In my Jewish Studies program at the Graduate Theological Union, I have focused on art and the Holocaust. My thesis, “Degenerate Art and the Jewish Question,” discusses the ways in which the Nazis demonized modern art and used it as a weapon against Jews, whom they saw as its representatives. In the collection that accompanies my master’s work, “Echoes and Fragments,” I create forms that suggest how art suffers and survives these attacks, as well as represents how the Jewish people have suffered and survived, with the brokenness of the pieces reminding us both of the brutality of the past and of what remains unbreakable.
The catalyst for my studies and my art was my father’s story of survival. When my father was twelve years old, he and his brother were place on one of the last Kindertransports out of Berlin, Germany to London (a mission of the United Kingdom to rescue Jewish children).
It was modern art that saved my father’s life. His aunt and uncle, both artists in Berlin, sold one of their most cherished possessions, an original painting by Max Pechstein, to secure enough money for passage for themselves and the children out of Germany. My father and uncle said goodbye to their family and home, expecting their parents to rejoin them soon. Unfortunately, my father never saw his parents again or found out what had happened to them — according to the U.S. Holocaust Museum archives, they were last seen alive in the Polish ghetto of Lodz.
The stories I heard as a child and the brokenness in my father’s eyes have shaped my Jewish identity and my worldview. This exhibit of “Echoes and Fragments” is a deeply personal statement about sifting through the shards and treasures of my family history in order to continue my search for my own truth and the affirmation of divine presence despite the horrors of Jewish genocide. Many of the ceramic forms have been broken and pieced back together into mosaic forms in order to express the literal brokenness that has resulted from the Shoah.