The Lonka Project. Man number Automatic translate

The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center presents the exhibition “The Lonka Project. The man under the number. " It will become part of an international photography project about people who survived the Holocaust and will show more than 60 portraits.

The history of the Lonka project began in 2018. Eleanor (Lonca) Nass went through the Shoah, but rarely told the children about her experiences. “I grew up in a house of silence,” says Rina Castelnuovo, Lonca’s daughter. “I knew what a barracks was and who the Nazis were, but when my mother died overnight, responsibility for the past passed onto us.”

After the death of her mother, Reena and her husband Jim Hollander, photographers specializing in the Middle East, approached professional photographers to create portraits of Holocaust survivors and record their memories. There were no criteria for the photo: it could be a color or black-and-white photo taken from any angle.

The global photography community responded to the request: more than 300 photographers from 30 countries took part in the project. Among them are Magnum members Alec Sot, Gilles Perezc and Eli Reid, World Press Photo laureates Ed Kashi and Jane Evelyn Atwood, and Roger Ballen, known for his collaboration with Die Antwoord.

Each of them was able to convey the fragility and strength of the surviving women and men in their own way. The photographs show Anita Lasker-Walvis, a cellist who played in the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz; British street photographer Dorothy Bohm; Liliana Segre - Senator for Life of Italy; weightlifting champion Sir Ben Helfgott; and Oscar-winning filmmaker Claude Lelouch.

The curators of the exhibition at the Jewish Museum are Anna-Patricia Kahn, director of the CLAIRbyKahn gallery in Zurich, member of the Lonka project; curator of photographic projects Nina Gomiashvili and curator of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center Liya Chechik. They selected more than 60 images from the international project.

In their selection, the curators sought to reflect the emotional dialogue between photographers and survivors: “We are the last generation to have an exceptional opportunity to cross the eyes of the ages and hear the personal memories of Holocaust survivors,” they emphasize.

Lonka continues to be replenished with new works. The Jewish Museum acted as a partner in a global project and invited Russian photographers to participate in it. Egor Zaika, Olga Izakson, Maria Gruzdeva and Anna Shmitko joined Lonka - they made portraits of Russians who passed through the Shoah.

Among them are the playwright Alexander Gelman and the theater director Kama Ginkas.