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Menorahs of Victory
| Article
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17092 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1990 |
4,445 Words |
| Author
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Frank Fox
Frank Fox is a professor of east European history who
specializes in the history and art of Poland in the twentieth
century.
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"You must go to Kazimierz," an elderly Polish woman said, who went on to tell me about that ancient center of Jewish life. She remembered going there as a child and seeing the reflection of hundreds of candles in the waters of the Vistula. She was not sure whether they were those of Sabbath lights or of the menorahs of Chanukah. She saw them flickering from the top of the Mount of the Three Crosses, a hill overlooking the town, where a ruin of a castle and a monument were reminders of victory over the Swedes in the seventeenth century. Her recollection of Jewish lights shining from the hilltop seemed an apt image for the closeness and the distance that have always marked relations between Poles and Jews in that blood-soaked land.
I had come to Poland to interview seven sculptors who had been commissioned by a Holocaust survivor to design and cast in bronze the eight-branch menorahs that Jews light to celebrate the victory of Judas Maccabeus. Simon Schochet (pronounced Shoshay), a Polish Jew liberated at the end of World War II in Dachau, set this project in motion in 1986. We had many discussions about it. As a Polish Jew who had escaped before the war, I too had an interest in such a topic. I agreed to go to Poland to interview the sculptors in November 1989.
Observant Jews
"I felt that I wanted to confront what happened to the Polish Jews," Schochet said to me during one of our talks on the subject. "These were the most pious Jews, those who were closest to the 613 mitzvoth [good deeds required of observant Jews]. The Jews of American were spared, the communist Jews of Russia were spared, but those who really adhered to their faith were wiped out. And why was God as helpless as the people He was supposed to protect? Did God also perish at Auschwitz?"
"But why did you pick Polish sculptors," I asked, "and why particularly those who were relatively young?"
"I wanted to entrust this to Poles born since the war. To a generation free of the prewar prejudices as well as to those young enough to have escaped the indoctrination of the Socialist-Realist style so dominant right after the war."
Schochet had given the barest of instructions to the artists. His only requirements were that the menorahs were to be no more than half a meter in height and that they were to be cast in bronze. His intermediary was Danuta Wroblewska, one of the most
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