the Religious Zionist, General Zionist, and Revisionist Zionist factions through its support for developing a secular national culture. In 1905, at the Seventh Zionist Congress, in Basel, he, along with Boris Schatz, became a member of a committee formed to help establish the Bezalel Art School. In 1896, he received an award for photography from the avant-garde magazine Jugend. Lilien illustrated several books. In 1923, an exhibition of his work opened in New York.