Yad Vashem Memorial Gifts

This year's calendar is based on an upcoming exhibition, to be displayed in the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) during 2025. All artworks are from Yad Vashem Art Collection and have been created in ghettos and in camps, in forests and in hiding, by men, women and children persecuted by the German Nazis.

The artwork shed light on the experiences of the artist and their subjects during the harshest of circumstances, while providing a window into their thoughts and feelings. 

The poster depicts a town, symbolizing a typical Jewish community. The composition resembles a tree of life extending upwards, poetically and implicitly echoing the destruction of the Jewish community, an almost abstract phenomenon existing in the heavenly realms that was brutally removed from the real world, represented by the city map "below".   The community's structure is portrayed as a tree of life that ascends infinitely, resonating with the Jewish people's eternal nostalgia for the communal existence that was destroyed.

The poster is simultaneously abstract and concrete; the impeccable composition illustrates the multidimensional void left by the obliteration of these communities within the Jewish and broader historical and cultural landscape. Some houses within the community are hollow, with only their outlines remaining, powerfully symbolizing the absence of its residents - an absence rendered eternal by the comprehensive and systematic nature of the extermination. In this way, the poster effectively communicates the human narrative encapsulated within the broader tragedy.

The ethereal depiction of the community's presence across worlds echoes the timeless work of painter Marc Chagall, serving as yet another poignant reminder of the multifaceted assaults on Jewish culture perpetrated in the effort to annihilate the Jewish people and their heritage.

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