Bernard Baruch Zakheim (April 4, 1898 – November 28, 1985)[2] was a Warsaw-born San Francisco muralist, best known for his work on the Coit Tower murals.

[7][8] After fighting in World War I, Zakheim and his wife arrived in San Francisco in 1920, where he lived and worked as a furniture maker in the Fillmore District, then a heavily Jewish neighborhood.

[10] Turning more seriously to mural painting as a form of expression, he traveled to Mexico, studied with Rivera, and met contemporary San Francisco muralist and fellow Russian Empire émigré Victor Arnautoff.

The Union lobbied the national government to create a federally funded arts program during the Great Depression.

In 1941, Zakheim moved out of the city to the rural-agricultural town of Sebastopol, California, where he taught classes at Pond Farm.

[23][26][27] One of the murals shows Black nurse Biddy Mason working with John Strother Griffin.

[7][32] Another set of murals were painted at the Alemany Hospital in San Francisco's Outer Mission, built in 1933.

[33] In 1966, Zakheim created six wooden sculptures for one of the first Holocaust memorials in the United States, for 1969 display at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life in Berkeley.

[35] However, rather than abandon the political subtexts that informed his art, he advocated that artists should openly espouse their social and religious beliefs within their works.