|
50 - 950 West 41st Ave, P: 604.264.0499 |
|
|
 |
October 2007 - December 2007 LAWYERS WITHOUT RIGHTS: THE FATE OF JEWISH LAWYERS imagine what would happen if half of BC’s lawyers were summarily disbarred, the legal system transformed into an instrument of tyranny and the rule of law disappeared. If individual rights and freedoms were threatened, who would stand up to protect them? An internationally acclaimed exhibit that chronicles the fate of Jewish lawyers before and during the Holocaust reminds BC lawyers and citizens what can happen when politics interfere with the right to justice. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 there were 19,276 lawyers in Germany, almost half of whom were considered to be Jewish according to Nazi racial ideology. On November 30, 1938, Jews were officially banned from practicing law. All lost their profession, most of them lost their country and a large number lost their lives Lawyers Without Rights: Canadian Stories: Online exhibit |
 |
October 2006 - August 2007 Vancouver’s Schindler Jews Vancouver’s Schindler Jews presents the story of Oskar Schindler who rescued over 1000 Jews during the Holocaust, through the unique perspective of four Schindlerjuden who later immigrated to Canada and found new lives in Vancouver. The exhibit is based on the personal narratives, documents, photographs and artefacts of the four Schindler survivors - Else Dunner, Bernard Goldberg and Esther and Leon Kaufman - ensuring that their unique voices will not be lost. |
 |
February - September 2006 Shoes of Memory: Holocaust Ceramic Work The seventy pairs of ceramic shoes that make up the exhibition, echo the piles of shoes, clothing, hair, glasses and suitcases found in the warehouses of Auschwitz at liberation and evoke the memory those who perished. Meticulously researched and rendered in clay, Stolzenberg’s shoes return a sense of identity to the victims of the Holocaust by rescuing the shoes from their anonymity in the piles at Auschwitz. Stolzenberg's work widely exhibited in Great Britain and Europe, was presented here for its first showing in North America.\ |
 |
Fall 2005 Questionable Issue: Currency of the Holocaust Questionable Issue: Currency of the Holocaust is a travelling exhibit produced by the Holocaust Museum Houston. It consists of eighty-five pieces of scrip (currency) issued at thirteen Nazi concentration camps or ghettos, including Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, and the Warsaw ghetto. Artefacts were donated by numismatist Charlton E. Meyer Jr., owner of the most complete collection of money from the Holocaust known today. The currencies of the Nazi-imposed camps and ghettos of World War II attest to the extent of the tragedy. For more information or to rent the travelling exhibit |
 |
Spring 2005 Faces of Loss: Remembering Those who Perished Faces of Loss: Remembering Those Who Perished is an exhibit that focuses on the victims of the Holocaust, whose families later immigrated to Canada and now live in Vancouver. Survivor and other Vancouver families contributed their precious few pre-war photographs, of some of their family members who were lost during the Holocaust. In many cases, no photographs remain of those who perished. The exhibit serves to remember and mourn these victims, while restoring the human, personal element to what has become an abstraction of numbers.
|
 |
Fall 2004 Anne Frank - A History for Today Anne Frank is an icon, a myth, and a memory. Her story is a warning, a reminder and an inspiration. Her diary is one of the most widely read books in the world. Anne Frank – A History For Today arrestingly presents Anne Frank’s story in words, still photos and moving images. The multi-media display juxtaposes photographs of the Frank family with documentation of events of the time. The story of Anne Frank’s life and death remains relevant as children and other innocent civilians continue to be the targets of violence, war and conflict today. This travelling exhibit was developed by the |
 |
Summer 2004 The Post War Photographs of Henry Ries:
The Post War Photographs of Henry Ries presents thirty-five photographs from New York Times photojournalist Henry Ries documenting the Rothschild Hospital Displaced Person (DP) camp and the return of the Exodus 1947 passengers to Germany. The exhibit captures these two powerful moments in the lives of Jews who had survived the Shoah only to find themselves with no place to call home in the aftermath of the Holocaust. These photographs attest to the dislocation and the waiting of the DP’s as they pondered their future and came to grips with their past.
