Rachel Stern2022-03-02T19:19:46-05:00December 31st, 2021|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
In the late nineteenth century, the sculptor Joseph M. Abbo (1888–1953) – who later renamed himself Jussuf Abbo – was born in Safed, in the province of Beirut of the Ottoman Empire. As a young man, he began working as a labourer on the restoration site being led by an architect, Hoffmann, on behalf of the German government. Abbo was noticed and was rapidly promoted to the drawing-office and to stone-carving. He was offered a scholarship at the Berlin School of Art. Jussuf Abbo arrived in Germany in 1911 and began studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin in 1913. By 1919 he had a master studio in the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts. Throughout the [...]
Rachel Stern2022-08-26T05:20:00-04:00October 8th, 2021|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
In a prolific career that spanned nearly five decades, Friedel Dzubas (b. Berlin, 1915–d. 1994, Newton, Mass.) articulated his mature style by the 1970s, creating a striking visual language from counterpoised abstract shapes of brushed color that he juxtaposed, overlapped, and opened to reveal his gessoed grounds. Yet, in prior years, Dzubas’s early work in Berlin were influenced by Expressionist artist of the two primary groups known as Die Brücke and Die Blaue Reiter. As Dzubas told curator Charles Millard in 1982, “Their unheard-of brashness of color; that was really brave. That was very exciting. Color’s an emotional thing. These people not only spoke directly; they felt deeply. There was passion.” His early pen and ink watercolors embed the [...]
Rachel Stern2022-08-26T05:28:17-04:00October 6th, 2021|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
Rudi Lesser, a graphic artist already gaining significant recognition in his twenties in Germany, survived the Holocaust in Scandinavia. Interestingly, he immigrated to the US just after the war, in 1946, and although achieving success in New York--and as the founder of the graphic arts department at Howard University in Washington, DC--never felt at home here. He returned to a different Germany, in 1957, where he lived in relative poverty and obscurity--but apparent contentment--for the remaining thirty years of his long life. Lesser was one of over 10 Jewish refugee professors at Howard University and among the more than 60 at Black colleges, primarily in the South. Like other Jewish and white progressives and liberals of his era, [...]
Rachel Stern2022-02-06T07:18:15-05:00September 14th, 2021|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
In Claude Lanzmann’s seminal nine-and-a-half-hour film SHOAH, he chose not to use any images of the Holocaust, telling the story instead solely through the words of witnesses. By contrast, art historian Georges Didi-Huberman and contemporary artist Gerhard Richter have both emphasized the power of images to reflect and educate—the former in his book Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, and the latter in a series of paintings titled “Birkenau.” Join the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the Fritz Ascher Society for a lecture exploring the tension between these different perspectives on images, words, and the Holocaust with German art historian and curator Eckhart Gillen. Gillen grounds the discussion in the example of Boris Lurie, the subject [...]
Rachel Stern2022-02-18T05:29:09-05:00May 30th, 2021|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
MARI is innovative in many ways. For the first time, descendants of victims of Nazi persecution are cooperating with German institutions in a public/private partnership in provenance research. After an initial three-year research period, the successful project at Freie Universität Berlin is now being continued. Numerous works from the former Mosse collection have already been recovered and restituted. In the process, surprising stories came to light showing the whole challenge range of provenance research and restitution. MARI's task, however, is not only to search for the works of the former collection, but also to gain insight into the strategies of the so called “Gleichschaltung” (consolidation) of the press just after the Nazis came to power in 1933, as well [...]
Rachel Stern2022-02-18T05:25:20-05:00May 11th, 2021|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
Presentation by Steven Less, PhD Senior research fellow emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and son of the artist in Heidelberg (Germany) and Hannah-Lea Wasserfuhr PhD Candidate at the Center for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg, Heidelberg (Germany) Moderated by Rachel Stern Director and CEO of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York Born in Berlin, John Hans Less (1923 – 2011) fled to Shanghai in September 1940 as a 16-year-old together with his family to escape Nazi persecution. Largely dependent on relief organizations to survive, the Less family soon went through further disruptions when the Japanese occupied the city and later confined Jewish refugees to the Hongkew [...]
