This thesis presents the first in-depth study of the impact the Filmbühne (film stage) had in the lives of German Jews living under the systematic oppression of the Nazi regime. The Filmbühne was an extension of the Jüdischer Kulturbund, a Jewish organization which offered cultural activities exclusively for Jews in the Third Reich between 1933 and 1941. The Filmbühne opened in December 1938 and provided Jews in Berlin an opportunity to view films, an activity which had been forbidden to them in the previous month. This thesis first reconstructs the Filmbühne itself, including who attended the film screenings, what was shown, the cinema’s function within the larger Kulturbund organization, and why the Nazi authorities allowed it to exist. The following chapter analyzes diaries, essays, and letters of personal correspondence in order to determine how individual German Jews interacted with the cinema and the different ways the organization affected their daily lives. The closing chapter is devoted to the ways in which films were presented to the Jewish community in Germany through film reviews in the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, the only surviving Jewish newspaper at the time. This study illustrates how these film reviews resisted the prevailing ideology of the Nazi regime, reflected both in the films’ plots and their reviews in non-Jewish newspapers in the Third Reich, and articulated a particularly Jewish cultural perspective. Furthermore, this thesis demonstrates how the Jewish reviews of the Filmbühne screenings were used as a pretext to circumvent strict Nazi censorship in order to send messages to the Jewish communities across the German Reich, having a much greater impact than merely affecting the individuals who actually attended the film screenings. Ultimately this study discusses the variety of ways that the Filmbühne affected the lives of German Jews, most notably by increasing quality of life and serving as a valuable communication tool that subverted Nazi ideology and opposed the Nazi regime’s policy of cultural segregation and sent messages of validation and encouragement to the Jewish community.

Supervisors:
Dr. Kobi Kabalek
Prof. Ofer Ashkenazi

Between 1947-48, an album of linocut prints was hand crafted within the confines of a British Mandate Internment Camp in Cyprus, one of a number which were established as a temporary measure designed to prevent illegal immigration into Palestine after World War II. Vocational training and creative practices were encouraged by relief agencies, both in the European DP camps and in Cyprus. In 1947, the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee worked in coordination with the educational organization Beit Rutenberg to establish a series of workshops in the camps in Cyprus, to which Jewish-Palestinian teachers who specialized in fine arts, sciences, and humanities were sent. Under the tutelage of the artist Naftali Bezem, twenty-five survivors who had struggled through the destruction of European Jewry only to find themselves imprisoned once more, took part in the making of the album, entitled Exile in Cyprus. This thesis covers several areas of focus: the style and content of the prints themselves, the political and ideological context of the workshops and the impact of the experience on the emotional recovery and subsequent lifestyle of some of those involved. Issues relating to the involvement of institutions are also raised, in this case the Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem. An analysis of the album, which was intended to be read as a collective body of work, reveals many themes and subject matters reflecting the nature of camp life, including the heat, the lack of sanitary conditions, and gender imagery. The discussion also considers the extent to which the content of the album overlaps with concentration camp iconography, and the potential relationship between their status as refugees and as survivors of the Holocaust. Little is known in terms of the impact that the creative process had on the lives and rehabilitation of the students of the workshop and their long-term futures, including whether they continued to produce art after arriving at their ultimate destination, Palestine. In the context of rebuilding the new Jewish state, art was not highly prioritized or encouraged as a profession. Exile in Cyprus was mostly forgotten and hidden away in archives or personal collections.

Supervisors:
Dr. Rachel Perry
Dr. Eva Frojmovic

At the end of World War II, two suitcases containing some 4,500 children’s drawings were found in Terezin ghetto. Of the drawings, about 500 were created by teenage girls who were incarcerated in the Girls Home L410, room 28 between July 1942 to October 1944. This artwork represents the prolific outcome of the mentoring of these children by Friedl Dicker Brandeis, a professional artist who volunteered her artistic skills to the children of Terezin. Dicker Brandeis encouraged freedom of imagination and creativity, enabling her students to connect with their own selves, feelings, hopes, fears, and fantasies during the unusually cruel circumstances of the Holocaust. The artwork provides a unique perspective in understanding the lives of the youth in the ghetto.

