2/28/07

NY Times Praises YU Museum Exihibit of Photos of Poland's Lost Jews

It's amazing. YU Museum Director Sylvia Herskowitz and her staff continue to wow the museum world with serious and professional exhibits at the Yeshiva University Museum. I remember when the YU Museum first opened. Who would have imagined then that the NY Times would be writing glowing reports on its exhibitions. Bravo to all involved.

The photos [click here to see some]are breathtaking. Here's part of what they said at the Times today:
The Things They Left Behind: Photographs From Poland’s Lost Jews
By JOSEPH BERGER

They are exquisitely ordinary family snapshots: six young men and women on the beach, playfully arranged in a pyramid; a bourgeois family flaunting its Sabbath best of fur-lined topcoats and rakishly angled hats; a dark-haired Orthodox mother with an infant cradled in her arms and her five children, three barefoot, lined up stiffly in front of a tumbledown shack.

There are dozens of other photographs just as posed and stilted, and strangers scanning them might barely pause for a second glance — except for one fact. Almost all these Polish Jews, rich and poor alike, would be dead within a few years, massacred in the Nazi camps or ghettoes or consumed by the war. One woman in the beach pyramid, a caption says, perished in the Soviet Union, searching for her husband as they fled the Nazis.

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