UK - England – Student Rebecca Kitchin, 2003 thesis (excerpt)
“Compare and contrast art produced by the Inmates of the
Holocaust camps with that of contemporary art”
Author: Rebecca Kitchin, B.A. (hons) Visual Communication – Illustration, January 2003 Birmingham Institute of Arts, England / © Rebecca Kitchin
B.A. (hons) Visual Communication – Illustration, January 2003
© Rebecca Kitchin / Birmingham Institute of Arts, England
[excerpted from page 8]:
….Similarly Christian and Jewish symbols have played an important role in imagery about the Holocaust. One such artist, Akiva Kenneth Segan, asks questions upon our own understanding of what actually happened in the Holocaust by reproducing and drawing from actual photographs of victims, before they were condemned to death in the camps or ghettos.
The theory that post-Holocaust art is less powerful than art made by inmates of the ghettoes and concentration camps does not apply here, as Segan uses [some] images that have never been shown to the public. They are personal photographs of both Jews and other victims of the Holocaust; they portray something different and dignified rather than piles of corpses of chimney stacks and therefore his pieces are extremely powerful.
In his ongoing series of drawings “Under the Wings of G-d” he portrays victims of the Holocaust with Angel type wings, although one can notice that the Angel wings are sourced from the Bible, but they are also from Jewish folk tales. Perhaps these wings are a metaphor for the freedom that these Jews were forbidden to have under Nazi dogma.
[page 9]
Segan’s work is a moving testimony to the six million Jews that died; he argues that [of some] of the artwork that represents the Holocaust, you can see the type of horror these people faced. He concludes: “I wanted to do something to restore their dignity, and to show that these were real people and not just some faceless memory.”
One of Segan’s most interesting works is that of “Rubinsztajn’ (Under the Wings of G-d drawing number 19) seen as Fig. 7. Going back to the use of Christian and Jewish symbols and ideas in post-Holocaust art, Segan’s ‘Rubinsztajn’ can be seen as having similarities to the ‘suffering of Job’ in the Bible. Job was the blameless righteous man, who with no fault of his own was suddenly to lose his most sacred possessions: his children and most significantly, his health. A similar story to that of Rubinsztajn, who was a street performer in the Warsaw Ghetto; “Ale glajch!!” [Rubinsztajn reportedly was heard yelling on the day he reported to the Umschlagplatz, from there to be trained to his death at the Treblinka death camp] translated from Yiddish [and German] as “All are equal!”
Sadly he lost his reason after a particularly vicious beating by a Gestapo interrogation, and murdered in 1942.
Therefore ‘Job’ can be seen as a metaphor for all the Jews – all that were involved in the terrible acts of the Nazis either fled to other countries, or lost their families or even died, and therefore all have a significant tie with ‘Job.” Amishal-Maisels argues that the Christian idea of ‘Job’ and his relationship with God has “traditional roots in Judaism, and also parallels in Jewish theological writings and literature about the Holocaust.”
~ BIB entry TAGS / www.humanrights-holocaust-art.org
TAGS: Rebecca Kitchin; Holocaust art A K Segan; images Rubinsztajn;
images Warsaw ghetto; images Umschlagplatz; Birmingham Institute of Arts thesis; Warsaw ghetto history; Bible Job; Amishal-Maisals; Holocaust art Under the Wings of G-d; Holocaust art Under the Wings; Treblinka death camp; Nazi occupation Poland Holocaust; post-Holocaust art; Holocaust empathizer art; Ziva Amishai-Maisels; Jewish theology Jewish Scriptures Job Holocaust
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Footnotes added by A. K. Segan, Oct 19, 2020:
A bio page on Ziva Amishai-Maisels:
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/amishai-maisels-ziva
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The website of artist Rebecca Kitchin:
http://www.rebecca-kitchin.co.uk/
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Facebook, Rebecca Kitchin has an art Page:
https://www.facebook.com/artistrebeccakitchin/