A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE GREAT ARTIST MAGDA WATTS. 
The blonde doll is missing her left arm which is not noticeable with her long sleeve top. She is also missing a shoe. Please look closely at pictures. Some flaws but still a rare spectacular piece. Signed on bottom base. 
Watts survived the Auschwitz death factory, then the labor camp at Nuremberg. It was there that she created the ancestors of the folk-art masterpieces she now crafts, such artful and appealing rag dolls that Nazi guards would swap extra bread for them. That, she says, "was life" for her and her sister Shari _ enough to keep them alive.
The rebbe doll scene is typical of her work: lifelike yet cartoonish figures set in evocative tableaux. She makes them in her workshop in Israel, where she lives with her husband, Beni Barnea, six dogs and 40 cats.
Starting at $1,500, Watts' dolls are sold only in Israel, but collected worldwide. She once made a panorama of the Jewish people's 5,000-year history for an Israel museum, and a violinist doll for concert great Isaac Stern.
The dolls are tailors, jewelers, seamstresses, musicians, students, rabbis _ a cast of characters from the shtetls of a bygone Europe and from small corners of the modern Jewish world.
They laugh and brood, gossip and smoke, fiddle and play cards. Infused, as if by some spiritual alchemy, with the full range of human emotion, they furrow their aging brows in worry and concentration. Soulful eyes gaze both outward and inward.