For I See Old Things Happening Again:
Jill Freedman’s “Missing Generations”
Presentation by Susan Chevlowe, PhD, followed by a conversation with family member Wendy Wernick
April 24, 2025 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
| FreeSusan Chevlowe, PhD, Chief Curator and Museum Director of Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection at Hebrew Home at Riverdale, presents the documentary and street photographer Jill Freedman (1939-2019), followed by a conversation with family member Wendy Wernick.
When the documentary and street photographer Jill Freedman went to Poland in April 1993, on the occasion of the 50thanniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, she wrote that she made the journey as a pilgrim “to mourn the dead, to honor them,” along with the “survivors, their children, old soldiers and witnesses.” She returned to the sites of destruction again the next year after receiving a fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation (APF), which supports the work of photojournalists. Susan Chevlowe, PhD, discusses the series of photographs that resulted from these two trips, including to additional sites in Hungary and the Czechia, and the book that Freedman had planned but that was left unrealized at the time of her death.
Image above: Jill Freedman, Auschwitz 1. Tourist family entering gas chamber, 1994. Gelatin silver print, 8 1/2 x 12 11/16 in. (21.6 x 32.2 cm). © Jill Freedman Family Estate
From the moment she picked up a camera in 1966, Freedman candidly and passionately documented the world around her. In the 1990s, as ethnic cleansing was once again being perpetrated in Europe and historical revisionists were denying the Holocaust had ever happened, the project she called Missing Generations became ever more urgent. Dr. Chevlowe will look at these photographs in the context of Freedman’s other work, which she undertook as part of her relentless pursuit of social justice in an inherently unjust world, particularly her photographs documenting the Poor People’s Campaign march to Washington, D.C., following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968.
Jill Freedman, Survivors in Front of the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, 1993. Gelatin silver print. © Jill Freedman Family Estate.
Jill Freedman, Tourists peering through the doors of the Old-New Synagogue (Altneuschul), Prague, 1994. Gelatin silver print, 12 11/16 x 8 1/2 (32.2 x 21.6). Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection, Gift of the Jill Freedman Irrevocable Trust © Jill Freedman Family Estate
Freedman published seven books: Old News: Resurrection City (1970); Circus Days (1975); Firehouse (1977; 2022); Street Cops (1981; 2022); A Time That Was: Irish Moments (1987); Jill’s Dogs (1993), and Ireland Ever (2004). In addition to Missing Generations, Freedman planned two additional photography books at the time of her death, Madhattan and Patriot Acts. Freedman was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1939, and lived and worked for most of her career in New York City. She died in 2019.
Jill Freedman, Treblinka. View from the bus, 1993. Gelatin silver print, 8 1/2 x 12 11/16 in. (21.6 x 32.2 cm). © Jill Freedman Family Estate.
Jill Freedman in Jewish cemetery, Poland, 1993. Gelatin silver print. © Jill Freedman Family Estate.
Susan Chevlowe is Chief Curator and Museum Director of Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection at Hebrew Home at Riverdale, in the Bronx where she has organized solo shows featuring the work of Micaela Amato, Leonard Freed, Jill Freedman, Jonathan Hammer, Robert Katz, Richard McBee, Jill Nathanson, Archie Rand, and many others, as well as group exhibitions. She is a former adjunct assistant professor in the Program in Jewish Art and Visual Culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where she also served as co-chair of the Visual Arts Committee of the Arts Advisory Board. Prior to coming to the Derfner, Dr. Chevlowe was an associate curator at the Jewish Museum, New York, where she organized such exhibitions as Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York, 1900–1945 (co-curated with Norman L. Kleeblatt), Common Man, Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn, 1936-1962, and The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography, and edited or co-edited their accompanying exhibition catalogues. Her essay on photographer Adi Nes was included in the exhibition of his biblical series at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Dr. Chevlowe received her Ph.D. in art history from the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a member of the Jewish Art Salon advisory board and lectures and writes about Jewish art and visual culture.
Wendy Wernick is Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Healthcare certified. She completed Bachelors in Health Service Administration and is a registered wound ostomy continence nurse working clinical solution specialist for northeast at convaTEc. Wendy Wernick is also a distant relative of Jill Freedman and is, with her sisters Susan Hecht and Nancy Sklar, the custodian of the Jill Freedman Family Estate.
For further information about the 2023 exhibition of Jill Freedman’s Missing Generations at the Derfner Judaica Museum, and more information about the museum and its programs please go to:
You can find further information about Jill Freedman on the photographer’s website:
