The Journal American, Bellevue, Washington
Friday, September 30, 1994
Artist draws visions of the Holocaust
by Sherry Grindeland, Journal American Features Writer
[The center of the article had an outlined box, with text inside the box stating]: At a glance
WHAT: Holocaust Education Through Art, presented by Seattle artist Akiva Kenneth Segan
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 19
WHERE: Temple B’nai Torah, Mercer Island
ADMISSION: Free with contribution of a non-perishable food item for the Jewish Family Service food bank
Information: (Temple phone number)]
___________________
To the right of that info box - A reproduction of UTW 2 - Man with tattered coat in the Warsaw Ghetto; the art captioned:
Akiva Kenneth Segan drew this picture of a man with a tattered coat for his series
SEATTLE --- Artist Akiva Kenneth Segan looked forward to a year of post-graduate studies in the Polish Academy of Fine Arts in the mid-1980’s. He thought the bonus would be a pleasant summer tour of Poland with other graduate students.
Visits with Polish artists turned into a haunting experience for the Jewish man.
One lived in a former synagogue. Another had leather-bound Hebrew books. Someone else talked about how they got to move into a completely furnished home during World War II, after the Jewish owners were shipped to Warsaw.
The final horror came the day he saw a bowl of *soap, made from human carcasses at a Nazi death camp.
“I asked the artist for the soap,” Segan says. “I was going to take them to a rabbi for purification.” The artist refused.
Then, as a final punctuation to the recurring thoughts of ethnic suffering, he returned to Krakow, his fellowship funding had mysteriously disappeared in the Ministry of Higher Education.
“Yes, they knew I was Jewish,” Segan says. “As it turned out, I left at the right time. That was the winter of the Chernobyl accident and my friends received radiation.”
The visions of murdered Polish Jews haunted Segan. After seeing some of the photos in the Warsaw Ghetto Exhibit, combined with other Holocaust studies, he began a series of drawings, “Under the Wings of G-d.” It is the basis of his traveling slide show lecture, Holocaust Education Through Art to Promote Tolerance and Understanding.
Several of his drawings accompany the “Day in the Warsaw Ghetto” exhibit**.
Each drawing is taken from a real-life photograph of someone from Warsaw who died either in the ghetto, during the 1943 uprising, or in a death camp. Many of them are relatives of Seattle residents.
Segan’s work is as haunting as his memories of the Polish countryside. The faces seem almost like photographs. There’s an old man praying, a baby, a man in a tattered coat, and a beautiful young woman. Attached to each image is a pair of angel wings. Forget angels with white wings that look like they couldn’t carry a wish to heaven. Segan gives his angels sturdy wings, bird wings, capable enough of carrying a soul a long way.
Christians, Segan says, sometimes seem surprised by his angels.
“A great number of angels are found in Jewish history and writings,” Segan says.
“It’s just that until recent years, Jewish artists didn’t portray the human form.
“The Ten Commandments states that we shall not make a graven image of G-d, and since we are made in G-d’s image, devout Jews didn’t paint people.”
[Notes by Segan while typing the text of this article on Sept. 1, 2020:
* That contention, re: the Nazis having made soap from human bodies, has been discredited by historians. This is the url of an article on this subject, published on Feb. 12, 2020 in the English language edition of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz:
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-did-the-nazis-really-use-bodies-of-murdered-jews-to-make-soap-1.8523702
~
**The reporter referred to the Oct. 1 to Nov. 13, 1994 exhibit at The Museum of History and Industry, Seattle. That exhibit included 60 photos taken by a Nazi soldier who went into the ghetto on his birthday, in Sept. 1941; and 7 drawings form the Under the Wings drawings]