BY NIM WUNNAN
The first exhibits at the new home for the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education include the story of a teen-written, underground magazine.
The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education has a new home and big plans. Founded in 1990 as a “museum without walls” in the Multnomah County Central Library, the museum has been “peripatetic” ever since, according to Director Judith Margles. It has found temporary homes at Montgomery Park, an Old Town storefront, and a more comfortable, longer-term but still-temporary location on Northwest Kearney street.
They’ve now found their forever home in the former location of the Museum of Contemporary Craft, on the North Park Blocks at the corner of Northwest Davis Street.
Many of us in Portland still feel the sting of the sudden closure of the beloved contemporary craft museum that was considered, in the words of Oregon ArtsWatch’s Bob Hicks, “a pacesetting institution [by] both the city and a tightknit national craft art scene.” Luckily, the unexpected announcement of MoCC’s closure came at a time when the Oregon Jewish Museum had already begun a formal study to find a permanent location. That space was “too good to miss,” according to Margles. After initial discussions with the owner, Pacific Northwest College of Art, a 45-day exclusivity period was extended to OJM, giving them much-needed time to complete a fast, dedicated, and ultimately successful fundraising campaign that raised more than $5 million, mainly in large donations.
The new location is part art gallery, curated by Bruce Guenther, and part historical museum, with engaging exhibits from Bryan Potter Design and Janice Dilg at HistoryBuilt, and part cozy café. Add those parts together, and it sums to something more like a cultural center—a place for history, issues, and exploration of what it means to be Jewish and Jewish in Oregon. They’ve already begun hosting events in their 100-seat auditorium, most recently the panel discussion, “Never Again: A Jewish Response to the Rohingya Crisis.”
Most of the second floor of the museum is dedicated to their three “core exhibits.” The first, Discrimination and Resistance, An Oregon Primer, looks at the history of official state discrimination—against Jews, African Americans, and others—while documenting and celebrating the resistance techniques that have been used to combat it. The second, Oregon Jewish Stories, gets specific and personal about the stories of the Jewish community of Oregon with a collection of artifacts, photographs, and historical accounts arranged to encourage exploration and curiosity. Next to these exhibits, which directly address current issues of oppression and discrimination, The Holocaust, An Oregon Perspective presented by the Center for Holocaust Education offers a somber and weighty cautionary tale with stories of Oregon and southwest Washington residents who survived.
The first floor hosts the main gallery, which recently closed I AM THIS, an excellent collection of paintings and sculptures by Jewish artists with a connection to Oregon, including Mark Rothko. A promising R.B. Kitaj retrospective will be opening in June, following two remarkable, newly installed book-arts exhibits—To Tell the Story: The Wollach Holocaust Haggadah and Vedem: The Underground Magazine of the Terezin Ghetto.
To Tell the Story: The Wollach Holocaust Haggadah
Commissioned by Helene and Zygfryd B. Wolloch, the Wollach Pessach Haggadah in Memory of the Holocaust is a richly illustrated modern take on the Haggadah. With lithographic prints by David Wander and calligraphy by Yonah Weinreb, this beautiful, handmade tome places the traditional text of the Jewish liberation from slavery in Egypt in the context of Holocaust survivorship. Wander’s prints use iconography from concentration camps and World War II to link the story of liberation from Ancient Egypt to the living memory of the Jews who survived the Holocaust.
Vedem: The Underground Magazine of the Terezin Ghetto
Vedem Editor, Petr Ginz (age 12). Photo courtesy of Rina Taraseiskey.
Called “the Dead Poets Society of Terezin” by the Jewish Journal, Vedem was an extraordinary, vibrant, handmade magazine produced by a collective of teenagers under terrifying conditions in the Terezin ghetto/concentration camp during WWII. With a title that means “in the lead” in Czech, Vedem was founded in Terezin by a 14-year-old artistic prodigy, Petr Ginz. Born in Prague, Ginz was a writer, poet, and artist who had written several novels while still a child. Creating Vedem and driving its weekly production became his final and most influential achievement before he was deported to Auschwitz and killed at the age of 16.
Vedem ran for 83 issues, published every Friday and distributed by being read aloud at secret meetings. These readings became an important social and cultural hub for the captives of Terezin, who had been taken from their lives in the thriving intellectual culture of pre-war Prague. Vedem itself was more than a publication—the boys who produced it, led by Ginz and later also Sidney Taussig, called themselves “The Republic of Shkid” in reference to a Russian book about a children’s orphanage shared with them by Walter Eisinger. Eisinger supervised the boys in the foster home where they lived together in a converted schoolhouse on three-tier bunks. There, they found a discarded typewriter. The initial issues of Vedem were typewritten on smuggled supplies, and when the typewriter ribbon wore out, the boys of Shkid handwrote the magazine.
