Benno Elkan was born on 2 December 1877 at Dortmund, Westphalia in Germany. He was the only child of Salomon and Rosalie Elkan, who were Jews engaged in the textile trade. He was educated at Dortmund Gymnasium and at Château du Rosey, Rolle, near Lausanne in Switzerland. He worked initially in a clothing store in Antwerp, but was so dissatisfied with his lot, that he threw the job up and travelled to Munich to study art. In the period 1905-11 he lived in Paris, where he taught himself sculpture, met Rodin and shared a studio with the sculptor Julius Steiner and the American painter Patrick Henry Bruce. Elkan executed a bronze mask of the painter Jules Pascin and struck medallions of Loubet, Fallière and Clemenceau. He returned to Germany after an absence of some eight years, settled in Alsbach, near Darmstadt and established himself as a versatile sculptor of portrait medallions, busts and funerary monuments. His work included medals of King Edward VII (c. 1902), Gustav Mahler (1911) and Carl Flesch (1944), the bronze Jesus Christ’s Head with the Crown of Thorns for the Feuerbaum Family Monument in the Protestant church of St Mary, Dortmund (1905), the lamps for Westminster Abbey, and busts of Winston Churchill, Walter Rathenau, Alfred Flechtheim and John Maynard Keynes for Kings College, Cambridge (1949). He also produced the Candlesticks and the Abbot Anscar Vonier Memorial Plaque for Buckfast Abbey, on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon. In 1906 Elkan had his first one-man exhibition at the old town hall, Dortmund. In 1907 he married the concert pianist Hedwig Einstein. After the Great War, Elkan was commissioned by the German government to carve its biggest monuments to her war dead. The German populace trooped for miles to view the massive, grief-weighted, maternal figures he set up in the public squares of Frankfurt, Saarbrucken and Wickrath along the French frontier. His Great War Memorial, To the Victims, Symbol of All Mourning Mothers at Frankfurt was removed by the Nazis in 1933 and re-erected in 1946. (His Freedom Monument in Mainz would be destroyed during the Second World War). In 1933 Elkan surmised that the Jews of Germany did not have much of a future under Adolf Hitler, packed his suitcase and got out through Switzerland. The only sculpture he took with him was a six foot-tall menorah (seven branched candelabrum), bristling with figures from Jewish history. The Nazi state denounced him as a degenerate artist and then set about confiscating and destroying all his work that could be found. He travelled to England, settling firstly in Oxford, then in London, where he began to rebuild his reputation as a skilled craftsman. Commissions were few and small. But little by little, he won British critical acclaim. His Jungle Family depicting a female orangutan with her baby, was commissioned by the London lead casters, Stovers & Saunders Ltd, as their exhibit in the grounds of the 1938 Empire Exhibition in Bellahouston Park, and the Jungle Family was intended by Glasgow Corporation to be a permanent attraction there, but in December 1939, Stovers & Saunders informed the city that they wished to exhibit the group in Edinburgh, where it now resides in Edinburgh Zoo. In 1939 he executed in lead the Jungle Book Relief Panel on the south wall of the Rudyard Kipling Building at the Imperial Services College, Haileybury. His Fighting Cock in silver gilt was sculpted as a commission for Arsenal Football Club. Elkan created the 15 foot tall bronze menorah which stands outside the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) in Jerusalem. It depicts scenes from Jewish history – from Biblical times, to the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948. It was donated to Israel on 15 April 1956 by Great Britain, as a token of friendship between the two nations. The inscription reads: “The idea of presenting the menorah was conceived by Members of Parliament of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland in appreciation of the establishment of a democratic parliamentary government in the State of Israel.” Elkan was appointed OBE in 1957. He died in London on 10 January 1960 and his ashes would be scattered in Israel. His biography by Fritz Hofmann: Benno Elkan: Ein jüdischer Künstler aus Dortmund was published in 1997. Elkan’s work is well represented in many public and private collections all around the world.