From: SEDOLTD
To: SEDOLTD
Sent: Sun, Jan 13, 2013 11:10 pm
Subject: (no subject)
Please take a few
minutes and read the content of the web page below…
It is a very interesting
project about what is left in a small section of a country years after the
Holocaust. Even if you do not get
involved, you might want to follow it as it
evolves.
I grew up in the same
region of Hungary where Ari decided to document the remnants of a once vibrant
Jewish population, prior to the Holocaust.
I was a child during the
Holocaust. As a child, I remember
the horror of my friends and their families being rounded up by the Nazis,
carted off on horse drawn wagons and German military trucks, never to
be seen again.
Jeno Abraham, my
father’s business partner and a family friend, was Jewish. I remember when he and his family were
captured and forcibly removed from their home by the Nazis.
Later on, Mr. Abraham
was among a contingent of slave laborers hauled through our village by the
German troops. During a small
window of opportunity, my father managed to lure him and one of his friends away
in order to hide and protect them.
If the two men would had been discovered hiding on our property, the
penalty for such an act of humanity would have been the extermination of my
entire family by firing squad. Both
men ultimately survived in our old abandoned cellar for a month, until the
Russian troops arrived and liberated them. Unfortunately, Mr. Abraham’s entire
family perished in one of the Nazi concentration
camps.
Ari is a member of our
family, married to my nephew’s daughter and they live in
Canada.
Thanks and best
wishes,
Joe
PS: if you happen to be
on any of the “social web sites”, you
might want to post Ari’s web page.
Hi,
My name is Ari Tapiero, I am a photographer in Ottawa, Canada; my heart and soul is in documentary work, specifically portraits. I work with large format film cameras, 4x5 and 8x10, to get the look and detail I need.I've been a photographer for 15 years; I've had a few exhibits, notably a solo show in Montreal, where I also produced a book to accompany the exhibit. I've also photographed a coffee-table book about the city of Ottawa.
I've been working on The Last Jews of Eastern Hungary for six months now, and I hope to return to Hungary this summer to continue work, as well as expand upon it.
Why It Matters
There are sizable, stable and growing Jewish populations in much of western Europe; but what about the east, where the Holocaust claimed the majority of its victims? What happened to the survivors and their descendants in Hungary, Ukraine, or Romania?
I got a small glimpse when I was in Miskolc, Hungary in 2010. My wife is from the town, and our daughter was born there in the summer of 2010. I found an aging, withered, but still-defiant tiny Jewish community. They had heard the war stories of their parents, and still feared for their children's future, so they did not continue in their religious traditions. Their children, grown fearful of religious reprisals, have largely gone overseas or married out-of-the-faith, and are thus unable or unwilling to make a Jewish community for themselves and their own children. The resulting sense of finality hangs heavily over this community, as their congregation slowly dies off.
There are other places like this one in eastern Hungary, Ukraine and Romania, and I feel it important to document their existence as a kind of living museum; most of these communities will have disappeared in the next 20-30 years. The small-town eastern European Jewish community, once the backbone of a continent, is on the verge of natural extinction; eventually, only memories and recorded materials will tell us that they existed at all.
It is of vital importance to me to be able to give a sense of what
people are (and were) like and how they live as individuals and as a
community, in order to preserve that memory for future generations. In
essence, this is what being a photographer means to me, and it is both a
great responsibility and a great honour.
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