The exhibition features nine aspects of the Jewish woman’s daily life during the Holocaust: Love, Motherhood, Caring for Others, Womanhood, Resistance and Rescue, Friendship, Faith, Food and the Arts.
More than two million women were murdered in the Holocaust. The Nazi ideology viewed women generally as agents of fertility. Accordingly, it identified the Jewish woman as an element that must be exterminated in order to thwart the rise of future generations. For these reasons, the Nazis treated women as prime targets for annihilation in the Holocaust. Jewish women inhabited a society that was largely conservative and patriarchal, with males as heads of household and women discharging traditional roles at home or helping to make a living. Accordingly, women did not participate in the leadership that was tasked with shepherding the Jewish public. Instead, Jewish women assumed the main family role that one may term the “affirmation of life”: the attempt to survive in any situation.
Women in the Holocaust applied their minds to a place that deprived them of their minds; brought strength to a place where they had no strength. And in a place where they and their families had no right to live, they marched all the way to death and invested every additional moment of life with meaning. It is these women’s voices that we wish to sound and whose stories to tell.
By giving expression to these individual women, the exhibition reveals the poignant stories behind the historical events, and provides faces and voices within the darkness and silence.
This exhibition consists of 21 Panels. Each panel is approximately 800 mm x 1200 mm