INTERNATIONAL SHOAH ART MUSEUM 
& HOLOCAUST / GENOCIDE 
EDUCATION  THROUGH ART
AQIVA KENNY SEGAN, ARTIST & EDUCATION DIRECTOR

PO Box 1721, Seattle, WA  98111 U.S.A. Phone: (206) 624-4154 
e-mail: underwings@connectexpress.com

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SHOAH DREAMS 
Schoah Traume

Wings Art No. 42
FLÜGELN GOTTES 42
Pod Skrzydlami Boga 42
Las Alas dibujo numero 42

Shoah Dreams is available for exhibitions with other 
Under the Wings of G-D & Sight-seeing with DIgnity
artworks or by itself. 

All the artworks in Under the Wings of G-D
and Sight-seeing with Dignity are copyright protected. 
 Please do not reproduce artworks without permission, thank you

Frame 1:  Reproduction of the entire Shoah Dream art work

 Frames 2 - 14:  Detail images, historical photos & background text

Please click images to enlarge

Please click to enlarge

SIZE: Four feet x eight feet, plus the beautiful and heavy frame.
121.9 x 243.8 cm 

The piece is designed to be displayed at exhibitions as a table top piece, allowing viewers to walk around it and see the images from all directions. This will aid viewers in the artists quest for viewers to feel movement, flight and dislocation that Shoah Dreams addresses. It is the first of three planned works of this size - each a silent symphony. 

At installation sites where a tabletop installation isn't practical, the piece is to be installed as is seen in the photo, with the young woman with the silver kerchief at top; and the artists interpretation of the interior of the Tlomackie (Great Synagogue) Synagogue of Warsaw on lower right. 

Thanks to Rev. Dr. Donald MacKenzie & University Congregational Church; Ms. B. Segan, and Bob & Millie Royce of Bainbridge Island, WA for helping with the framing of Shoah Dreams. .
      For technical &  logistical help in framing this large artwork, thanks to Mr. Stan Willard, retired chemistry professor, of Port Townsend, WA.; the office and maintenance staff of University Christian Church, Seattle;  Mr. Rainer Waldman Adkins and Rev. Brooke Rolston, both of Seattle.   

  

The wedding ring (right center of detail) is from a 16th-17th century northern Italian wedding ring in the book Jewish Ceremonial Art (Joseph Gutmann, author, Thomas Yoseloff, Pub., 1966. The structure at top of the ring is probably a synagogue, representing a Jewish wedding and wedding site for the couple) 

1992 watercolor by the artist based on the photo (below); Collection of Genia Dayan, Israel. Ms. Dayan, a first cousin of the artist's mother, visited Zlata several times in the 1930's at the Jewish Home for the Aged in Bialystok. 

Please click images to enlarge

      
The house that Segan's grandfather and family lived in during the 1890's was in a village near Bialystok, a large city in northeast Poland that had been 50% Jewish before the Holocaust

Zlata Barshewsky sewing (darning socks?) while seated in a hammock slung between trees in Bialystok, Poland, around 1936-38. She was murdered in 1942; and was probably
in her 80's at her death. 

Please click images to enlarge

The green toned wing seen above the elderly woman's head is from an orange-footed parakeet from New Zealand. The reddish wing attached to her right shoulder (seen on viewers left, or to the left side of her head) is from a lory, or lorikeet, from Snohomish County, north of Seattle.  

Zlata Barshewsky was a resident of the Jewish Home for the Aged in Bialystok, Poland. One of Zlata's sons, who lived in Vilna, Lithuania, went to see Zlata several times in Bialystok in the 1930's, as late as 1938. This son was accompanied by his son and daughter, both living now in Tel Aviv, who are first cousins of the artists mother. In the 1930's Zlata lived in the Jewish Home for the Aged in Bialystok. She was probably in her 80's when the Germans occupied Poland in 1939. Her life ended in a way that's painful for me to think about: Between February 5 - 12, 1942 thousands of Bialystoker Jews were seized, including the elderly residents of the Jewish Home for the Aged. They were "deported" in cattle trains to the Treblinka death camp in Poland where they were systematically murdered. I only learned Zlata's name in Oct. 1999 when I met one of mother's cousins my last night in Israel. It was since that visit that the story of the end of the Bialystok Jewish community was relayed to me (via the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Library) and I've wondered how my grandfather dealt with knowing at the end of World War II that his mother, who he never saw again after he left home in his 20's on his way to London and eventually New York, had been murdered at the hands of the German soldiers in some barbaric and brutal manner. 

