The Source: Community News
The Church Council of Greater Seattle Monthly ecumenical newspaper of the Church Council of Greater Seattle, Vol. XVII, No. 9. November 1994. Page 12
Jewish Angels? – ask the artist
A drawing series being created for Holocaust education through exhibits, an educational video and a book.
By artist Kenneth Akiva Segan
Why Jewish angels?
While many people of different faiths and backgrounds have found great solace in the winged figures, some people have questioned by a Jewish artist would represent murdered Jews in what is commonly thought of as “Christian” imagery: Angels.
My reason for creating Jewish “angels” rests on two adjoining platforms of thought, belief, tradition and history. The first is the great number of angels in the Bible, and we find them from Genesis on. Ask any Rabbi or minister!
…One of our great sources of information on the Nazi’s Final Solution was the large number of artists who sketched, drew and painted in the sealed-in ghettos, the transport trains and in the concentration and death camps. Most of them perished, but we are fortunate to have these tragic but priceless records, which are amazing… that these martyred Jewish artists, like their relatives and neighbors who were farmers and laborers, professionals and schoolchildren, housewives and Yeshiva Bokhers (religious school pupils), babies and the elderly are angels, I have no doubt.
Akiva Kenneth Segan has been a Seattle resident since 1980. He studied in Poland during the summers of 1984 and 1985, and what he witnessed became a part of his mind’s vision, as so much of Poland today reflects the vanished Jewish communities of Europe.
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To the right of the article, a box with the following text:
The Wings of G-d
This series is drawn from real-life photographs of murdered Jewish children, women and men in the Warsaw Ghetto and during the heroic uprising against the Germans and their allies in April-May 1943.
The exhibit, Under the Wings of G-d, Drawings and Reflections on the Warsaw Ghetto and Uprisings in Poland, 1939-43, is currently at the Museum of History and Industry (traveling from the Smithsonian Institution). It ends on November 13. Several of these works will be exhibited at the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. next summer in the exhibition “The Other Washington: Jewish Artists of the Pacific Northwest.”
A note for readers, typed by A. K. Segan, Sept. 1, 2020, while I typed that boxed blurb, above, from the original Nov. 1994 hardcopy issue of The Source: The traveling Smithsonian exhibit of photos (taken in the Warsaw ghetto by a Nazi soldier, that exhibit titled A Birthday Trip to Hell) did not include any of my wings series drawings during other venues of the Smithsonian traveling exhibit. Seven drawings from the wings series were exhibited with those photos at the Museum of History and Industry tour site of those photos.