“Once upon a time… there was a Holocaust…and everyone lived happily ever after.”

Such were the bedtime stories I was raised on. As the son of a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, I grew up hearing the first-hand testimony of a witness to humanity’s darkest moment. Dr. Mengele supplanted Dr. Suess, and the ‘Big Bad Wolf’ did a lot more than huff and puff. Sleeping with the lights on might keep the Boogie Monster at bay, but nothing could beat back the horror of being tucked under the covers by an arm branded with death camp numbers.

As my father left my bedside and headed out the door, he would pause and turn back toward me. “Did you say your prayers?” he would invariably ask.

“Did I what?!”

How can you bequeath me such an encounter with the Devil, and expect me to believe in a loving G-d? Do you really believe in ‘everyone living happily ever after’?

And yet somehow, he did. He, and countless other survivors experienced hell on earth, and still found the strength to believe.

It is this struggle to have faith in the midst madness, and the unique Jewish response to it, that is the subject of Black is a Color, a series of artworks and stories that express how traditional Jews found – and still find – hope and faith in the midst of the deepest darkness. It is an illumination of man’s post Holocaust spiritual stature; a search for the happy ending.

Humanity lost 60 million people to the Holocaust, 6 million of them Jews. The themes of Black is a Color honor all of them with their universality, but they express most specifically images of traditional Jewish life.

Due to the deep and multi-layered nature of the works, each piece will be accompanied by a written abstract similar to the selected ones displayed at the end of this exposition. My hope is that the collection will be of interest to institutions and museums for limited display. A printed and bound edition of the collected works with their respective abstracts would allow for an even greater distribution.

The Talmud teaches that a person who remembers the redemption from the Egyptian exile immediately before commencing to pray is worthy of an afterlife.1 Assuming eternal life is not earned on the cheap, what significance can be attributed to the juxtaposition of the redemption from Egypt and standing before G-d in prayer? It may very well be that serving G-d in the present requires being cognizant of our oppressive and ultimately redemptive past. We stand before Him in spite of history’s long, dark shadow of oppression. If we approach G-d without a recollection of what we have gone through and how He has saved us, we cannot hope for everlasting salvation.

The Exodus is central to Jewish faith, but the Talmud itself gives permission for children of the post-Holocaust world to focus on our most recent – and greatest – cataclysm in our search for salvation.

Expounding on a verse in Jeremiah,2 The Talmud3 tells us: “While (memory) of the exodus from Egypt will never be uprooted, a (future) oppression will dominate (our perspective)…” There will be a single oppression at the end of days whose atrocities will be so great that our salvation from that evil will eclipse the bondage of Egypt.
As we continue to recollect Egypt, modern man must also examine his existence from within the shadow cast upon him by the horrors of the Holocaust. In Egypt, the Jewish people became a nation and offered G-d the Paschal Lamb. In Nazi Germany the Jewish people were the sacrificial lamb. Our status has changed dramatically, and along with it, so has every aspect of our lives.

The early 19th century French painter, Édouard Manet, whose artistic subject matter often portrayed the lighter sides of societal life, and ushered in the colorful Impressionist movement, categorically claimed, ‘black is not a color!’4. By contrast, the achromatic pallet of our post-Holocaust era limits our ability to portray life as anything but nihilistic images of the macabre. Yet, as the artworks of Black is a color testify, traditional Jewish life looks out into the blackness of our terminal night, and refuses to be blinded by it. The ‘black’ we inherited is a rich-bodied color which adds depth and clarity to the portrait of our lives.

The Jewish faith has an interesting custom for the burial of brutally victimized individuals. Traditionally, we adhere to a strict regimen of cleaning and dressing the deceased. However, victims of violence are sent to their final resting place, ‘as is’. Their blood-stained garments and badly beaten corpses are left intact. No attempt is made to visually purify them. This is meant to illicit a heavenly reaction. By sending G-d’s beloved back to Him in such a defiled state, we expect G-d to be moved to show mercy and redeem His children.