Rachel Stern2023-02-15T19:21:41-05:00January 8th, 2023|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
Inspired by a visit to his birth country in the 1990s, American artist Philip Orenstein (b. 1938) created seven murals about the French complicity in the persecution of Jews in France during World War II. At that time, the French government had not admitted it had taken part in the persecution. The murals have been shown in various galleries and museums in the United States. In 1999, William Zimmer wrote in the New York Times, “Mr. Orenstein’s method involves combining poignancy with the determination that the viewers not miss the story. To this end, Mr. Orenstein skillfully, and wittily, employs the look of today’s splashy graffiti.” The works have not yet been shown in France. Born in Paris, France, in 1938, [...]
Rachel Stern2023-02-06T07:18:23-05:00January 8th, 2023|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
The Kunstmuseum Basel’s department of classic modernism houses one of the most prestigious collections of its kind. It was in fact assembled at a comparatively late date. In the summer of 1939 — shortly before the outbreak of World War II — Georg Schmidt (1896–1966), the museum’s director at the time, managed to acquire twenty-one avant-garde masterpieces all at once. The works were among those denounced in 1937 by Nazi cultural policy as “degenerate” and forcibly removed from German museums. The Third Reich’s Ministry of Propaganda correctly assumed that a portion of such works would find buyers abroad and bring in foreign currency. In this way certain artworks deemed “internationally exploitable” reached the art market via various channels. [...]
Rachel Stern2023-02-01T06:15:59-05:00December 1st, 2022|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
In honor of UN Holocaust Remembrance Day, Hilary Helstein, director of the award-winning documentary "As Seen Through These Eyes" spoke with Rachel Stern, director and CEO of the Fritz Ascher Society New York, about the making of her documentary. As poet Maya Angelou narrates this powerful documentary, she reveals the story of a brave group of people who fought Hitler with the only weapons they had: charcoal, pencil stubs, shreds of paper and memories etched in their minds. These artists took their fate into their own hands to make a compelling statement about the human spirit, enduring against unimaginable odds. Featuring interviews with Simon Wiesenthal as he talks about his art, never before appearing in a film, [...]
Rachel Stern2023-02-26T09:25:37-05:00November 7th, 2022|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
Erna Pinner, Rosy Lilienfeld, Amalie Seckbach, and Ruth Cahn were among the first women artists in Frankfurt to enjoy professional success. Throughout the Roaring Twenties, these four Jewish women left their mark on Frankfurt’s art scene, published and exhibited internationally, cultivated a cosmopolitan lifestyle, and competed with their male colleagues. When the National Socialists seized power, their careers came to an abrupt end. From then on, they were persecuted as Jews and their works ostracized; later, after the end of World War II, they were largely forgotten. Now, “Back into the Light” is at long last bringing them back to the public eye. The departure point is an article by art historian Sascha Schwabacher, published May 1935 [...]
Rachel Stern2022-08-25T13:01:20-04:00June 7th, 2022|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
Ludwig Pollak (Prague 1868-1943 Auschwitz) was an extraordinary connoisseur of antiquities--an Austro-Hungarian Jew whose path into academia was impeded by his religion, but who settled in Rome, where he carved out a unique place for himself as an expert in recognizing, understanding, and organizing great works of art. It was he who shaped and articulated the magnificent collections of JP Morgan. Of perhaps even greater consequence, his astute eye saw a sculpted fragment of an arm in a flea market that, he deduced, was the limb missing from the spectacular Hellenistic-Roman sculptural group known as Laocoon. He gifted that arm fragment to the Vatican so that it might complete the work that occupied an important place within [...]
Rachel Stern2022-06-30T07:48:20-04:00June 7th, 2022|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
Between 1938 and 1945, the National Socialists deported hundreds of thousands of men, women and children from the German Reich to ghettos and camps. The deportations took place everywhere, in broad daylight and for all to see. And yet so far only a few photos are known. Knowing these pictures tell many stories – of the deportees, the perpetrators, and the spectators – this initiative invites your participation in helping us to discover and analyze previously unknown photographs that survive in museums, archives, private attics, basements, or dusty photo albums. In this lecture, Berlin-based Dr. Christoph Kreutzmüller, historian and coordinator developing the educational tool for #LastSeen, speaks about the importance of this project, and how you can become part of [...]