More than 60 boys contributed under various pseudonyms over the run of Vedem, and Ginz was the engine behind the project. Many of the printing supplies came from Ginz’s parents, who still lived in Prague and were thus protected by the Nuremberg Laws. They regularly sent their son packages of art materials and food. He assigned projects to other children such as interviewing other residents of Terezin, writing poetry, or drawing illustrations of their daily life. As these were children risking their lives to produce the articles, they were often delivered as notes scribbled in secret on scraps of paper. Ginz groomed them to the editorial standards of Vedem. When there weren’t enough articles for the week’s issue, he’d bribe children to write with treats from his parents. If that didn’t work, he’d write the whole thing himself, under multiple pseudonyms.
Taussig first joined as a sports writer but became essential to the magazine’s survival. His father was employed in the administration of the camp, and Taussig himself had the job of delivering corpses to the crematorium. Urged by Ginz to write something more substantial than his sports column, he eventually produced an account of the operations of the crematorium, one of the most harrowing and significant contributions to Vedem. Partially because of his father’s position, he was the only member of the Shkid boys to remain after the rest of them were shipped to Auschwitz about two years after the founding of the magazine.
Alone, Taussig retrieved all the existing magazine material from the empty schoolhouse where his friends once lived and, with the help of his blacksmith father, built a metal box to store the archive along with 120 of Ginz’s paintings. He then smuggled the box to the edge of the city, where he interred it in the wall of the city moat, out of sight but above the waterline. After liberation, Taussig dug the box up and carried it with him on the journey back to Prague by horse and carriage, preserving the legacy of Vedem and Petr Ginz. Taussig currently lives in Florida.
In the years since, Vedem has been recognized as a singular artifact of the Holocaust. The first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, even carried a drawing by Ginz into space. However, this traveling exhibition is the first major survey of the art and history of Vedem.
The exhibit is the brainchild of Rina Taraseiskey. A documentarian and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and resistance fighters, Taraseiskey was moved to begin work on a documentary about Vedem and Petr Ginz after learning about the magazine at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. She flew to Prague with survivors, including Taussig, and interviewed Ginz’s sister.
While working on the documentary, the richness of the material in Vedem made her feel “selfish that she was keeping it all to herself.” Taraseiskey partnered with designer Michael Murphy and writer Danny King to create a dynamic, highly visual exhibition. Cartoons from the pages of Vedem are blown up to wall-sized graphics that frame the facts of life in the Terezin ghetto/camp. Sixteen of the Shkid boys, including Ginz and Taussig, are profiled in the “masthead” section, identified by their nicknames and drawn portraits. The highly-designed presentation of this material emphasizes the subversive, youthful nature of Vedem. Taraseiskey wants to show how the rebellious humor, subversive art, and spirit of resistance that drove Vedem is as energetic and vital as the youth movements of resistance, independent publishing, and music of today.
Given how prominent independent publishing and progressive politics are in Portland’s present identity, this exhibit shouldn’t struggle for relevance here. Just as the museum encourages connections between the history of Jews in Oregon and the present issues facing all marginalized populations and voices, this is an excellent opportunity to consider the deeply political roots of independent publishing in Portland, beyond the contemporary “zinester” culture. For example, influential anarchist newspaper, the Firebrand, was published out of Sellwood in the 1890s before being shut down for “obscene materials,” which included a Walt Whitman poem. Then there’s Oshu Nippo, a Japanese-language daily that became essential to the large Japanese community in Portland in the first half of the 20th century. Oshu Nippo was seized by federal agents the day that Pearl Harbor was bombed, and its printing press was later used by the U.S. government to print anti-Japanese propaganda while its founder, Iwao Oyama, was held in an internment camp in New Mexico. It’s worth noting that The Oregon Jewish Museum now stands just a few blocks from the waterfront Japanese American Historical Plaza, which commemorates the executive order that destroyed Portland’s Japantown by sending its residents, including Oyama, to internment camps. Likewise, the exhibits documenting the forced demolition of Jewish neighborhoods in Southwest Portland in the 1950s make the obvious connections to the destruction of Black communities after the Vanport flood, using the same language that we currently use to discuss the economic displacement of gentrification.
It’s very clear from the museum’s current programming, updated collection, and these upcoming exhibits that, though the stories the Oregon Jewish Museum tells are from a Jewish perspective, they with all of us, one way or another, regardless of our beliefs or backgrounds.