Í tengslum við okkar “Samstarfsaðilar í Umhyggju” áætlun styrkt af UJA-Federation of New York, Y mun innihalda viðtöl frá sex staðbundnum eftirlifendum til að skilja betur sögu hvers einstaklings. Þessi viðtöl verða sýnd í Hebreska tjaldsalnum “Upplifa stríðstíma og víðar: Andlitsmyndir af lifendum helförarinnar”. Galleríið verður opnað föstudaginn 8. nóvember.
Fredy Seidel lives in Washington Heights. Through this initiative, he has learned more about the Y and plans to become a member of the Center for Adults Living Well @ the Y.
Fredy Seidel(sculpture by Peter Bulow: WWW.PETERBULOW.COM)
After Kristallnact, the Seidels realized that it was no longer safe to stay in Germany so they decided to contact a Jewish agency in Breslau to begin preparations to leave. There was a Jewish organization that worked tirelessly to help Jews get out of Germany. The organization’s first priority was helping to get prisoners out of concentration camps, which was a very expensive task because the German government would not let prisoners leave the camps unless they were able to produce a roundtrip ticket out of the country. Fredy’s parents received a telegram at their synagogue on Saturday morning during services from this agency, stating that the agency found money for them to leave Germany and that they should come immediately. The agency had enough money to rescue Fredy’s parents, grandmother, and one of his brothers, Horst. Fredy’s oldest brother Rudi would be sent to Berlin to stay with an interfaith family in the hope that he would receive an affidavit to go to America. However, Rudi would never make it to America; while he was in Berlin, he was picked up from the street and sent to Auschwitz.
Í 1939, the family left Bremerhaven, Germany and arrived in Shanghai a month later. After getting off the boat, the Seidel’s were taken to the ghetto that had been organized by the local Sephardic community. Fredy Seidel was born on May 1, 1941 in Shanghai, China. While in Shanghai, Fredy’s parents attempted to make a living by doing anything that they could to make money. The conditions were poor and made it very difficult to find work. The ghetto of 25,000 people was fed by a community kitchen that was also funded by the local Sephardic community. The ghetto had one synagogue, which had been built by Russian Jews. The synagogue became known as Ohel Moishe and that synagogue is still standing today.
The Jews who lived in Shanghai ghetto were housed in warehouses that were divided into 10 rooms. Each room provided shelter to 28 people. There were no walls; it was just one large room with bunk beds. Fredy’s mom would use a trunk and tablecloth to make a table for their meals. Conditions were not very sanitary. Til dæmis, the toilet was about 150 feet away from the room, so the Seidel family would keep pot under their bed in case they had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. In the morning, they would take their pots to the toilet to dispose of the waste. There were two community showers, one for men and one for women; this did not allow for any privacy. Approximately 3000 people died from malnutrition and unsanitary conditions. Fredy recalls that you were not allowed to leave the ghetto without special permission from the police commissioner.
Not all of the refugees in the ghetto were Jewish. Fredy remembers that there were people who came because they had interfaith marriages. When asked about his community, Fredy states, “For me, I felt a very strong sense of Judaism and a very strong belief in G-d.” While living in Shanghai, Fredy recalls learning a lot about Judaism and what it means to have faith. He goes on to explain that a large portion of the refugees came from a town in Germany called Selisia.
The Jewish community in Shanghai was very tightknit and poverty stricken. People tried to make the best of their time there. The Jews created their own newspaper called the Yellow Post. Fredy recalls the Chinese being very helpful and shared what little they had with the Jewish community.
Fredy attended four Jewish schools within five years in Shanghai. He also attended a British school. Fredy recalls having to attend Anglican services while in the British school. There, the students were punished by the teachers with a bamboo stick, which they used to hit the children. This was very different from his experience in the Jewish schools. He described the Jewish schools as very nurturing. Since there were many refugee students left, a small school was created to accommodate them. There were three students to every teacher. This was not very conducive to learning because of the way the teacher’s attention was decided.
While in the ghetto, Fredy’s fathers tried making a living by collecting old razor blades, sharpening them, and trying selling them to the Chinese, but this did not work out. He then tried to become a shoemaker. Additionally, he was the cantor at Ohel Moshe synagogue.