The aim of this research is to explore the artwork and the creative process of the girls of room 28 individually and examine how this preserved their sense of individuality and creative freedom, thereby helping them to cope with their harsh reality.

In order to understand the context in which the creative process took place, this thesis is comprised of two sections. The first segment provides historical background and the essence of daily life for adolescents in Terezin. It explains the complexity and value of art in Terezin, the role and impact of Friedl Dicker Brandeis, and explores the life of the girls of room 28. The second section analyzes selected artwork created by the girls of room 28, accompanied by testimonies of five survivors from the room, excerpts from diaries, and essays written by some of the girls who perished, as another powerful way to document history from the perspective of teenagers.

In conclusion, this artwork is the most valid, elucidating, and illuminating evidence of what these girls witnessed and felt. Despite the hardships and challenges, the girls were able to free their spirits, imagine, immerse themselves in creativity, and express their utmost inner feelings and thoughts. This gift enabled them to preserve their sense of individuality, affirm their existence, and allowed them to document their lives. The methods used to analyze the artwork give a new perspective in documenting the lives of youth in Terezin and stands as both an archive augmenting the mounting literature of the Holocaust and a memorial to the 45 girls who perished, leaving behind their drawings as traces of their existence.

Supervisors:
Prof. Hagit Lavsky
Dr. Rachel Perry

This research draws on students’, teachers’, and choreographers’ current understandings of Holocaust Education, to explore the use of dance for teaching about the Holocaust in secular high schools.

Depictions of the Holocaust have emerged in various forms of Contemporary and Modern Art. These are derived from different narratives of the Holocaust, created by survivors, their children, and the following generations. The Visual arts and performing arts, specifically dance, can offer a way to express, to reflect upon, to protest against or to resist individual and collective trauma related to the Holocaust. As the arts are increasingly being utilized to express experiences and thoughts about the Holocaust, questions can now be raised regarding the specific use of dance in Holocaust Education.

A handful of choreographers from Israel and beyond have dealt with the topic of the Holocaust in their stage-based and non stage-based works, which draw on both theatrical and social dance. Yet, a paucity of research exists on the specific role of dance in Holocaust Education. This thesis will investigate the use of dance for teaching about the Holocaust, as a medium that not only utilizes historical facts and judgements about victims, perpetrators, bystanders, or resistors, but that also enables students to reflect on the Holocaust on a personal and emotional level. It will achieve this through the analysis of interviews with students and teachers who do not have prior experience in the field of dance, and with choreographers who have explored the Holocaust in their work. Ultimately, the aim is to explore how dance acts as an embodied teaching tool, which allows students, teachers, and choreographers alike to viscerally encounter collective memory and to explore an individual understanding on the topic, which may not be achieved by learning from historical facts alone.

Supervisors:
Prof. Arie Kizel
Dr. Henia Rottenberg

The scholarly discussion of artworks created by inmates of Nazi concentration camps has viewed them either as evidence for spiritual resistance or as documentary historical illustrations, thus only rarely examining them using the methods of art history. In contrast, this study approaches them as artworks, which exceed documentation and cannot be reduced to narratives of resistance. They are analyzed as subjective interpretations of the camp experiences. The focus on one topic – forced labor – at one place – the Buchenwald concentration camp – permits me to closely examine a great number of artworks. In Buchenwald, most artworks were produced by political prisoners with a socialist background as well as a rather privileged position in the inmates’ hierarchy. Thus, one might expect them to pre-empt the anti-fascist postwar iconography. But even though they used socialist artistic traditions, a closer analysis reveals a striking diversity and ambivalence.

The first part of this study asks how the ideology of prisoner artists influenced their depictions of individual forced laborers. I show that the degree to which forced labor is appropriated within familiar frameworks of work depends on the purposes of these artworks. They often oscillate between idealization and documentation, similar to works of early Realism. Yet, while all the analyzed artworks somehow adhered to ideals of socialist imagery, their multifaceted character rejects any one-dimensional classification. The second part raises the question, how the specific kind of forced labor depicted influenced the artistic interpretation. I therefore compare depictions of inmates pulling wagons in the quarry and inmates carrying corpses to the crematorium. This reveals how the political prisoners’ encounters with the horrors of the Holocaust challenged previous patterns of interpretation. The corpse carriers were no longer characterized as resistant or heroic. Instead, the emphasis shifted to the relationship between workers and corpses as well as, the inmates surrounding them, who are at the verge of death.

