Yad Vashem Lectures 2021 Part II — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

On October 2021, we gathered at Beit Vilna to hear the second part of the Yad Vashem lectures.

1. Ms. Sima Volkovich, director of the family research section at the Yad Vashem archives, spoke on the genealogy of Lithuanian Jews, search options regarding these people based on letters, photos and various testimonies which have accumulated in the Yad Vashem archives.
2. A discussion on Samuel Bak, his personal experiences, and the imprint of the Holocaust on his works. Lecture by Eliad Moreh-Rosenberg, Museum Curatorand Directorof the Art Department at Yad Vashem.

About the mother who cared for and encouraged her son Samuel Bak's painting studies in the Vilna Ghetto, in Germany, and in the DP camps, and who appears in the early paintings of the artist from Vilna; on the yellow badge that becomes a symbol of a universal phenomenon in Bak's personal experience; on the Star of David which appears in his paintings as an expression of Jewish identity and is connected to the stones of the Western Wall.

Mention is also made of the use of motifs which Bak takes out of context and reassembles, giving them a new meaning (a pear, an egg, etc.); cracked housewares, and still-life scenes as permanently fixed images of sudden family destruction during the Holocaust; on the shot egg in the forefront of a family painting of lifeless people, symbolizing the past of the child looking straight ahead.

Galia Gavish, an artist and member of the Association, commented that Samuel Bak felt that people did not want to hear about the Holocaust and thus did not want to provoke pity, suffering and pain, but to talk about an existential situation. As the years went by, he portrayed metaphysics and surrealism, and spoke more about the pain of the Holocaust.