http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/4635/features/first-build-an-art-school/
Before Zionists built Israel’s first kibbutz, first university, or first luxury hotel, they built an art academy. The Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design opened in 1906, not because the Jewish homeland needed an art school more than it needed a university but because the Zionist leadership thought an art school would be an effective motor of economic growth.
The man who built the art school was named Zalman Dov Baruch Schatz before he left his yeshiva to study art and changed his name to Boris. His sculpture won a silver medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle, but he couldn’t feed his family. So, in 1895, he accepted an offer to help train the first generation of artists for the new nation of—Bulgaria.
Bulgaria was established in 1878 on territory wrested from the Ottoman Empire. It needed almost everything: A language had to be created out of the local dialects, a king imported from a minor German duchy, and a Royal Academy of Art founded to train artists to express the culture and vision of the new nation.
There were so few artists in the new nation that it was necessary to hire a faculty of Czechs—and the Lithuanian Jew Boris Schatz. Although no distinctly Bulgarian artistic style emerged, Schatz explored the romantic nationalist notion that the soul of the nation resides in the peasants. He created workshops in which art professors could design and craftsmen produce folk art-inspired objects representative of Bulgaria.
Schatz’s comfortable life was disrupted in 1903, when his wife left him and news of the Kishinev pogrom shook Europe. Schatz was one of many Jews who took the pogrom as decisive evidence that Jews could have no future in Europe. He became part of the Second Aliyah.