Supervisors:
Prof. Verena Krieger
Dr. Kobi Kabalek

At the turn of the 20th century, a late Industrial Revolution led to a Golden Age in the German entertainment business, during this time the German Circus gained a reputation as the leader in the industry. There were three dominant Jewish families that factored into Germany’s success in the field, they were: the Blumenfeld, Strassburger, and Lorch families. These circuses saw their apex in the inter-war years. The Blumenfeld, and Lorch Circuses filed for bankruptcy at the onset of the economic downturn, as did the vast majority of German circuses. However, in the case of these Jewish circuses, the question of the effect of German antisemitism must be examined. The Strassburgers were forced to sell their circus to their competitor Ring Mistress Paula Busch, in order to Aryanize their business in accordance with the Nazi Government in 1935. The coming years destroyed the Jewish circus in Germany. Only a few survived the atrocity of the Holocaust, but the Jewish circus failed to continue.

This thesis focuses on the Lorch family and their experience in the Holocaust while contextualizing their story in the history of Circus Lorch, from conception, through the Great Depression and the rise of Nazism, to their ultimate destruction.

Two Lorch brothers were arrested and transported to French internment camps, they wrote letters to their older siblings in hiding in Belgium. The bulk of primary resources for this project is based on these letters, which unfold the Lorch family experience in the Holocaust. Their experiences are typical of a German Jewish family, for example, some of the siblings stayed in their hometown, some fled, some hid, and still most perished in the Holocaust. But their circus network made the Lorch experience unique. The circus culture and network into which the Lorchs integrated themselves changed their experience in the Holocaust. Some of the siblings even hid within the circus, performing throughout the war, while others, like the brothers in the French camps, received food, money, and other goods from the European network of circus people. The measure of success was not survival, rather it was the willingness of the circus community to help despite the danger presented by rising tides of Nazism. The Lorch experience in the Holocaust was singular, each family’s story leads to a better understanding of the history of the Holocaust.

Supervisors:
Prof. Hagit Lavsky
Prof. Michael Brenner

Dr. Henryk Beck, a gynecologist of Jewish origin and a distinguished figure of the 1930s Polish medical world, survived the World War II and the Holocaust in Lviv and Warsaw. In 1946, at the age of 50, he died suddenly, leaving behind a pictorial diary: nearly 1,700 small-scale artworks from the years 1937-1946 where he depicted his daily life and the historical events he lived through. Despite the existence of this rich and remarkable material, Beck’s life and art, specifically from the wartime, have so far been recognized only broadly or fragmentarily.

This study aims to reconstruct Beck’s biography between September 1939 and January 1945 on the basis of written sources (archives, memoirs, and press), and his art from that time. The research conducted proves the sources’ bilateral convergence and complementarity and bring new information to light, such as details of Beck’s military service, imprisonment, and time in hiding. The reconstruction is presented against historical events, and it outlines key determinators of Beck’s actions and positioning as a Polish-assimilated, upper-class representative, pointing to the diverse conduct of his social environment and of individuals towards him as a victim of the anti-Jewish oppression. The protective role and underground activities of his wife, Jadwiga Beck, are highlighted.

Through the analysis of selected artworks, my study offers an interpretation of how Beck captured his experience of the war and Holocaust artistically. I demonstrate that his progressive social degradation and maneuvering through the realities of Soviet and Nazi persecution are reflected in his style, as well as motifs and means of expression used. Beck’s artistic language, which I define as synonymous with his social status, indicative of his visual competence and immersion in contemporary graphic and artistic trends, undergoes a profound development in extremis, while hiding in the ruins of Warsaw in late 1944. I argue that “The Bunker” series of Beck’s drawings can be regarded as the pinnacle of his creativity as an artist and should be considered in the context of his earlier works. Reviewing the author’s wartime art against the background of his legacy and biography as a whole, I argue that making art served him at the time as a way to reduce social degradation and exclusion from the strata and culture to which he belonged.

Supervisors:
Prof. Barbara Engelking
Dr. Rachel Perry