Rachel Stern2022-02-18T06:42:00-05:00May 11th, 2021|Events, Past Events|
Join the Fort Tryon Jewish Center (FTJC) and the Fritz Ascher Society for a LIVE DATA ENTRY EVENT to help build the world’s largest digital monument to victims of the Holocaust: the Arolsen Archives’ #everynamecounts. THIS EVENT WAS NOT RECORDED. Opening Remarks Rabbi Guy Austrian Fort Tryon Jewish Center in New York Rachel Stern Director and CEO of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York Introduction and Moderation Elizabeth Berkowitz Digital Interpretation Manager of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York #everynamecounts is a crowd-sourced data entry initiative to return the names of Holocaust victims, their families, and details of their lives into the findable, keyword-searchable public record. Participants enter information about Nazi victims and family members from digitized [...]
Rachel Stern2022-02-18T05:46:15-05:00April 29th, 2021|Lectures, Past Events|
Lecture by Dr. Martina Weinland Commissioner for Cultural Heritage at the Museum of the City of Berlin in Berlin (Germany) Followed by Q&A moderated by Rachel Stern Director and CEO, Fritz Ascher Society in New York The Berlin artist Jeanne Mammen (1890-1976) is best known for her depictions of strong, sensual women and Berlin city life. But there is much more to her 70 years of artistic output, with unique sketches, paintings and sculptures. In 1975, she tells the art historian Hans Kinkel, who conducts the only interview she will ever give: “You must always write that my pictures were created between 1890 and 1975. …I have always wanted to be just a pair of eyes, walking through [...]
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 Stern2022-02-18T06:37:23-05:00March 4th, 2021|Events, Past Events|
The International Tracing Service (ITS), since 2019 called Arolsen Archives, was established by the Allies in 1948 as a central search and information center. They house the world’s most extensive collection of documents about the victims of National Socialist persecution, including documents from Nazi concentration camps, ghettoes and penal institutions, documents about forced laborers, and documents from the early post-war period about Displaced Persons, mainly Holocaust survivors, former concentration camp prisoners, and forced laborers. People who had fled the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union for political reasons are also included. The archive's holdings consist of 30 million documents in total and belong to UNESCO’s Memory of the World. At this event, Floriane Azoulay (Director) and Giora Zwilling (Deputy [...]
Rachel Stern2022-02-18T06:04:58-05:00March 3rd, 2021|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
The Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) achieved world fame with his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes. Rüdiger Görner, author of the first English-language biography, depicts the artist in all his fascinating and contradictory complexity. He traces Kokoschka’s path from bête noire of the bourgeoisie and a so-called ‘hunger artist’ to a wealthy and cosmopolitan political and critical artist who played a major role in shaping the European art scene of the twentieth century and whose relevance is undiminished to this day. In 1934, Kokoschka left Austria for Prague, and in 1938, when the Czechs began to mobilize for the expected invasion by the German Wehrmacht, Kokoschka fled to the United Kingdom, where he remained during the war. Although he [...]
Rachel Stern2021-02-24T05:40:28-05:00February 24th, 2021|Selected Publications|
Ascher composed, wrote, drew and painted: Between 1942 and 45 - three long years - he hid from the persecution of the fascists in the basement of a bombed-out house in Berlin-Grunewald. Immobility, loneliness and hunger as well as the fear of betrayal and discovery, torture and death did not leave him during this time. In this situation he found poignant words for his “unpainted pictures”. He conveys both the intensity of his thought processes and his sensitivity for - and his use of - words as well as their nuances and sound patterns. Above all, he demonstrates the indomitable spirit of the artist Fritz Ascher, which no circumstance, regardless of the medium, can prevent from creating with vehement and [...]