|
 |
Spring 2004 Light One Candle: A Child's Diary of the Holocaust Light One Candle: A Child's Diary of the Holocaust is a photographic exhibit based on the lost secret diary of a young Jewish boy, Solly Ganor, who survived the Kovno ghetto, a slave labour camp and a death march from Dachau. Ganor’s story is interwoven with the tales of the remarkable rescue efforts of the Japanese Consul to Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, and the liberation of Dachau concentration camp by the Japanese-American 522nd Field Artillery Battalion. The exhibition, curated by Eric Saul from the Visas For Life Foundation, includes over forty-six photographs by Zvi Kadushin (George Kadish). Kadish was an amateur photographer and one of only two Jewish photographers who documented conditions during the Holocaust. His photographs transport the visitor into the crushing life of the Kovno ghetto and provide a chilling echo to Ganor’s riveting text. |
 |
Fall 2003 Silent Voices Speak: Paintings In Silent Voices Speak: Remembering the Holocaust, artist and child survivor Barbara Shilo depicts significant moments during the Holocaust through a series of mixed media paintings. Based on black and white documentary photographs, the paintings manipulate the original images for dramatic effect through the use of colour, proportion, repetition and depth. Some rely heavily on the documentary images, while others take more artistic license to connect viewers emotionally with the images portrayed, which reflect the themes of children in the Holocaust, the Warsaw ghetto uprising, deportation, death camps, death marches and liberation.
|
 |
Spring 2003 RavensbrÜck: Ravensbrück was a unique concentration camp; built exclusively to house female prisoners, it had the highest percentage of murdered prisoners of any concentration camp in Germany. Yet Ravensbrück, and the women imprisoned there, remain relatively unknown. Ravensbrück: Forgotten Women of the Holocaust, is the first VHEC exhibit to focus on the unique victimization of women during the Holocaust. By reproducing the drawings, poetry and even a recipe book made by the women inmates, the exhibit examines the strategies women used to survive: friendship and solidarity among the inmates and their determined resistance to the destruction of mind and spirit through creative and intellectual activities. For more information or to rent the travelling exhibit |
 |
Fall 2002 Korczak and the Children of the Warsaw Ghetto Janusz Korczak was one of the world’s first advocates of children’s rights. On August 6, 1942 he became a heroic figure. On that day, this famous and beloved doctor, writer and educator was forced by the Nazis to gather together the two hundred orphans under his care in the Warsaw ghetto and report for deportation. Refusing all offers for his own rescue, he led the children with quiet dignity to the tram that would take them to their deportation to Treblinka, an extermination camp where they were murdered. Janusz Korczak & The Children of the Warsaw Ghetto examines the life of Janusz Korczak, the experiences and tragic fate of the children in the Warsaw ghetto and looks at how the violation of children’s rights during the Holocaust is reflected in the global fight for children’s rights in the world today. For more information or to rent the travelling exhibit
|
 |
Summer 2002 May 31, 1944 May 31, 1944 was a significant date in the lives of many European Jews. For Isabelle Leitner, it was the day that her family, who were deported from Hungary, arrived in Auschwitz. On May 31, 1944 another group of fortunate Jewish refugees arrived in Philadelphia on a refugee ship that had been stopped mid-ocean by the Germans. Upon their arrival in the US, seventy-four Jewish refugees were taken by train to Canada. On that same day, the Gestapo arrested twenty-eight Jewish children and their young guide who were caught trying to cross the border from France to safety in Switzerland. Included in the exhibit was an art folio created by book artist Philip Gallo and artist Gerson Leiber, May 31, 1944 incorporates illustrations, photos and survivor testimony to examine some of the events on this date in order to show the interrelatedness of seemingly unconnected events during the Holocaust. |
 |
Spring 2002 Life Unworthy of Life: Between 1939 and 1945, 100,000 - 200,000 people fell victim to the Nazi “euthanasia” policy. The policy decreed that men, women and children who suffered from mental illness, who lived with diseases such as tuberculosis and alcoholism, or who were labeled Jewish half-breeds were “unworthy of life.” Life Unworthy of Life: The Euthanasia Crimes at Hadamar tells the disturbing story of one of these so-called “euthanasia” killing centres: the Hadamar Institution in Germany. More than 10,000 mentally and physically disabled men, women and children were murdered by medical practitioners at Hadamar as a direct result of Nazi racial policies. The exhibit raises ethical questions about some controversial areas of genetic research today. For more information or to rent the travelling exhibit
|
 |
Summer 2001 What Words Could Not Express: Some works of art that were secretly produced during the Holocaust managed to survive the devastation that they sought to record. These sketches and drawings speak of the hardships, horrors and simple acts of humanity of the time. They attest to the courage of artists who used lines on paper as acts of resistance. What Words Could Not Express brings together the work of three such artists for the first time. The Dutch artist Henri Pieck captured his experiences as a political prisoner of Buchenwald, while Esther Lurie documented life behind the barbed wire fence of the Kovno ghetto, and the Polish artist and member of the resistance movement Janina Tollik recorded the brutality of Auschwitz. Together, these works are unmatched in the power of their imagery. |
 |
Spring 2001 Too Close to Home: Too Close to Home: Nazism and Anti-Semitism in Canada draws attention to a painful and shameful part of Canadian history during the 1930s and 1940s. Anti-Semitism was pervasive at the time and was reflected in the attitudes of both individual citizens and government policies. It found expression in stereotyping, newspaper headlines, political cartooning, immigration quotas and the policies of exclusion that restricted admission to universities and professions. The period also saw the emergence of Nativist, Nazi and other Fascist groups across the country, from Adrien Arcand's National Social Christian Party in Quebec, to the Toronto Swastika Clubs and the Manitoba Brown Shirts.
