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The island of Djerba, in southern Tunisia, is home to one of the oldest and most famous synagogues in the world, the Ghriba. The community around this synagogue, whose existence is accounted for since the Middle Ages, was documented by Jacques Pérez in 1979-1980, in a series of colorful photographs that illustrate their ancestral traditions.

The mahJ is showing The Parade, the series of drawings created by Si Lewen (1918–2016) in 1950. Although this Polish-born American artist was a prominent figure in American post-war art, he is still little known in Europe. The recurrent theme in his work is the inexpressible horror of the Holocaust.

Founded in Russia in 1880 to extricate Jews from misery through the promotion of handicrafts and agriculture, ORT (Organisation Reconstruction Travail) is today an international education and training network established in over forty countries. 2021 marks the centenary of its presence in France.

Echoing the "Chagall, Modigliani, Soutine… Paris pour école, 1905-1940" exhibition, the mahJ is paying tribute to Hersh Fenster (Baranów, 1892–Paris, 1964), the journalist, Yiddish writer and author of Undzere farpaynikte kinstler (Our Martyred Artists), published in Paris in 1951. Both a memorial and an art book, it retraces the lives and work of 84 Jewish artists living in France who died between 1940 and 1945, about whom Fenster compiled testimonies and photographs over a five-year period. Some, like Chaïm Soutine and Otto Freundlich, are well known, others, such as Étienne Farkas and Jacob Macznik, less. Yet all played their part in the final years of what the critic André Warnod dubbed in 1925 the “School of Paris”. Painters, sculptors, illustrators, men and women, their work was brought to a premature end and sometimes destroyed.

Jean Besancenot’s photographs, taken from 1934 to 1937, are a priceless record of rural Jewish communities in Morocco no longer in existence. 

The Guerry Columns, a major work Georges Jeanclos (1933-1997), joined recently the mahJ’s collections thanks to an exceptional donation by the artist’s family of a full-scale terracotta study of the bronze monument erected in the hamlet of Guerry at Savigny-en-Septaine in the Cher. A poignant evocation of one of the crimes of the Shoah perpetrated on the French territory, this work constitutes a major enrichment of the mahJ’s contemporary collection.

Adolfo Kaminsky, a member of the Resistance and a brilliant forger, spent thirty years of his life producing counterfeit identity papers to save lives. He discovered photography during the Second World War reproducing official stamps for forged identity cards.