The house where Zlata, her husband Moishe and their children lived in during the 1890's in a village outside of Bialystok is seen in the accompanying photo. The house was photographed in the 1920's by an aunt of the artist. During the years the Barshewsky family lived there in the late 19th century the family had a cow, horse and chickens and they sold kerosene, candles and herring to neighboring farm families. The house was no longer standing in the 1930's. Moishe Barshewsky died before the Holocaust.

Among Zlata's children was Harry Barshewsky. Barshewsky left Poland in 1905 at the age of 25 or so. Before emigrating to the U.S. in 1907, Harry and his wife Sarah (the artists maternal grandmother) lived in the East End of London, England.

Harry was Segan's maternal grandfather. Sarah, who came from the town of Bobroisk, Russia, and Harry settled in Englewood, New Jersey in 1907. Harry worked for 20 years, until the early 1930's, as a bookkeeper for the Workmen's Circle in New York City, a fraternal organization of Jewish immigrants from the Old Country. Long active in a fraternal association of Polish Jewish emigres from the Bialystok region, known as a Bialystoker landsmanschaften association, he and Sarah had three children, one of whom is the artists mother.

An amateur Yiddish language composer and songwriter, Harry passed on in 1968, the same year I graduated high school. Both Harry and Sarah had siblings who emigrated to the America. Harry's youngest brother Shewack (who visited Zlata in the late 1930's from Vilna) survived the Holocaust as did his wife and their two children; they emigrated to Israel in the mid-1950's. Shewack was a commercial photographer in Tel Aviv for many years and 
owned and managed a commercial photography studio. 

3. This detail image shows a child with a scarf wrapped around his head or neck, holding a cup and a brick of bread. The artist calls this the "child with birds nest scarf." This nameless child posed for a photo that the Nazi's ordered the Judenrat (the Jewish Council, an administrative organization to maintain order, each established by the Nazi's in every ghetto) to create for a propaganda booklet on the ghetto in Kielce, Poland. In the photo, the child is smiling. 

The photo can be seen in the website of the US HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM in Washington, D.C:  CGo to: ARCHIVES- PHOTO, and type: CHILDREN - KIELCE GHETTO. It is photo # 03272. 

Segan was immediately drawn to the photo as the scarf has the look of a birds nest. The scarf was probably made from twine or cord. The Kielce ghetto was liquidated between August 20, 1942 and August 24, 1942. Children and adults who were ill had been taken out of the ghetto and killed prior to the deportation. 

The child's wing is not technically a wing, but the tail, of a Seattle pigeon found by the artist in 1998 on Alaskan Way by the Seattle waterfront downtown. The artist did not draw the entire tail, but most of it, having decided to leave a section (seen at upper left) of it "incomplete" for compositional effect.

The reddish-toned wing attached to the woman wearing a scarf is from a Seattle pigeon (deceased) the artist found on a sidewalk on Alaskan Way by the Seattle waterfront in 1998. The wing between the young woman's lapel, drawn in black ink, and the Drohobycz street corner, is from a halcyon sancta, from N.W. Wales, Australia.  The dark reddish toned wing seen above the Drohobycz street corner and the small head of a man (at the very top of the detail) is from a speckled mousebird. 

The drawing was two in two phases: First, an underlay of orange and reddish hues  was painted using metallic drawing ink. Tomas's features, his cap and the birds wings were drawn over that using fine point metal pen nibs dipped in bottled India ink. 

The wing on his right shoulder (seen on viewers left, to the left of his head) is from an orange footed parakeet. The actual wing had green hues ~ artistic license, you see! The wing on Tomas's left shoulder (seen to the right of his head) was drawn from the underside of a speckled mousebird. 

The boy wearing shorts was drawn from a photo shot by Nazi soldier Willy Georg. It can be seen in the book In the Warsaw Ghetto, Summer '41 (Aperture, NY, 1993)

To his left can be seen two men in a 'pedicab' in the Warsaw Ghetto. Pedicabs were unknown in Warsaw before WWII. They were used to transport people in the ghetto as most other transport had ceased to exist, the ghetto being completely sealed-in. Some pedicabs were powered  by a man pushing it from behind while others were powered by a man pedaling it like a bicycle, akin to the rickshaws used as taxi's in poorer cities in the world today, such as in Bombay, India. The wing immediately above the pedicab (as you view the detail; on the right side of the pedicab if you were looking at the pedicab right side up) is from a shorebird. 

