A visual encounter of the Holocaust

May 2, 2011 - 12:12 PM by Jessica

In the spirit of this day — Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day — which can seem so routine in its Monday-ness, I’m thinking about an exhibit I just saw at a local art gallery known as Artspace, owned and run in the German Colony, Jerusalem home of poet Linda Zisquit.

Painted by artist Ruth Kestenbaum Ben-Dov, it’s called The Painter and the Hassid, and here’s an apt description of it:

An imagined visual encounter with and between two creative individuals: Malva Schalek, a Prague-born painter whose works were discovered after World War II between two walls in the Thieresenstadt Ghetto, and Klonymos Schapiro, a Polish-born rabbi whose writings were discovered after the war inside a milk jug in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto (and were later published in the book “Esh Kodesh. (“Both of them were murdered, yet their work survived, hidden.

Kestenbaum Ben-Dov was born in the U.S. and has been living here since 1979. According to the ArtSpace Gallery website, “her recent work explores the relationship between religion and art, body and text, matter and spirit, and her place in these concerns as woman, artist, and traditional Jew.”

As a viewer, her paintings touched me deeply, particularly given the timing of the show, and the images and films being shown on television today. It’s nearly impossible to imagine how people survived, and more than that, left something behind to be remembered.

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