The Red Cross came to Shanghai and distributed questionnaires to the refugees to figure out who was looking for their relatives. A year later, they came back and posted a large bulletin board on a wall with a list of names of the people they had been looking for. This is how Fredy’s father found out that his oldest son had been murdered in Auschwitz. He also found out that his parents and siblings had all been killed. Fredy remembers, “my father collapsed into the arms of my brother. That’s how people found out what happened to members of their family. It wasn’t the most sensitive way to find out.”
Eventually, the Chinese government told the Jews that they could not stay there any longer. In 1952, the Seidel’s returned back to Germany. They were one of the last thirty families to leave Shanghai. Fredy’s parents would get startup money to rebuild their lives once again in Germany.
When the Seidel’s got back to Germany, it had been divided into East and West Germany. Fredy’s parents were from a German town called Breslau, which had become a part of Poland, and was considered to be a part of West Germany so the restitution that was promised upon their return to Germany did not apply to them. This was financially devastating to the Seidel’s. This made the Seidel’s resort to smuggling good between East and West Germany in order to help them survive. The Seidel’s moved into a small apartment and Fredy’s father became a cantor again. On February 2, the Seidel’s received their visa to come to America. On February 22, Fredy’s mother was admitted to the intensive care unit where she would stay until September and would come out in a wheelchair. Fredy’s bar mitzvah was going to be in May. He was supposed to be the first boy with two Jewish parents to be bar mitzvahed in post-war Berlin. Many rabbis came from all over to be there for this occasion. The night before his bar mitzvah, Fredy and his father decided that they did not want to have the bar mitzvah without his mother being present and healthy again. He ended up waiting until after she was discharged from the hospital to have his bar mitzvah.
The Seidel’s were stuck in Germany for 7 years. In 1959, the Seidel’s made their way to America. The family decided to go to San Francisco to visit one of Fredy’s brothers before settling down in New York. What was supposed to be a two week trip turned into a yearlong stay. While in San Francisco, Fredy worked as a busboy and then a stock boy to try and help his family financially. After his family decided to move to New York, Fredy worked in Gimble’s selling stamps. He had dreams of attending Columbia University and after working at Gimble’s for a short while, his dreams were realized. Fredy enrolled at Columbia University at 20 ára. Although he would be drafted into the army while at Columbia, because of the tropical illnesses he contracted as a child in Shanghai he was not accepted into the army. In his last job, Fredy worked as a paralegal at a law firm for 20 ár.
Þetta viðtal var tekið af Halley Goldberg hjá Y's Partners in Caring frumkvæðinu og tilheyrir YM&YWHA í Washington Heights og Inwood. Notkun þessa efnis án skriflegs samþykkis bæði Y og viðmælanda er stranglega bönnuð. Sjáðu meira um Partners in Caring áætlunina hér: http://ywashhts.org/partners-caring-0
Hebreska tjaldbúðin Armin og Estelle Gold Wing galleríiðí stoltu samstarfi viðYM&YWHA í Washington Heights og Inwoodbýður þér til okkarnóvember/desember, 2013 Sýning“Upplifa stríðstíma og víðar: Andlitsmyndir af lifendum helförarinnar” með ljósmyndum og skúlptúrum eftir: YAEL BEN-ZION, PETER BULOW og ROJ RODRIGUEZ. Í tengslum við sérstaka minningarþjónustuaf75ára afmæli Kristallnóttar - Nótt glerbrotsinsÞjónusta og opnunarmóttaka listamanna, Föstudag, 8. nóvember, 2013 7:30 kl.
Yfirlýsing frá Y : ” Í áratugi hefur Washington Heights/Inwood Y verið, og heldur áfram að vera, griðastaður fyrir þá sem leita skjóls, virðingu og skilning. Margir sem ganga inn fyrir dyr okkar og taka þátt í áætlunum okkar hafa lifað í gegnum raunir og þrengingar sem við getum ekki einu sinni ímyndað okkur. Fyrir suma, hverjir verða hluti af þessari sýningu, Einn slíkur hryllingur hefur verið þekktur í heiminum einfaldlega sem „helförin“ – kerfisbundið morð á sex milljónum gyðinga í Evrópu.
