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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.

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.

To celebrate its 20^th birthday, the mahJ highlights in the permanent collection and the auditorium foyer 100 donors and the artwork they have donated to the museum.