|
 |
Fall 2000 Portraits of Our Past: Greece and the Holocaust When one thinks of the Holocaust, one usually thinks of Germany, Austria, and Poland; yet the reach of Nazism and the destruction of Jewish communities reached much farther, to places such as Greece and Rhodes, where it had devastating effects on both the Jewish and non-Jewish populations. The photographic exhibit Portraits of our Past documents the impact of the Holocaust in Greece through the themes of Jewish presence in Greece, Sephardic pre-war heritage, the destruction of communities during the Holocaust, and the post-war rehabilitation of survivors. The photographs, collected from private sources, convey the passing of centuries-old Jewish communities, including Salonica, Athens, Kastoria, Kavala, Jannina and Rhodes, and bear silent witness to their once-vibrant culture. |
 |
Summer 2000 Indifference: Indifference - The Sur-Rational Paintings of Fritz Hirschberger is an exhibit made up of twenty paintings of intense colour and sentiment by contemporary artist and survivor Fritz Hirschberger. Accompanied by text that illuminates, explains or complements the work, his paintings are meant to counteract indifference and to confront viewers with perplexing and disturbing questions. Hirschberger, who lost most of his family, could not approach the Shoah as a subject of his art until well into his sixties. When he began to work on this topic, he did intensive research, and remains committed to historical accuracy and to presenting a human side to the tragedy by capturing individual moments.
|
 |
Spring 2000 Fragments: Fragments: Personal Artefacts of Local Holocaust Survivors features authentic artefacts from the collection of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, each with a unique and powerful story to tell. Most of the objects - ranging from a yellow star, to ghetto money, to forged documents - are on display for the first time. These objects attest to the power of artefacts to educate by raising questions about how they arrived in Canada, their meaning for survivors and their significance as documentary evidence of the Holocaust. Survivors and their documents, photographs and artefacts are inextricably linked. In many cases the survivor has taken extraordinary measures to save these fragile, tangible fragments of their history - concrete evidence that attest to the events of the Holocaust. |
 |
Fall 1999 Shanghai: A Refuge During the Holocaust Shanghai: A Refuge During the Holocaust chronicles the little-known story of the thousands of Jews who sought and found refuge in wartime Shanghai. Based on the oral histories of Shanghai-landers now living in Vancouver, the exhibit tells their stories through the use of documents and photographs. Shanghai: A Refuge During the Holocaust presents the compelling history of this special sanctuary and of those who survived through resolve, adaptability and resourcefulness. For more information or to rent the travelling exhibit Visas For Life: The Story of Feng Shan Ho This exhibit, curated by Eric Saul and produced by the Visas For Life Foundation, was presented concurrently with the Shanghai exhibit. It chronicles the story of Feng Shan Ho, a diplomat rescuer who, as part of the Chinese Consulate in Vienna, issued thousands of travel visas to Jews, allowing them to escape Nazi-occupied Austria.
