Opening of the Polish-German exhibition “Over the river. History of Jews on the Odra River,” co-organized by the Museum of the Lubusz Land and the German Cultural Forum of Central and Eastern Europe in Potsdam.
The exhibition is devoted to selected aspects of Jewish history on both sides of the Oder River — a borderland area that changed nationality for centuries, and which was a meeting place for the culture of German Jews and the culture of Polish Jews.
From the organizers:
In the nineteenth century, a growing wave of nationalism and anti-Semitism began to threaten the cultural diversity [of the region] and eventually it was destroyed by Nazism. After World War II, the border between Poland and Germany was marked on the Oder and Nysa Łużycka. After the expulsion and displacement of the German population, these lands became a new homeland for Poles. For a short time it seemed that Polish Jews survived the Holocaust survivors in Lower Silesia and Pomerania. Initially, tens of thousands of them settled here, but most of them left the area by the end of the 1960s. Over time, the thousand-year absence of Jews on the Oder fell into oblivion, and its traces blurred or were destroyed. The exhibition tries to save from oblivion and recall these traces.
The exhibition will continue until April 26, 2020.
The outdoor exhibition on the life and work of Lipót Baumhorn and the Jewish community in Murska Sobota, was designed by art historian Agnes Ivett Oszko — it is a traveling exhibition dedicated especially to the cities where a Baumhorn-designed synagogue stands or stood in the past. It was curated within the Rediscover project, and content was adjusted to reflect Baumhorn’s presence in Murska Sobota.
The exhibition includes a three-dimensional reconstruction of the Murska Sobota synagogue, designed by Baumhorn but demolished in 1954.
https://www.visitmurskasobota.si/novica/prva-v-nizu-ulicnih-razstav-na-slovenski-ulici/
More than 1,000 fragments of Jewish headstones that the Communist authorities removed in the 1960s from the Jewish cemetery on Zagorska Street and used to build a railway station platform will be exhibited to the public.
Excavations have been going on for six months to recover them, and they will eventually used to create a memorial.
At 5 pm, at the Muzeum Cafe Jerozolima, there will be a presentation about the history of the cemetery.
The annual “Open Jewish Houses/Houses of Resistance” commemorative program takes place in a score of towns and cities around the Netherlands.
Storytellers, visitors and residents share stories in houses where Jews or members of the resistance lived and worked before, during and just after the Second World War.
In 2020, we were privileged to host an online exhibition of work by the Warsaw-based papercut artist Monika Krajewska. The pieces were drawn from her extraordinary cycle of papercuts called “Burning,” a commemoration of the physical destruction of the Shoah.
This fall, from October 4 to December 18, Krajewska’s Burning cycle will be exhibited at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
The exhibit consists of 31 works in which the artist refers to the objects related to synagogue cult and transfers them to the traditional Jewish paper-cutting technique, painstakingly recreating the symbolism and ornamentation of Jewish art from East-Central Europe—stylised floral decoration, symbolic representations of animals, a repertoire of traditional sacred Judaic symbols (a menorah, Torah and the Tablets of Law, the Temple) and calligraphic quotations from religious texts and prayers.
In order to introduce reflection on loss and destruction, the artist subjects her painstaking work to destruction: she tears apart sections of the works after cutting them out and burns the ends of the sheets. She uses tinted paper as a background for the cut-outs, incorporating the motif of fire, ashes and ruins. In the representations, she incorporates quotations from religious texts or classics of modern Jewish literature, in which there are references to flames and destruction, as well as to the hope of salvation.
“Burning,” an exhibition of paper cuts by Monika Krajewska, is now being shown in Radom, following an exhibit at the POLIN museum in Warsaw. We were privileged to host an online exhibition of some of her works in 2020.
The exhibit consists of 31 works in which the artist, using traditional Jewish paper-cutting technique, refers to objects related to the synagogue, painstakingly recreating the symbolism and ornamentation of Jewish art from East-Central Europe—stylised floral decoration, symbolic representations of animals, a repertoire of traditional sacred Jewish symbols (a menorah, Torah and the Tablets of Law, the Temple) and calligraphic quotations from religious texts and prayers.
In order to introduce reflection on loss and destruction, Krajewska subjects her painstaking work to destruction: she tears apart sections of the works after cutting them out and burns the ends of the sheets. She uses tinted paper as a background for the cut-outs, incorporating the motif of fire, ashes and ruins. And she incorporates quotations from religious texts or classics of modern Jewish literature, in which there are references to flames and destruction, as well as to the hope of salvation.
A multimedia exhibition by the artist, architect and historian Natalia Romik dedicated to the creativity of Polish Jews seeking to survive the Shoah in hiding.
In Poland and Ukraine during World War II, approximately 50,000 people survived persecution by the German occupying forces in hiding. The majority of them were Jewish. They found refuge in tree hollows, closets, basements, sewers, empty graves, and other precarious locations. Natalia Romik’s exhibition “Hideouts. The Architecture of Survival” pays tribute to these fragile places of refuge and explores their physicality. The show poses basic questions about the relationship between architecture, private life, and the public sphere: it addresses the protective function of spaces and emphasizes the creativity those in hiding brought to bear in their attempt to survive.
In a research project extending over several years, Natalia Romik and an interdisciplinary team of researchers consulted oral histories to identify several hiding places, which they explored using forensic methods. The multimedia exhibition “Hideouts. The Architecture of Survival” presents the results of this research. It consists of sculptures bearing a direct connection to the sites and includes documentary films, forensic recordings, photos, documents, and objects found in the hiding places.
“Hideouts: The Architecture of Survival” is presented in cooperation with the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and the TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin. On the occasion of the show at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt, a catalogue will be published in German and English editions by Hatje Cantz Verlag.
The exhibition was curated by Kuba Szreder and Stanisław Ruksza with the help of Aleksandra Janus (scientific collaboration). For the presentation in Frankfurt, Katja Janitschek, curator of the Judengasse Museum, was responsible for the curatorial project management. We would like to thank the Evonik Foundation for their generous support.
Comments are closed.