| Luboml is one town, one ancestral home, but it is also all towns. Like the tower of faces in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, it has become the representative town that stands for the hamlets and village, the urban centers and rural farm communities that were the Jewish settlements in Poland that so many of us came from and to which so few of us can return. --Michael Berenbaum, Former President and CEO, Survivors of the SHOAH Visual History Foundation
The vanished world of the Polish shtetl will be recreated in a special exhibition to be shown at Schatten Gallery, Woodruff Library, Emory University from March 10 through May 31, 2002. Remembering Luboml: Images of a Jewish Community provides a touching glimpse of a way of life that was destroyed by the Holocaust. It evokes life in Luboml, a small Jewish community dating back to the fourteenth century, one of the oldest in Poland.
Shown to considerable acclaim in both the U.S. and abroad in Europe, a striking selection of archival photographs, poignant artifacts and documents portray the people, celebrations, architecture, daily way of life and religious activities in meaningful fashion. The exhibition reminds the viewer that the way of life in Luboml was representative of thousands of other Jewish market towns or shtetls destroyed in World War II. Many of these shtetls had been home to over 600 years of continual Jewish community life.
By the 1930s, Libivne (as it is called in Yiddish) had a vibrant community of at least 4,000 Jews. But Jewish life there came to an abrupt end in October of 1942 when the Germans murdered almost all of the town's Jews. Only fifty-one Libivners survived the Holocaust.
In 1994, Aaron Ziegelman, a Libiviner who emigrated to the United States in 1938 as a nine year old boy, initiated the Luboml Exhibition Project to preserve the history and the memory of the shtetl. To date, the Project has collected nearly 2,000 photographs and artifacts from more than one hundred families and archives around the world, and has videotaped numerous oral histories with many Libivners. Remembering Luboml features highlights from these collections.
The exhibition contains many surprises for a generation brought up on Fiddler on the Roof. Between the world wars, Luboml emerged rapidly from its insular existence. Modernization and tradition existed side by side in this village of 4,000 Jews and 3,000 Poles and Ukranians. The contrast is depicted vividly in photographs of bearded Hasidic scholars and girls in shorts riding bicycles in the park. While many of the photographs show a vibrant community life, there were also hard times in Luboml. We see a long queue forming in front of a soup kitchen in 1917 and a portrait of students and teachers in 1929 when clothing was being distributed to poor children. The exhibition includes rare cine footage of Luboml taken by a visiting American tourist in 1933 and evocative artifacts such as Luboml postage stamps in Yiddish, German, Polish and Ukranian; a vodka bottle and labels, embroidered textiles and silver Kiddush cups hastily buried when the Germans arrived.
Through research under the direction of historian/curator Fred Wasserman, the Luboml Exhibition Project has amassed over 2000 photographs, artifacts and lists of Luboml survivors and their descendants in the U.S., Canada, Israel, Argentina and Brazil. The exhibition contains 43 framed archival print photographs, artifacts within wall mounted cases, text panels, a map of the region and two freestanding photomurals.
The exhibition is made possible with the support of Mrs. Barbara Schatten and family in memory of Dr. William E. Schatten, Emory University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, Emory College and the Aaron Ziegelman Foundation.
Exhibtion URL: www.luboml.org |
