The Yom Hashoah Community Arts Project
Photography
In The Shadow
A note from the artist: I am a second-generation Holocaust survivor. Both my parents survived the Holocaust though most of their families were annihilated. It was only much later in life that I came across the term ‘Second Generation Holocaust Survivor’, and that is when I fully understood the intractable shadow that the Holocaust has cast over future generations. In this photographic series, my mother’s concentration camp number is etched on my soul as surely as if it were tattooed onto my own skin and will continue to cast an ominous shadow on her progeny. Never again.
About the artist: Paris-born Lilianne Milgrom is an internationally acclaimed painter, ceramic artist, and award-winning author. She completed her studies at Melbourne University and the San Francisco Academy of Art. Her artwork can be found in private and institutional collections around the world. She resides in Virginia and has recently exhibited her work at the Tifton Museum, the Taubman Museum Triennale and Spectrum/Miami Basel. In her work, she strives to achieve a balance between concept and aesthetics.
by Lilianne Milgrom
Untitled
A note from the artist: Every visit to Israel has been an inspiration to me and these pictures are from a visit with my children who had their B'nai Mitzvah at the Kotel.
About the artist: Jeffrey Steefel has been a creative and leader in the Entertainment/Video Game industry for decades, inspired in part by his father, who was also a photographer. He has been an amateur professional on and off most of his life. His work can be seen at www.steefel.com.
by Jeffrey Steefel
Untitled
A note from the artist: “If your need is to refuse to abandon the past, you must recreate it.” Louise Bourgeois
My father’s mother, Ruth, was born in a shtetl called Liuh, in the western region of the Russian Empire. It was a place of poverty and hardship, and the Jews of Liuh lived under the threat of religious persecution as official Tsarist policy. At the same time, it was a community of people, and there were celebrations and weddings, birthday celebrations and bar mitzvot, dances, holidays and celebrations, plus from what my grandmother shared, a cast of community characters held dear for their oddities and quirks. Most important, there was a deep sense of belonging in the tiny town of Liuh.
This is not a work of history. This is a work of collective portraiture. I started by asking myself, Do Jewish museums matter? And this question led me to consider how museums, and in particular Jewish museums, might play a more meaningful part in the archiving and understanding of stories of Jewish peoples. Considering our Talmudic instruction to learn and study every day, might Jewish museums be the rightful spaces for conversation --- that elusive but necessary pathway away from the polarizing and dangerous state of the contemporary world? Might we use storytelling to find our way to empathy? Or at least to a state of willingness to listen?
In the wake of the tragic events of October 7 and the normalization of a level of anti-Semitism not seen in this country since the Shoah, this became an imperative. I am recreating the story of my story. On my father’s mother’s side, I can only go back two generations: Ruth, then my father, then me.
There are no letters, no diaries, no photographs, no documents. That is why I am working with AI. Because what I do have – stories, memories as recited, research, and imagination – serves as prompts (natural language descriptions). My need is driven by the fact that I am now sixty-four years old. I have no children. My eldest sister died two years ago, and she did not have children, either. My middle sister is alive, and she has two sons. Neither of her sons identifies as Jewish, and the one grandchild isnot being raised Jewish.
I am the last of the Selwyn Jews in my small family. One of the questions future generations implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) ask is “Where am I in this history?” In other words, “How has this past informed my identity?” In the words of writer Jonathan Safran Foer, “Everything is as it is because everything was as it was.”
About the artist: Amy Selwyn is a visual artist, writer, and storyteller based in New Hampshire. She is a transplanted NY’er. Amy is working toward her MFA in Mixed Media from Maine Media Workshops + College, Rockport, ME. She specializes in creating refracted portraits constructed from memory and myth, using photography, storytelling, performance and alternative processes. Amy’s work has been featured in Lens Magazine, The Curated Fridge (Winter ’22 and Spring ’23), the Firehouse Arts Center (Newburyport, MA), the SE Center for Photography “Botanicals” show, and in various exhibitions at The Griffin Museum. Amy earned her BA from Cornell University and her MBA from New York University. and the Stockholm School of Economics.