Nussbaum's most famous painting: Self-Portrait with Jewish Identity Card, probably from late 1942. The Nazi occupation ID card states JEW in French: JUIF, 
and in Flemish: JOOD. 

The young boy in a Warsaw ghetto photo seen in the lower right corner of the detail (above). He wears a cap and is drawn in beige. Photo is from chapter titled Children in The Warsaw Ghetto - 45th Anniversary of the Uprising

7. This detail image portrays the German-Jewish painter Felix Nussbaum, who was raised in Osnabruck, a city in Germany. During the war, Felix and his wife Felka Platek were in hiding for their lives in Brussels, Belgium for three years. They were arrested in 1944 and deported on the last transport of Jews from Belgium to Poland. Felix and Felka were prisoners No. 284 and 285 on the train in which they were deported on July 31, 1944. They were gassed to death at Auschwitz on August 3, 1944. Felix was 39 years old and Felka was 45.  

This portrait of Nussbaum was the first section of "Shoah Dreams" to be drawn. in summer 1997. After he was drawn I decided to create a multi-image drawing featuring people, buildings, and wings floating around multi-directionally. The portrait was drawn from Nussbaum's most famous painting: a self-portrait of the artist in which he holds his identity card. The identity card is marked JUIF - JOOD (Jew in French and Flemish). Nussbaum probably completed the painting in late 1942, according to a biography in the  Felix Nussbaum Exhibition Catalog (The Jewish Museum, N.Y., 1983) 

Nussbaum's wing was drawn from a beat-up and very tattered red-colored wing given to Segan by a former girlfriend on the morning of Yom Kippur 1996, a gift for the artist (and subsequently used in this drawing.) 
Found in her backyard, the wing was from a Red Shafted Flicker, a woodpecker which migrates through and resides in Washington state. It was probably the victim of a neighborhood furball-ejector-creature, commonly known as a cat.   

Decades after his murder, many of Nussbaum's paintings and drawings were collected and eventually dedicated in a section of the Osnabruck Art Museum, Germany. The wing to the right of Nussbaum's head, which we can see the left portion of in the detail (above the child painted in beige) is from a Missourah ducky given to the artist by the Missouri Dept. of Conservation in Columbia, Mo.  
The child (foreground - left, with head covered and two wings) is drawn from a photo shot by Nazi soldier Willy Georg, from the book of his Warsaw Ghetto photos In the Warsaw Ghetto, Summer '41 (Aperture, NY, 1993). Both wings on this child are from sacred kingfishers. 

The boy painted with a beige underlay and black ink features (foreground right) is drawn from a photo in the chapter Children in The Warsaw Ghetto - 45th Anniversary of the Uprising). The reddish-orange wing is from a bird from Argentina. 

The man at lower left (of the detail, above) and the boy with cap seen to his right

(Please click on images to enlarge)

Photo of the Warsaw Ghetto street scene showing a street lamp and people walking, seen on the left side of detail 

8. 

This detail image shows a portion of the interior of the Tlomackie synagogue of Warsaw, with several anonymous children in the Warsaw Ghetto in the foreground.

The wing drawn with earthy-looking colors seen between the two youngsters heads (at bottom right of the detail: the boy is at far right; a girl is to his left) is from a common murre. The larger wing to the left of the girl (she is second from right in the detail) and to the right of the boy wearing a cap (he is facing left) is from a bird from Nicaragua.

The photo of the boy with cap (seen at left) is from Varshaver Geta en Bund - The Warsaw Ghetto in Pictures (YIVO, NY, 1970). Many of the photos in this book also appear in The Warsaw Ghetto - 45th Anniversary of the Uprising (Interpress, Warsaw, 1988). The two children (foreground right) and the clock: ZEGARMISZT with the clock time frozen at 9:30, are drawn from photos in the book In the Warsaw Ghetto, Summer '41 (Willy Georg, Aperture, NY, 1993). 

The red and blue gouache sign (seen at left in the detail) is drawn from a photo of  a theatre marquee sign in the Warsaw Ghetto. The theatre at the time the photo was taken was producing a play called The Rabbi's Little Rivkale. Rivka is a girls name; adding a 'le' at the end of a name makes the name into a nickname form of usage. The theatre was the El Dorado Theatre. 
The marquee sign also appears in the book The Warsaw Ghetto in Pictures. 

