From Aug ’11 Spotlight:
“Women took upon themselves the responsibility to care for others,” said Yehudit Shendar when she introduced Spots of Light: To be a Woman in the Holocaust, the new exhibit at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. “It was the task of the perpetrators to take away their beauty, but after the war many became gorgeous again.”
Shendar’s remarks were warmly received by the enormous crowd who came to Skokie on June 23rd for “Member’s Preview Night.” Although most of the materials for this exhibit had been prepared in Israel by Yad Vashem staff (including Shendar), many objects and artworks were also donated locally. Some of these precious artifacts have never been displayed in public before, even though they are part of ILHMEC’s permanent collection.
The exhibition runs through September 6th. For more information, visit the ILHMEC website: www.IlHolocaustMuseum.org. The beautiful exhibition catalogue (written and edited by Yehudit Inbar) is on sale in the ILHMEC gift shop and also available on the Yad Vashem website: www.YadVashem.org.
Another excellent resource on this topic is the section called “Double Jeopardy” in Judy Chicago’s Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light: “I plan to tell ‘the story of the holocaust’ using standard photographs . . . then I want to ‘paint in’ the untold story of women’s experiences of those same events . . .”.
