turning the last page of history

Holocaust Remembrance Day is on the horizon at the end of the month,and whatever its merits, or its motivations that underlied this United Nations initiative it interestingly coincides with the Jewish holiday of Tu B’Shevat, as a renewal, a time of planting , a connection with the land of Israel, and a reflection of god’s relationship to the world using the imagery of a cosmic tree. At the start of the modern  Zionist movement, Tu B’Shevat  took on new meaning as planting trees became a symbol for the Jewish affirmation and complicity with the  land of Israel. It has to be remembered that Judaism has a long relationship to trees: from the very first trees planted at creation and the Garden of Eden, right to the trees worshipped by King Ahaz in the final chapters of the Bible.

There is no hiding place
There are no shadows to
disguise your face
He’ll make the sky fall
He’ll make the waters freeze
And you’ll walk alone in the land
Of the burning trees
There. There is no hiding place
There is no hiding place
But crime & punishment
Crime. Crime & punishment
You stand accused
Why do you feel no shame
You’re charged with doing
the devil’s work
Using God’s name
He may forget
And he may forgive
But he can see through the
walls of the house
Where the guilty live
There. There is no hiding place…( Godley and Creme, Crime and Punishment)

Leo Baeck Institute New York...

Leo Baeck Institute New York…

(above) …”My Nightmare” or “The Last Stop Before the Last Stop” by Norbert Troller, Theresienstadt Ghetto, 1943. An endless column of bunk beds reaches the sky. An Angel of Mercy brings a bedpan to the man (The dreamer) on the top of the bunk. But the Angel of Mercy could also be a comforting Angel of Death (as is pointed out in “The Holocaust’s Ghost: Writings on Art, Politics, Law, and Education” by F. C. DeCoste, Bernard Schwartz). From the art collection of the Leo Baeck Institute….

…Most painfully, the Holocaust is the absolute nadir of exile, the most tragic reminder of the Destruction of the Jewish Temple Mount; and until the Third Temple is built and the redemption arrives, each and every jew suffers as if he had seen the Temple going up in flames, the ovens and smokestacks of the Death camps being the most cruel parody of even the greatest suffering. Never Forget. Forget what? For the Jew it has to be that the laws of man, with man at the center of the universe, the belief in “innate goodness” is also a road to moral relativity, and no substitute, in fact a chasm between the Chosen People and the god given Torah at Sinai. Never forget…to go back to the roots…

We thought the end would never come
But it’s coming now
And we’d deal with the problems
But we don’t know how
Please send us something to believe in
While there’s still time
Will God’s revenge be sweet
And will the punishment fit the crime
There is no hiding place
There is no hiding place
But crime & punishment
Crime. Crime & punishment
We’re running out of time
So let the punishment fit the crime
In nomine patris
Et filii et spiritus sancti …( Godley and Creme)


---For Lurie that reaction was deeply and understandably connected with his experiences in the Holocaust, and he created different series of works that commented, directly and indirectly, upon those experiences. Most notorious, and to some, offensive, was his 1959 Railroad Collage, an elaboration of his Flatcar Assemblage by Adolf Hitler (1945), an appropriated photograph of a stack of corpses on a flatcar at Buchenwald. His sarcastic renaming of that horrific image wasn’t enough for Lurie; he took it one step further in “Railroad Collage” by superimposing a cutout shot from a girlie magazine showing the backside of an attractive woman lowering her panties and exposing her ass. Were these works a comment on pornography and the Holocaust, or the Holocaust as the ultimate pornography? Was it a callous denigration of the victims, or a celebration of eroticism, the life force, Eros, in the midst of an unsentimental and unsparing depiction of death; or was it simply an unvarnished expression of contempt for the diminished humanity of their depraved killers? Whatever it was, the results, in 1959, were shock and outrage: people leaving the gallery in a rage, letters to editors, condemnation, controversy, uproar — everything a serious artist dreams of provoking.---click image for source...

—For Lurie that reaction was deeply and understandably connected with his experiences in the Holocaust, and he created different series of works that commented, directly and indirectly, upon those experiences. Most notorious, and to some, offensive, was his 1959 Railroad Collage, an elaboration of his Flatcar Assemblage by Adolf Hitler (1945), an appropriated photograph of a stack of corpses on a flatcar at Buchenwald. His sarcastic renaming of that horrific image wasn’t enough for Lurie; he took it one step further in “Railroad Collage” by superimposing a cutout shot from a girlie magazine showing the backside of an attractive woman lowering her panties and exposing her ass.
Were these works a comment on pornography and the Holocaust, or the Holocaust as the ultimate pornography? Was it a callous denigration of the victims, or a celebration of eroticism, the life force, Eros, in the midst of an unsentimental and unsparing depiction of death; or was it simply an unvarnished expression of contempt for the diminished humanity of their depraved killers?
Whatever it was, the results, in 1959, were shock and outrage: people leaving the gallery in a rage, letters to editors, condemnation, controversy, uproar — everything a serious artist dreams of provoking.—click image for source…

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