Við hjá Y minnumst fortíðarinnar, heiðra þá sem lifðu og dóu á þeim tíma, og standa vörð um sannleikann fyrir komandi kynslóðir. Í þágu okkar sjálfra og barna okkar, við verðum að miðla sögum þeirra sem hafa upplifað illsku stríðsins. Það er hægt að draga lærdóma fyrir framtíðina. Viðtölin eru skjalfest af Halley Goldberg, umsjónarmaður „Partners in Caring“ áætlunarinnar. Þessi mikilvæga áætlun var gerð möguleg með rausnarlegum styrk frá UJA-sambandi New York, hannað til að auka tengsl við samkunduhús í Washington Heights og Inwood. “
Sameiginleg listasýning okkar sýnir andlitsmyndir og viðtöl við eftirlifendur helförarinnar, Hanna Eisner, Charlie og Lilli Friedman, Perla Rosenzveig, Fredy Seidel og Ruth Wertheimer, sem allir eru meðlimir Hebresku tjaldbúðarinnar, gyðingur söfnuður sem margir þýskir gyðingar flýja nasista og heppnir að koma til Ameríku, gekk til liðs við seint á þriðja áratugnum. Að auki munum við einnig heiðra Gizelle Schwartz Bulow, sem lifði helförina af- móðir listamannsins Peter Bulow og Yan Neznanskiy, sem lifði af seinni heimstyrjöldina, - faðir yfirmanns Y's., með einhverfu sem eru ekki að fá þjónustu sem styrkt er af Þroskaháskólastofu.
Sérstök hvíldardagsþjónusta, með hátölurum, til minningar um 75 ára afmæli Kristallsnóttar (Nótt glerbrotsins) á undan opnun Gold Gallery/Y sýningarinnar:Guðsþjónusta hefst stundvíslega 7:30 kl. Öllum er boðið að mæta.
Fyrir opnunartíma gallerísins eða fyrir frekari upplýsingar vinsamlega hringið í samkunduna í kl212-568-8304 eða sjáhttp://www.hebrewtabernacle.orgYfirlýsing listamanns: Yael Ben-Zionwww.yaelbenzion.comYael Ben-Zion fæddist í Minneapolis, MN og uppalinn í Ísrael. Hún er útskrifaður af Alþjóðlegu miðstöðinni í ljósmyndun í almennu námi. Ben-Zion er handhafi ýmissa styrkja og verðlauna, síðast frá Puffin Foundation og frá NoMAA, og verk hennar hafa verið sýnd í Bandaríkjunum og í Evrópu. Hún hefur gefið út tvær einrit af verkum sínum. Hún býr í Washington Heights ásamt eiginmanni sínum, og tvíburastrákana þeirra.
Yfirlýsing listamanns: Pétur Bulow: www.peterbulow.com
Móðir mín sem barn, hafði verið í felum í helförinni. Í gegnum árin, reynslu hennar, eða það sem ég ímyndaði mér að hefði verið reynsla hennar, hefur haft mikil áhrif á mig. Þessi áhrif endurspeglast bæði í persónulegu lífi mínu og í listalífi mínu. Ég fæddist á Indlandi, bjó sem ungt barn í Berlín og flutti til Bandaríkjanna með foreldrum mínum á aldursbili 8. Ég er með meistaragráðu í myndlist í skúlptúr. Ég er líka styrkþegi sem gerir mér kleift að búa til takmarkaðan fjölda bronsbrjóstmynda af eftirlifendum helförarinnar. Endilega látið mig vita ef þið hafið áhuga á að vera með í þessu verkefni.
Yfirlýsing listamanns :Roj Rodriguez: www.rojrodriguez.com
Verk mitt endurspeglar ferðalag mitt frá Houston, TX - þar sem ég fæddist og ólst upp - til New York - þar sem, verða fyrir þjóðerni sínu, menningar- og félagshagfræðilegan fjölbreytileika og einstaka sýn hans á innflytjendur– Ég fann endurnýjaða virðingu fyrir menningu allra. Ég hef lært hjá rótgrónum ljósmyndurum, ferðaðist mikið um heiminn og var í samstarfi við marga fremstu fagmenn á þessu sviði. Síðan í janúar, 2006, Ferill minn sem sjálfstæður ljósmyndari er orðinn ferli þar sem ég tek að mér persónuleg ljósmyndaverkefni sem koma fram af mínum eigin skilningi á því hvernig við deilum heiminum og beitum sköpunargáfu okkar í heild.
