Dear Friends,

Happy 2025! An eventful month lies ahead.

First of all, I am very excited to announce that you now can experience our website in multiple languages – try it out: https://fritzaschersociety.org/.

Here at the Fritz Ascher Society, we are starting the year with two virtual talks that are connected to exhibitions – one in London and one here in New York:

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8, 12:00PM EST
FRED KORMIS (1894-1986)–
SCULPTING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
PRESENTATION BY BARBARA WARNOCK, LONDON (ENGLAND)

Fred Kormis, Two Heads, c. 1930s © Wiener Holocaust Library Collections

Sculptor and printmaker Fred Kormis (1894-1986) was born into an Austrian and German-Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany, was wounded fighting in the First World War as part of the Austrian army and spent four years as a prisoner of war in Siberia. He worked as an artist during the politically and culturally tumultuous Weimar period. In 1933, he left Germany for Holland and then Britain. There, he continued his lifelong preoccupation of using sculpture to memorialise and represent the emotional impact of captivity. This culminated in the 1960s in his prisoners of war and victims of concentration camps memorial in Gladstone Park, Dollis Hill, north-west London.

Dr Barbara Warnock is the Senior Curator and Head of Education at The Wiener Holocaust Library, where she oversees the education programme and has curated the exhibitions Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust; Berlin London: The Lost Photographs of Gerty Simon; Fighting Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today, and Forgotten Victims: The Nazi Genocide of the Roma and Sinti, amongst others. She obtained her doctorate in Austrian history from Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2016.

The event is co-sponsored by The Wiener Holocaust Library in London (England).

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22, 12:00PM EST
MAKING WAY FOR BERTHE WEILL-
ART DEALER OF THE PARISIAN AVANT-GARDE
PRESENTATION BY LYNN GUMPERT, NEW YORK (USA)

Amedeo Modigliani, Fille rousse (Girl with red hair), c. 1915. Oil on canvas, 16 x 14 3/8 in. (40.5 x 36.5 cm). Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris. Jean Walter and Paul Guillame Collection, 1960.46 © Photo: Musée de l’Orangerie / Sophie Crépy

Berthe Weill was a trailblazing art dealer who exhibited works by emerging artists in her Parisian gallery from 1901 to 1941, including Picasso, Matisse, Rivera, and Modigliani. Even though many of them went on to become key avant-garde figures, Weill’s role has been omitted from most historical accounts of 20th-century modernism. In this presentation, Lynn Gumpert, a co-curator of the first exhibition on Weill, provides an overview of this remarkable woman.

Lynn Gumpert is the Director of NYU’s Grey Art Museum, formerly known as the Grey Art Gallery. During her tenure, the Grey has presented over 75 exhibitions. Among them are: Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde (2024); Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World (2020); and The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (2018). Lynn received a BA from the University of California at Berkeley and an MA in art history from the University of Michigan. The French government honored Gumpert with the distinction of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1999. (2018).

The event is co-sponsored by The Grey Art Museum in New York, NY.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. We can’t imagine a better way of commemorating this important anniversary than celebrating with an exhibition of the art of Alice Lok Cahana, one of the few survivors of this unimaginable hell on earth, and the family she raised:

SURVIVAL AND INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY:
The Arts of Alice Lok Cahana,
Rabbi Ronnie Cahana and Kitra Cahana
Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, Portland, OR
January 26 – May 25, 2025

Alice Lok Cahana, 1940-44 Triptych: right panel, 1984. Collection Ronnie and Michael Cahana, Inv. 052

This unique and powerful exhibition explores the role of art and creativity, bringing the past into the present by focusing on three generations of artists from the same family. Alice Lok Cahana (1929-2017) was a Holocaust survivor who pledged she would become an artist if she survived the war. Rabbi Ronnie Cahana, Alice’s oldest son, is a poet and survivor of a major stroke. Kitra Cahana, Ronnie’s oldest daughter, is a filmmaker and photographer.

This exhibition reveals how the tragedy of the Holocaust impacted multiple generations of a family and how each member transformed the destructive trauma of the Shoah into acts of intense creative accomplishment, taking their own path to provide a through-line to preserving the memories, culture, and identity of their shared family and the Jewish people.

Curated by Ori Z Soltes. In cooperation with The Fritz Ascher Society, New York.

This is already a tradition: Leading up to Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, we invite you now for the fourth year to once again participate in #EVERYNAMECOUNTS.

#everynamecounts is a crowdsourcing initiative by the Arolsen Archives: Together with tens of thousands of volunteers, we establish a digital memorial to the people persecuted by the Nazis. That way, future generations will be able to remember the names and identities of these victims.

This involves transcribing the names and dates found in historical documents that have already been scanned to create a digital record of the data they contain. No specialist knowledge is needed – everyone can contribute.

The crowdsourcing website guides you through the archival documents and displays help texts to assist you. All project information is available in English and German, Spanish, Polish, and French. And please let us know about your experience!

Help digitize this evidence of Nazi crimes and become part of building the Largest Digital Memorial to the Victims of Nazism.

If you missed our December online events about two visionary Jewish Czech women, you can watch the recordings here:

Please donate generously to make our work possible. THANK YOU.

The Fritz Ascher Society is a not-for-profit 501(c)3 organization. Your donation is fully tax deductible.

We wish you a good start of 2025 and hope to see you online or in person in Portland, Oregon!

With warm greetings,

Rachel Stern
Executive Director