Samuel Bak (b. 1933), Thou Shalt Not Kill, 1978, Oil on canvas

Samuel Bak was born in Vilna, and began to draw at an early age. His drawings were displayed in the Vilna ghetto, where he lived with his mother. Bak's father was killed just a few days before Vilna was liberated by the Russians. After the war's end, he was sent to refugee camps in Germany, and emigrated to Israel in 1948.

Thou Shalt Not Kill is a diptych, with the two Tablets of the Covenant constituting the central motif in both sections. In the lower section of the diptych, Bak uses the broken Tablets as a symbol of the artist's loss of faith in God in the wake of the Holocaust. The God who failed to watch over his children and abandoned his people, the Chosen People who were entrusted with the Tablets of the Covenant. The two Tablets of the Covenant containing the Ten Commandments, intended as an eternal moral code, were broken due to the wrongdoing of mankind. The broken Tablets are cast into a grave, also in the shape of the Tablets of the Covenant, with blood dripping from its peeling walls. The broken Tablets signify the loss of faith, and the grave in the form of the Tablets of the Covenant is a symbol of the annihilation of the Chosen People, God's people, who preserved the Jewish tradition, and were sent to the crematoria. Bak separates the words "Thou Shalt Not" and "Kill", and thus the opposite meaning to the one intended in the Ten Commandments is implied. The word "Kill", which appears four times, reverberates in the empty grave under the words "Thou Shalt Not". This is the scene which unfolds before the viewer, who feels as though he himself is standing on the edge of the open grave.

In the upper section of the diptych, the broken tablets hover over a desolate, apocalyptic vista. The letters have fallen off the broken tablets of stone, leaving only bullet holes, a reference to the blood on the sides of the grave. The name of the picture, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is deeply ironic, a protest against the murder which has already been committed.