The Source: Community News - Interfaith News

The Church Council of Greater Seattle Monthly ecumenical newspaper of the Church Council of Greater Seattle, Vol. XVII, No. 9.  November 1994.

Under the Wings of G-d to be part of MOHAI exhibit ‘A Day in the Warsaw Ghetto,’

by Brooke Rolston, campus pastor (Covenant House – Campus Christian Ministry, Seattle)


Seattle artist Akiva Kenneth Segan continues his Holocaust remembrance work, with the Museum of History and Industry incorporating seven of his works in its exhibit, A Day in the Warsaw Ghetto. The exhibit opens Saturday, October 1, and continues through November 13.
The Museum is at 2700 24th Ave. E. in Seattle.

Segan has been creating the series, Under the Wings of G-d: Drawings and Reflections on the Warsaw Ghetto and Uprising in Poland, 1939-43, over the past three years. He now has completed 29 of the planned 50 pieces, the total dedicated to remembering the Warsaw Ghetto which fell 50 years ago last week.  

The Under the Wings drawings are personal interpretations of photographic records from the ghetto, taken by Nazi and other photographers from the time of the sealing of the Ghetto through the Jewish uprising to the destruction of the Ghetto by Nazi forces.

The Museum is adding Segan’s work to a traveling exhibit organized by the Smithsonian Institution and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.

A Day in the Warsaw Ghetto is a collection of 60 black and white photographs taken by a German soldier who wanted into the Ghetto against regulations on his birthday in September, 1941. Due to the graphic nature of many of the photos, the Museum suggests adult supervision for children.

The artist is also giving two slide lectures on Holocaust education through art during October.
The Rev. Brooke Rolston of Campus Christian Ministry/Covenant House says people find in the drawings “a personal dimension to the suffering of Warsaw’s Jews, who could only be statistics without the human touch of the interpreter.”

The presentations are set for Wednesday, Oct. 12, at University Baptist Church, 4554 – 12th Ave NE, Seattle, and Wednesday, Oct. 19, at Temple B’nai Torah, 6195 – 92nd SE, Mercer Island. Both begin at 7pm and are free and open to the public, though Segan urges children 14 and younger be accompanied by an adult. The artist asks those who attend to bring an item of non-perishable food for a donation to one of Seattle’s food banks.