.

Yet he felt a strong connection between the suffering of people everywhere, whether they were the Jews that he remembered from Europe, landless blacks in the heart of Australia or hungry children in inner urban Melbourne.

All the men socialized together. Bergner encouraged them to go beyond their traditional landscape style and introduced a more radical concern for working families, thus having an important impact on Australian art.

He left Australia in 1948 and after two years of traveling and exhibiting in Paris, Montreal,and New York City, he settled in Israel.

Bergner was a frequent visitor at their Warrandyte home. These old instruments symbolize the distorted and poor world of wars, secrets and darkness. He is best-known as a painter of allegorical still lifes and also designed scenery and costumes for the Yiddish and Hebrew theatres. Yet he felt a strong connection between the suffering of people everywhere, whether they were the Jews that he remembered from Europe, landless blacks in the heart of Australia or hungry children in inner urban Melbourne.

He left Australia in 1948 and after two years of traveling and exhibiting in Paris, Montreal and New York, he settled in Israel. He lived in Melbourne from 1937–48, socialising with a wide circle of local artists, among whom were Sidney Nolan and Stacha Halpern. Although he generally paints Jewish themes, Bergner is sensitive to the plight of all suffering people and transmits that compassion in his work.

Bergner may not have been prepared for the plight of many struggling Australians. In 1956, Bergner was a co-recipient of the Dizengoff Prize for painting, receiving the Israel Prize for painting in 1980 and he exhibited widely in Melbourne, Paris, Tel-Aviv, New York, Montreal and in the Venice Biennale and the Sao Paulo Biennale.

Yosl emigrated to Australia in 1937 and studied in the National Gallery School in Melbourne until the outbreak of WWII. Yosl Bergner died in Tel Aviv, Israel on 18 January 2017.