Illustrated children’s Bible wins award

“In the very beginning, God created a world — the heavens and the earth — out of nothing.”

So begins the “JPS Illustrated Children’s Bible,” the recent winner of the Jewish Book Council’s National Jewish Book Award for an illustrated children’s book.

Written by Ellen Frankel and illustrated by Avi Katz, the Jewish Publication Society book was also named a notable book by the U.S. Association of Jewish Libraries.

Katz, a staff artist for the Jerusalem Report, said the book aims to make the Bible more accessible to children. “The idea is to have a standard, universally acceptable version [of the Bible] for kids to read and learn the basic Jewish stories that every Western child and Jewish child should know.”

Frankel added: “One thing I’m really pleased about the book was that most children’s Bibles, they don’t honor the original text as it was, even in modern English, but aim to edit and abridge the text. They add interpretation, making the story into Western fairy tales or following the form of fairy tales, and these are not meant to be fairy tales; they were meant to be truth and history.”

Katz explained the difficulty in dealing with the more adult themes and content of the biblical stories, and how as an artist, this presented certain difficulties: “While the illustrations had to be straightforward, and to tell a story while also being visually enchanting, I occasionally had some dilemmas about how to represent certain aspects.”  — jpost.com