Haim Goldberg (חיים גאָלדבערג)

Haim Goldberg (חיים גאָלדבערג; c. 1888 - 1943), better known to contemporaries by his artistic name Haggai (חַגַּי), was a Polish-Jewish graphic designer, photographer, writer, poet, illustrator, and printer based in Warsaw. Goldberg was born to a Hasidic family in what is now Lublin Province in Poland and received a traditional Jewish education at the local yeshiva. However, he showed artistic talent and went to Germany to improve his artistic skills. Afterwards, he settled in Warsaw and opened a photographic studio before joining the Yuhudiya publishing house, affiliated with the daily newspaper Haynt (הײַנט), as a graphic designer, producing chromolithographed greeting cards and postcards incorporating Jewish themes, particularly greeting cards for the New Year (Shana Tova cards). Goldberg went on to illustrate Yiddish and Hebrew children's books and in the 1920s opened his own printing house called Graficon (sometimes as Grafikon), where he and his wife Esther designed new Hebrew fonts, among other innovations. This was a pet project for Goldberg, who even published articles in Jewish periodicals on the need to reform and modernize Hebrew typography. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Goldberg escaped to Bialystok in the Soviet-occupied zone, but after it was also occupied by the Nazis in 1941, he was confined to the city's ghetto, where he printed posters for the ghetto's Judenrat. Goldberg, his wife, and their only child, a son who had also studied art and graphic design, all died in the Holocaust