The Ruins of Memory: Women's Voices of the Holocaust
When
Occurs on
Saturday October 22 2022
Approximate running time: 1 hour and 30 minutes
Venue
Event Notes
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$20 General Admission
This moving and illuminating performance piece features selections of resistance and resilience from fiction, poetry, and oral histories by survivors and victims of the Holocaust, spotlighting the stories of women from both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities. Combining live music, sound and movement with spoken word and song, the production captures emotional snapshots of the time, delineating the mounting tension and fear that swept throughout Europe as Jews were led inexorably to their fates.
Nazi Germany’s master plan to eradicate the Jewish people did not technically differentiate between gender. However, the odds of a woman surviving the death camps was much lower than that of a man. Yet aside from the diary of Anne Frank and the memoirs of Gisella Perl who was a Jewish doctor at Auschwitz, women’s voices are, for the most part, little known outside of academia.
We hope to provide some balance to that picture by showcasing stories that put the women, their suffering, and their experiences, at the forefront. The reflections of Jewish women tend to be more intimate, the lens more narrow as the focus is often on the home, family tensions, small moments or gestures that are the genesis for turning points and uniquely female forms of self-sacrifice, humiliation and heroism. In addition, our desire to include testimony from the Sephardic community will also fill a noticeable void in Holocaust studies, which tend to focus solely on the Eastern European community, ignoring the devastating loss of entire Jewish centers in Greece, Rhodes, and other areas in the Mediterranean.
This moving and illuminating performance piece features selections of resistance and resilience from fiction, poetry, and oral histories by survivors and victims of the Holocaust, spotlighting the stories of women from both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities. Combining live music, sound and movement with spoken word and song, the production captures emotional snapshots of the time, delineating the mounting tension and fear that swept throughout Europe as Jews were led inexorably to their fates.
Nazi Germany’s master plan to eradicate the Jewish people did not technically differentiate between gender. However, the odds of a woman surviving the death camps was much lower than that of a man. Yet aside from the diary of Anne Frank and the memoirs of Gisella Perl who was a Jewish doctor at Auschwitz, women’s voices are, for the most part, little known outside of academia.
We hope to provide some balance to that picture by showcasing stories that put the women, their suffering, and their experiences, at the forefront. The reflections of Jewish women tend to be more intimate, the lens more narrow as the focus is often on the home, family tensions, small moments or gestures that are the genesis for turning points and uniquely female forms of self-sacrifice, humiliation and heroism. In addition, our desire to include testimony from the Sephardic community will also fill a noticeable void in Holocaust studies, which tend to focus solely on the Eastern European community, ignoring the devastating loss of entire Jewish centers in Greece, Rhodes, and other areas in the Mediterranean.