According to a Reference Librarian Intern at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Library in Washington, D.C., who wrote me back on Nov. 8, 2000 in response to a letter I sent asking about the theatre sign, it is believed the El Dorado theatre did not exist prior to the ghetto and that no other theatre had occupied the space it used prior to the ghetto. The librarian's letter includes the following information, from the book Theatrical Performance during the Holocaust: Texts, Documents, Memoirs, by Rebecca Rovit and Alvin Goldfarb (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1999). 

"It was owned by a woman named Judith, who also owned the only other Yiddish language theatre in the Warsaw Ghetto. She had connections with a German officer and used this connection to make sure no other theaters could perform in Yiddish, eliminating possible competition. The theater did not maintain high standards, but it changed plays once a month. It presented "Song of Songs" and "Village of Youth," which later became a major event in the ghetto."

9. Detail showing the Tlomackie synagogue  - interior of the sanctuary. The Tlomackie synagogue was also called The Great Synagogue of Warsaw. It was dedicated in 1878. The synagogue was outside the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto. 

After the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto during the famed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April - May 1943, the German forces blew up the synagogue and its world-famous library annex to "celebrate" the destruction of  Jewish Warsaw and the murder of most of the Jews who had been imprisoned in it. 

The German Army General in charge of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto's remaining 50,000 Jews still alive in January 1943 was SS Major General Juergen Stroop.  Stroop was tried by a U.S. Military Court for war crimes in Dachau, Germany in 1947 for executing captured American airmen. Eventually sent to Poland, he was tried, convicted of war crimes, and hung in 1951.  

The bottom portion of the detail (below the circular curved dome of the synagogue ceiling as you see it in the detail) is drawn from a Jewish gravestone in Sieniawa, Poland. A photo of this gravestone appears in Time of Stones (Monika Krajewska, photographer, Interpress, Warsaw, 1983). The gravestone depicts a vase with flowers flanked by deer (?) antlers.  

(Please click on images to enlarge)

     Well known as a visual artist & writer among the Polish intelligentsia, both Catholic and Jewish in the 1930's, particularly in Warsaw, Schulz supported himself as an industrial-arts shop teacher in the small Polish city of Drohobycz. 
     This city was part of Poland before WWII but has been part of Ukraine since the war ended. The only Polish speakers remaining in areas of Ukraine annexed from Poland after the war are now elderly. Schulz was executed at point-blank range on a Drohobycz street by a German officer in 1942. That street corner can be seen in Shoah Dreams detail # 4 (above). 

Photos of Schulz, his friends and and Drohobycz are in Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz (Jerzy Ficowski, editor, Harper & Row, 1988). 

The wing on Schulz's shoulder is from a bird from the Solomon Islands.

Please click on images to enlarge

Men praying inside a secret synagogue in the Warsaw Ghetto. The man second from left is the one seen in the detail section (above) with the green tallis (prayer shawl). From The Warsaw Ghetto in Pictures, chapter titled Worship, plates 75-82

Segan, Fishman and Vinecour were active at the Southern Illinois University campus Hillel House - Jewish student center in the mid- 1970's. Fishman was an undergraduate major in the university's School of Cinema and Photography. Vinecour was campus Hillel Director and also the Carbondale area community rabbi.

The upside down man with a beard was an observant Jewish man wearing a prayer shawl, seen with the green stripes. The image was drawn from a Warsaw Ghetto photo where he is seen at a table in a "hidden schul" (a secret, hence, illegal, religious school or synagogue) on which were Sabbath candlestick holders and candles. Also portrayed are a bird and broken sabbath candlestick  drawn from a Polish Jewish gravestone; these are from a photo of a gravestone in Time of Stones (Interpress, Warsaw, 1983, photos by Monika Krajewska). A broken candlestick holder on a gravestone symbolically represents a life ended. The gravestones with the birds and broken candle sticks are in the Jewish cemetery in Szydlowiec, Poland, plate 118 in Time of Stones.

The man pulling a wagon with the child sitting in it appears in a photo in The Warsaw Ghetto - 45th Anniversary of the Uprising. 

