Holocaust art exhibit opens at Yad Vashem

by Dan Slobodkin

Behind Raul Yisrael Teitelbaum hangs a dark oil-on-canvas painting by the 80-year-old Holocaust survivor, an effort to depict one of his horrific experiences at Bergen-Belsen. The dark oil-on-canvas painting shows a gaunt young man, clad in torn blue rags, sitting on a stone in a muddy courtyard in the camp, his face turned away.

Beside his piece are hundreds of paintings, wood and metal sculpture and other artwork in a unique year-long exhibit set to open Monday, Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day.

The first-of-its-kind exhibit, “Virtues of Memory: Six Decades of Holocaust Survivors’ Creativity,” showcases the creative works of some 300 Holocaust survivors whose artistic expressions of their Holocaust experiences and memories are housed at Yad Vashem, where an incredible corpus of work has been amassed over the decades, offering a look at the myriad ways Holocaust survivors have struggled to express themselves artistically after the Holocaust.

“We are so accustomed to think about the Holocaust in black-and-white,” curator Yehudit Shendar told reporters at a preview on Thursday, “but the ‘black-and- white’ was the camera of the perpetrator, not what the victims have seen.”

“Colors don’t mean that something is happy,” Shendar added. “It just means that it was real.”

The official opening ceremony for Holocaust Remembrance Day is scheduled to take place on Sunday at Yad Vashem’s Warsaw Ghetto Square.

Tags: art, Holocaust, Jerusalem, painting, Yad Vashem Museum