|
 |
Summer 1999 Gesher Project The Gesher Project was a unique and innovative project undertaken by Vancouver Holocaust survivors, child survivors and adult children of survivors. They met over a six-month period in 1998 to examine the impact of the Holocaust on their lives. They explored these experiences through painting, writing and discussion assisted by facilitators Dr. Alina Wydra, Linda Dayan Frimer, Dale Adams-Segal, and Reisa Schneider. The project culminated with the mounting of the Gesher exhibit. "Gesher", the Hebrew word for bridge, reflects the project’s goal of working together to bridge the generations and to use creative approaches as a means of healing Holocaust trauma. |
 |
Spring 1999 Broken Threads: Broken Threads presents over forty years of German fashion (1895 - 1938), including exquisite men's and women's apparel and accessories created by German and Austrian Jewish designers. The exhibit examines a unique and unexplored aspect of Holocaust history: the methodical destruction of Jewish involvement in the fashion industry. Jews had been prominent in the fashion industry in Germany and Austria for over a hundred years, but Nazism changed that forever. Forced from their homes and businesses, excluded from occupations and cultural life, Jews disappeared. Along with them went the fashion prominence of Berlin and Vienna. Beginning with the boycotts of 1933 and escalating to the expropriation of businesses, expulsions and deportations, Broken Threads is a microcosm of the larger devastation of the Holocaust.
|
 |
Fall 1998 MAUS MAUS, A Memoir of the Holocaust, is a multi-media exhibit based on Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book MAUS. In MAUS, Spiegelman characterizes humans as animals as he tells the disturbing story of his father Vladek’s survival in Nazi Europe and the effects that his parents’ Holocaust experiences had on his own life. The exhibit’s target audience is youth, with the intent of developing new audiences for Holocaust education. Controversial in its comic book form, MAUS remains one of the most engaging Holocaust memoirs read by high school age students and a compelling representation of this devastating period in human history and its impact on successive generations. |
 |
Summer 1998 Order & Chaos: In February 1997, Victoria artist Phyllis Serota began to paint images of the Holocaust. Starting with two or three images, she soon realized she had initiated a much larger project than she had originally conceived. Her work continued until she had completed the fourteen paintings, that would become Order & Chaos. The concept of "tikkun olam", or the responsibility of the Jewish people to “repair the world” guided her; she felt that wounds must be opened and cleansed in order for healing to occur. It is in this spirit that she offers these paintings, which reveal a profoundly human identification with all those who suffered and continue to suffer the horrors of genocide.
|
 |
Fall 1997 - Spring 1998 Open Hearts Closed Doors Open Hearts - Closed Doors marks the 50th anniversary of the arrival in Canada of 1,123 Jewish children orphaned by the Holocaust. It chronicles the lives of these children as they emerged from the Holocaust into DP camps and orphanages, and eventually to the ships that would lead them to new lives in Canada. It also tells the story of the efforts of Jewish organizations and international agencies, such as the Red Cross, who helped identify these children and bring them to Canada. It also speaks to the efforts of Jewish social workers, members of the Jewish community and Jewish foster families who cared for them after their arrival. The exhibit, which presents the documents, photographs, memoirs, diaries, and individual stories of the war orphans, attests to the power of communities to act and make a difference. View Online Exhibit For more information or to rent the travelling exhibit |
 |
Summer 1997 I Never Saw Another Butterfly Based on the book compiled by editor Hana Volavkova that features drawings and poems completed by child victims of the Holocaust, I Never Saw Another Butterfly is a student exhibit of original art inspired by Pavel Friedman’s poem, The Butterfly. Organized and produced by Sentinel Secondary School art teacher Barbara Sunday and Tupper Secondary School art teacher Ed Sunday, the exhibit features images created by students that reflect their understanding of the Holocaust. The exhibit honours the memory of the 1.5 million children who died in the Holocaust and reflects on immense loss of human potential lost through this devastation.
|
 |
Spring 1997 On the Edge of the Abyss: Of all the eloquent and powerful survivor accounts that exist, those done in visual form – drawings or paintings – represent a unique category of Holocaust eyewitness testimony, unmatched in their direct communication of emotions and events. On the Edge of the Abyss features a collection of these visual testimonies in the form of ninety-three drawings by Holocaust survivor Ella Liebermann-Shiber. Completed after liberation and during a period of recovery and re-entry, Liebermann-Shiber’s drawings seek to document and respond to the experiences of the Holocaust from an outside perspective: documenting and commenting on events as an observer rather than as a participant in the action. |
 |
Fall 1996 Judgement on Nuremberg: Der Stürmer (The Stormtrooper) was a virulently racist, anti-Semitic and pornographic newspaper published from 1923 to 1945. Cartoons published in Der Stürmer foreshadowed the “Final Solution:” the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews. Yet Julius Streicher, the owner and editor, never personally killed anyone or gave deportation orders. His crime was to publish what we now think of as hate literature. Through his writings and speeches he incited others to action. Or did he? In the fall of 1946 he was convicted and executed at Nuremberg. Would he have been convicted today? Judgement on Nuremburg offers students an opportunity to decide for themselves, to judge the trial's significance for today, and to discuss current issues of hate speech on the Internet and the trials of suspected Bosnian war criminals at the International Tribunal in the Hague.