Woman with the baby carriage and pinnacled building in the Warsaw Ghetto (from the chapter Resettlement, in The Warsaw Ghetto - 45th Anniversary of the Uprising)

12. Detail showing Alin Lederman of Ostrowicz, Poland (wearing a jacket and tie); an anonymous woman in the Warsaw Ghetto pushing a baby carriage; and a tower with a pinnacle or spire top that was in the Warsaw Ghetto. The woman with the carriage is drawn from a photo in The Warsaw Ghetto - 45th Anniversary of the Uprising. 

The wing coming out from Alin's left shoulder (to the right of his head and shoulder) is from a horned grebe from Washington state.

Alin's father Josef and youngest brother are depicted in Under the Wings of G-D Drawing No. 37 in the Under Wings Gallery; Alin's mother Laja and two of his three sisters, Zosia and Hanah are seen in UWG No. 32 (also in the Under Wings Gallery). 

The Hebrew letters drawn in the building tower are not seen in the photo but were fanciful additions by the artist. This buildings origin and use has not been researched by the artist. None of the original buildings in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw - that became the Warsaw Ghetto under the Nazi occupation - were rebuilt after the war.

The orange-reddish bird to the left of the tower and to the right of the woman with the baby carriage is drawn from a bird image in an 19th century amulet (in the form of a) watercolor, reproduced in black and white, p.77 in Jewish Art & Civilization (Geoffrey Wigoder, editor. Chartwell Books, Switzerland, 1972). The amulet was designed to ward off the evil eye for women in childbirth and is housed in the collection of the Strasbourg - Musee Alsacien, Depot Permanent de la Societe pour l'Histoire des Israelites d'Alsace et Lorraine, France.   

Two pre-war Polish Torahs (above right). The Torah scrolls are protected with beautifully embroidered cloth coverings. Both have exquisitely crafted metal plates in front. Left: An early 20th C. Polish painting. From Polish Jewry: Art & Culture (Interpress, Warsaw, 1983)

 
Shoah Dreams drawing detail - Polish Torah Crown 

The Hebrew letter "chai" (pronounced like the ch in the Scottish Loch Ness) seen in the left side of the crown was a fanciful addition by the artist. The letter "chai" means life in English. The artist saw a photo of it on the cover of In the Land We Shared (Polish Interpress Agency, Warsaw), a commemorative magazine about Polish - Jewish life and culture published in the late 1980's.   

A Torah crown is used to cover the top of a Torah.  A Torah is the Scroll, hand-written in ink on parchment, rolled onto two dowels, containing The Five Books of Moses. This is also known as The Hebrew, or Jewish Scriptures. Christians call it The Old Testament. To observant Jews of course, Torah is always new and hardly old except in the great number of years it has been used to make families and communities continue on in a vital way from generation-to-generation.  

At Jewish services a section of Torah is read every Saturday in synagogue for the entire year, beginning with Genesis I about a month after the Jewish New Year, which in October 2000 began the calendar year 5761.  The Jewish calendar is lunar- based; Jewish holidays fall on different days each year in the western calendar. 

The Jewish New Year is called Rosh Ha'shonah and is followed by Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. About a month after that is the holiday called Simchat Torah, or Rejoicing of the Law. The first Saturday following begins the new reading of Torah at shabbot (sabbath) services, beginning with Genesis. 

Photo of the man seen "upside down" at center left of detail 

MITZVO (a Hasidic song) 

"Always to be joyful is one of G-d's commandments" 

"Mitzvo gedoilo liyoiss besimkho toumid" (transliteration from Yiddish, the language of many of eastern Europe's murdered Jews)

"Es un mandamiento de Dios el estar siempre alegre"
(Canto chasidico) 

"C'est un commandment de Dieu d'etre toujours joyeux" 
(chant chassidique)

"Ein heiteres Gemut zu haben, ist ein Gebut Gottes" (Chassidisches Gesang)

"God gebiedt ons om altijd vrolijken gelukkig tezijn"
(Chassidisch lied) 

Special thanks to singer JACQUI SUSSHOLZ for the lyrics from his terrific 1990 music-CD 'YIDDISH IS FOREVER' 
(Sweetwood Productions, Antwerpen, Belgium)  

14. Clockwise starting with the Torah Crown:  Alin Lederman (with the jacket and tie); and an anonymous, unknown man (with the beard and glasses) in the Warsaw Ghetto.

The wing with the blue center (above the Torah crown) is from a Rosealla, a parrot from New South Wales, Australia. The long blue wing between the face of the upside down man with the hat, beard and glasses and Alin Lederman is from a shearwater, an ocean-going seabird.