Virginia Military Institute and the Civil War When Fort Sumter was fired upon and Virginia seceded, Ezekiel enrolled in the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, the first Jewish cadet (student) to do so. He was Corporal of the Guard that accompanied the coffin of Stonewall Jackson (a Virginia Military Institute instructor) at his burial in Lexington in 1863. He and other cadets from VMI marched 80 miles north and fought at the 1864 Battle of New Market. He was wounded in a fight with Union army troops under Franz Sigel. After his recovery, he served with the cadets in Richmond to train new recruits for the army. Shortly before the end of the war, he served in the trenches defending the city. Following the Civil War, Ezekiel returned to VMI to finish his education, graduating in 1866. He studied anatomy at the Medical College of Virginia in 1866–68, thinking of becoming a doctor. In 1867–68 he was superintendent of the Richmond Hebrew Sunday School. He moved in with his parents in Cincinnati in 1868; his parents had moved there, where their oldest daughter Hannah lived, after losing their business in Richmond to fire. While not there long, in his memoirs he calls Cincinnati his home. Sculpture In Cincinnati he began the study of sculpture at the Art School of J. Insco Williams and in the studio of Thomas Dow Jones. Moving to Berlin in 1869, he studied at the Prussian Academy of Art under Professor Albert Wolf. Needing money, in 1873, during the Franco-Prussian War, he was a war correspondent for the New York Herald, and he was arrested and imprisoned "for a time" as a spy for France. He was admitted into the Society of Artists, Berlin, and at age 29 was the first foreigner to win the Michael Beer Prix de Rome, for a bas relief entitled Israel. The prize of $1,000 provided for two years of study in Rome, but he traveled to Rome by way of the United States, where he had not been for five years, as he had "unexpectedly" received a commission from B'nai B'rith for a monument to Religious Liberty. Rome studio Arriving in Rome in 1874, he fell in love with the Eternal City, which he soon made his home. It was there that he completed the sculptures and paintings for which he is famous. "Ezekiel found both personal and artistic