|
 |
Summer 1996 Building Bridges: Student Art Exhibit Coordinated by Vivianne Gosselin and Magee Secondary School, Building Bridges was a mural project aimed at giving high school students an opportunity to creatively express the importance of the Holocaust today. After being displayed at the VHEC, the mural was shown in other public venues in the Vancouver area.
|
 |
Spring 1996 The Warsaw Ghetto: A Pictorial Remembrance Created by the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland and on loan from the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education in Kansas City, The Warsaw ghetto features fifty-seven black-and-white photographs of life in the ghetto captured by German soldier Willi Georg in 1941. In 1939, the Jewish community of Warsaw was the largest in Europe and the second largest in the world. In 1940, on Yom Kippur, the Nazis ordered the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto. Within weeks, the ghetto was sealed off from the rest of the world by a brick wall and the population swelled to 450,000. Ghetto life was a constant confrontation with death and survival demanded unflagging resourcefulness and heroic reserves of spiritual resistance, all of which are documented in this moving exhibit.
|
 |
January - March 1996 Visas for Life: Chiune Sugihara From 1933 to 1939, Jews who were able to emigrated to Palestine, the United States, Latin America and Shanghai. By 1940, the Nazis occupied most of Western Europe and had cut off most of those escape routes. Polish Jews however, were still permitted to emigrate from Lithuania through the Soviet Union, provided that they could obtain the necessary travel documents. Despite being ordered to leave, the Japanese Consul Chiune Sugihara remained in Kovno, and for twenty-nine days in 1940, sat for endless hours writing and signing visas by hand. Because of his efforts, thousands of Polish Jews with Sugihara visas survived in safety in Shanghai. |
 |
Fall 1995 We Were Children Then: We Were Children Then, produced by the VHEC, presents the stories, photographs and artefacts of seventeen child survivors from the Vancouver area. The exhibit focuses on the lives of these children, their hopes, their struggles and their losses. We Were Children Then also explores the relationship between these children’s experiences during the Holocaust and the United Nations’ Declaration of the Rights of the Child, moving between the historical context and contemporary issues of racism today.
|
 |
Fall 1995 Regenerations: A part of the city-wide public forum The Spectacular State: Fascism and the Modern Imagination, Regenerations features major works from local artist Nomi Kaplan, whose family fled to Canada at the start of World War II to escape the Holocaust. Incorporating photographs, rubbings from gravestones and collage and installation pieces that document and try to make sense of her experiences and family history, the exhibit is the first retrospective of Kaplan’s art. Working with materials “from her own backyard” puts Kaplan in touch with the cycles of birth, life and death. “These are universal things which affect us all, but over which we have only partial control.” |
 |
Summer 1995 Forced Exit: A Student Art Exhibit An exhibit of artwork by Sentinel Secondary School students inspired by a collection of deportees’ battered suitcases and organized by art teacher Barb Sunday. Student artist Azadeh Yaraghi explains, “While I was completing my piece, I thought about myself and my family witnessing the bombing of Tehran when I was ten. We, too, packed hurriedly and left with both panic and uncertainty. I left my childhood friends forever. As I worked and thought, I realized that while there are similarities, there are also differences in the outcome of the two events.”
|
 |
Spring 1995 Resistance and Rescue: During the Holocaust, thousands of people participated in rescue
|
 |
Fall 1994 Anne Frank in The World 1929-1945 The Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre opened in the fall of 1994 with the inaugural exhibit Anne Frank in The World: 1929-1945, an internationally acclaimed exhibit produced by the Anne Frank Center USA, New York. The exhibit is a photo documentary that recreates the world of Anne Frank and her diary. By telling the story of Anne Frank and her world, the exhibition highlights the causes, instruments and dangers of discrimination and the fragility of democracy. Vancouver Dutch Survivors Running concurrently with the Anne Frank exhibit was a small companion exhibit produced by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, which presented the oral histories and artefacts of local Dutch survivors.
|
