“HIDING,” by Diana Lubarsky depicts Jews hiding from Nazis in a closet, a secret cellar and under a bed.

Neveh Shalom hosts sculptor's Holocaust work

By PAUL HAIST

article created on: 2009-03-15T00:00:00

It was about 30 years ago that Diana Lubarsky began an art project that today is still a work in progress.

Lubarsky, who moved to Portland a few years ago with her husband, is a sculptor who has created some 50 or 60 small works in bronze or glazed terracotta, each of them about the Holocaust.

Thirteen of the pieces are on display now at Congregation Neveh Shalom. They are in the glass cases in the foyer outside the main sanctuary.

Apart from the fact that she’s Jewish, Lubarsky has no direct ties to the Holocaust; she is neither a survivor nor a child of a survivor. She was born in Brooklyn in 1945 and grew up on Long Island.

“I was raised knowing little about Judaism, and virtually nothing about the Holocaust,” she says in the biographical entry on her Web site (holocaustimages.com).

So, where do the images she creates come from?

“I had just had my first child and these images just started coming into my head,” she told the Jewish Review.

She thought it might be what she called “genetic memory.”

Again from her Web site: “Odd as it may sound, my connection to the Holocaust is a torrent of images that I see in my head. They are the images of a people caught in the throes of Holocaust. …these images have been with me and have bound me so deeply to the Holocaust that it has infused itself into every aspect of my life.

She suspects the images come from the past.

“I have come to believe that I did not choose Holocaust, but rather Holocaust chose me,” she writes. “As bizarre as this may sound, I feel as though I have been asked by the people in my head to remember them. And I do, with each breath I take.”

Lubarsky has sold only a very few of the Holocaust pieces, preferring instead to exhibit the collection.

“This is work that should be seen,” she told the Review, “Survivors come to me with tears in their eyes and say to me. ‘How did you know this is where I was hiding,’” The children look at me and say, ‘Wow, now I understand.’”

She has exhibited the collection in many places, especially in the eastern United States where she lived until recent years.

One of her most successful shows was in the West Point Jewish Chapel at the U.S. Military Academy in New York. The 1996 show was so popular that she was invited back the next year.

Although Lubarsky prefers to keep the collection mostly intact, she is proud that among her few buyers is the famed late photographer Roman Vishniac, renowned for capturing the Jewish culture of Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.

Vishniac purchased the first piece she sold. He said at the time, “Diana doesn’t know it yet, but Diana is better than Picasso.”

Lubarsky said that the subject matter of her work also makes it a hard sell. She said that people who openly admire the work are reluctant to purchase.

“It’s wonderful work,” they tell her, “but it’s not what I want on my piano.”

The works are not, however, graphically explicit. That is, no violence is depicted, nor are there any Nazis in her work—and that’s all on purpose.

Lubarsky explains on her Web site.

“The ‘people in my head’ and I choose not to memorialize the perpetrators of violence, or the individual heinous acts committed upon a defenseless people.”

Neveh Shalom Senior Rabbi Daniel Isaak was impressed by Lubarsky’s work.

“It is clear that this is a life’s work and she has put her heart and soul in trying to transmit the pain and anguish of the Holocaust,” said Isaak.

Lubarsky and her husband are members of Neveh Shalom.

Asked if she still experiences the mental images or visions of the Holocaust, she said, “Oh yes. I think that will be with me always.”

She quickly adds that the experience is not depressing.

“What this represents for me is not sad, the sadness has already happened. What this represents is an ability to reach through time to all the people who asked, ‘Who will remember me?’

“It’s like saying, ‘I will remember you and no one will ever hurt you again; you will be remembered.’”

The sculptures will remain on display for an indefinite period of time.