Chaim Gross historian Lewis Jacobs made a 30-minute feature of Gross carving, called "Tree Trunk to Head", showing Gross at work in his East Village studio on a portrait of his wife Renee, who models in the film. In 1949 Gross sketched Chaim Weizmann, President of Israel, at several functions in New York City where Weizmann was speaking. Gross began a portrait in clay and then traveled to Israel in the summer of that year hoping to be able to meet Weizmann and have him sit for a portrait. Weizmann was too ill, but Gross completed the bust in bronze later that
Chaim Weizmann personal foibles were representative of class consciousness, which the Zionists overcome through deeds rather than words. C. P. Scott, the editor of "The Manchester Guardian", formed a friendship with Weizmann after the two men encountered each other at a Manchester garden party in 1915. Scott described the diminutive leader as extraordinarily interesting, a rare combination of idealism and the severely practical which are the two essentials of statesmanship a perfectly clear sense conception of jewish nationalism, an intense and burning sense of the Jew as Jew, just as strong, perhaps more so, as that of the German as German or