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Eliad Moreh-Rosenberg is Curator and Art Department Director, Museums Division, Yad Vashem.
New exhibition in Yad Vashem: 'Bigger Than Me' – artist Shai Azoulay and curator Eliad Moreh-Rosenberg in conversation
At the beginning of your journey at Yad Vashem, you expressed your trepidation but you still decided to go ahead. Why? Because I’m a person who likes challenges, they interest me. It piques my curiosity to place myself in new situations – it rejuvenates me. In my creative process, I’m the type of person who spends all day alone in the studio. That is a situation that has to be constantly revitalized, otherwise you’re just replicating yourself. So, when an offer like this comes along, I... Continue reading
Different Perspectives: The Postwar Period as Reflected through Art
The Eli and Diana Zborowski Centre for the Study of the Aftermath of the Holocaust and the Yad Vashem Art Museum recently hosted a research workshop on the topic of “The Postwar Period as Reflected through Art.” In the months and years following their liberation, survivors of the Holocaust produced powerful works that record or reflect on their experiences during those darkest of years. A number of survivor artists turned to their craft in order to work through their past, rebuild their... Continue reading
Living with the Shadow, Creating with the Light
"It was between three and four o'clock, the date 11 April 1945. We waited in suspense and with unprecedented tension… Suddenly there were shouts, from the opposite direction, from the main camp… We rushed out to investigate: our compound was lifeless as before. 'Look at the gate!' shouted someone. I lifted my eyes and searched for the pyramid-shaped roof on the main watch-tower that stood out from beyond the main camp. The crooked cross of Fascism had gone. Fluttering from the symbolic... Continue reading
"In Memory of Our Destroyed Synagogues in Germany"
“This Judaism again I have come to accept with all my spiritual powers; to this treasure, which the most modern people neither know nor respect, belongs my innermost being." Ludwig Meidner, 1930 The rise of the Nazis to power in 1933 sealed the fate of avant-garde artists: their art works were declared "degenerate" by the newly instilled ideology as a defiling influence on the Aryan race, not least because this Art was viewed as having had Jewish characteristics. An exhibition under this... Continue reading
Last Portrait: Painting for Posterity
Over the course of eight months, from May to December 1943, Max Plaček – a prisoner in Terezin – drew over 500 portraits of artists, scientists, intellectuals and cultural figures that testify to the human richness of the ghetto’s population. The artist sketched his final portrait a week before he was transported to Auschwitz. In 1944, he was sent to Sachsenhausen, where he was murdered. In the Kovno ghetto, painter Jacob Lifschitz undertook documentation efforts together with artists... Continue reading
The Freedom of the Spirit
"One, I never met my grandmother. Two, my name is Danielle Rina Cohen-Levy. Three, my grandmother’s name was Renata Braun, later Rina Levy. Four, my grandmother died at the age of 38. In 12 years, I will be older than she ever was. Five, she died of breast cancer. That’s why, every year, I’m being screened. Six, for forty years my grandfather kept a secret in his attic. Seven, everything I’m telling you here is the truth." These were the opening words of Danielle Cohen-Levy’s... Continue reading
Camp Synagogue
The origins of this work of art are found in an outline quickly sketched by Felix Nussbaum immediately after escaping to Brussels from the French internment camp in Gurs. Here, for the first time, his Jewish identity takes central stage, after many years of addressing universal subjects. Marked as a Jew and denied his freedom, Nussbaum fully comprehended his Jewish affiliation. A universalist at heart who believed in the power of art, he was compelled to express his Judaism through this... Continue reading
The Republic of Dreams
On the evening of 30 June 1941, the town of Drohobycz (in the Lwow district in Poland, now Drohobych in Ukraine) was conquered by the Germans, and a campaign of abuse and murder of the Jews began. Serving at Gestapo headquarters in the town was SS Hauptscharführer Felix Landau, who was assigned responsibility for enlisting forced labor from the ghetto’s populace. Landau ordered the Jewish artist and writer Bruno Schulz to decorate the walls of the local riding school. With the arrival of his... Continue reading
From Father to Daughter: The Illustrated Bible of Carol Deutsch
Under assumed identities, a two-year-old girl named Ingrid Deutsch and her grandmother, Regina Braunstein, had spent 18 months in hiding with a Catholic family in Florenville, a town in the Belgian province of Luxembourg. The two had had no word of Ingrid’s parents, Fela and Carol Deutsch, for over a year. In the last postcard he sent, for Ingrid’s fourth birthday in the winter of 1943, Carol had written, “Father is very proud that his Ingrid is being such a good, sweet little girl. Love... Continue reading
The Portrait and the Maiden
“I was in Juan-Les-Pins, near Villefranche, on holiday with my mother, in 1939. We happened to meet Mrs. Moore (who was my godmother) in the street the day after war was declared. Mrs. Moore said she was returning to the U.S. and would be glad to take me with her, to which my mother gratefully agreed, for my safety. I was handed over there and then, in my bathing suit (and no clothes!)” So relates Valerie Kampf (née Page), in a letter to Yad Vashem that recollects her placement, at... Continue reading