Rachel Stern2022-06-22T15:01:42-04:00June 1st, 2022|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
Join us as the film's producer, Julia Rosenberg, speaks with Ori Z Soltes from Georgetown University in Washington DC about her motivation, thoughts and decisions that went into the creation of her newly released animated film "Charlotte." Moderated by Rachel Stern, Executive Director of the Fritz Ascher Society. Image above: Film poster "Charlotte" "Charlotte" is an animated drama that tells the true story of Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943), a young German-Jewish painter who comes of age in Berlin on the eve of the Second World War. Fiercely imaginative and deeply gifted, she dreams of becoming an artist. Her first love applauds her talent, which emboldens her resolve. But [...]
Rachel Stern2022-09-07T15:52:51-04:00March 28th, 2022|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
Maurice Blik has lived in England since being liberated from Bergen Belsen concentration camp, where he was taken as a small child from his birthplace, Amsterdam. The ability to come to terms with this experience and to confront the face of humanity that he has witnessed, stayed silent in his life for some 40 years. It finally found a voice in the passionate sculptures which began to emerge in the late 1970s when he created a series of horses’ heads. These noble and benevolent creatures posses an energy and a life force that seem just barely harnessed long enough to take their shape in the clay itself. Later he progressed to more figurative work in which the irrepressible joy [...]
Rachel Stern2022-06-07T11:49:44-04:00February 13th, 2022|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943), was a hugely talented Berlin-born artist who was murdered at Auschwitz, four months pregnant, at the age of twenty-six. Her main body of work, a sequence of nearly 800 gouache images entitled Leben? oder Theater? (Life? or Theatre?), and created while seeking refuge in the South of France, is an ambitious fictive autobiography which deploys both images and text, and a wide range of musical, literary and cinematic references. The narrative, informed by Salomon's experiences as a cultured, and assimilated German Jewish woman, depicts a life lived in the shadow of Nazi persecution and a family history of suicide, but also reveals moments of intense happiness and hope. Challenging the artistic conventions of Salomon’s time, it remains [...]
Rachel Stern2022-02-18T05:43:45-05:00May 25th, 2021|Events, Memory, Past Events|
Join us for a discussion about the Hungarian born Holocaust survivor Alice Lok Cahana, whose life and art are recently recognized in two very different ways: The just remastered, Academy Award®-winning documentary, The Last Days, presented by Steven Spielberg and USC Shoah Foundation and the book Immortality, Memory, Creativity, and Survival: The Arts of Alice Lok Cahana, Ronnie Cahana, and Kitra Cahana, recently published by the Fritz Ascher Society of Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art, which investigates three generations of the Cahana family and their art in the context of biological and psychological research, allowing a deep understanding of how trauma and especially the Holocaust experience is remembered. This event investigates the portrayal of Alice Lok Cahana, her life and art, in art book [...]
Rachel Stern2022-02-18T05:27:54-05:00April 20th, 2021|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
Lecture by Helen Shiner Director/Editor at the Moissey Kogan Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture & Prints, Oxford (UK) Introduced by Rachel Stern Director and CEO of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York Moissey Kogan (1879-1943) was an innovative, influential sculptor-craftsman and printmaker, whose career straddled the European avant-gardes of the first half of the 20th century. A cosmopolitan Russian Jew, whose work was marked by his interest in Jewish mysticism and theosophical beliefs, Kogan looked to non-European cultures and ancient sources, in common with many of his contemporaries in Munich, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris, to root his avant-garde experimentations and revivals of ancient techniques, in what were considered more authentic means of expression. On the day [...]
Rachel Stern2021-06-14T18:07:03-04:00March 31st, 2021|Events, Past Events|
THIS EVENT WAS NOT RECORDED. After surviving the Holocaust, Shoshana Comet (1923-2012) could not speak about her experiences. One day in 1968, Shoshana announced that she had joined a course on weaving. At home, she wove five 6-foot high tapestries which served as a means to unshackle herself from her holocaust trauma. Shoshana then trained to become a psychotherapist, working with Holocaust survivors and their families who had been scarred by their experience. (See Ted Comet, Transforming Trauma Into Creative Energy, March 10, 2014) Ted is giving tours of Shoshana's tapestries to diverse groups, including students from Germany. For the past year, these tours are virtual, developed and conducted by DOROT, an innovative leader in designing intergenerational programs, supportive services and opportunities that enhance the [...]
