When Alan Berliner arrived at the archives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in 1997, his instructions were simple:
“Go in there and come out inspired.”
Searching for inspiration among the file cabinets and boxes filled with 50,000 photographs and documents, the New York-based artist said recently, was “like sifting for gold, but in an enormous occan.”
His moments of “Eureka!” are now on display in “To the Rescue: Eight Artists in an Archive.”
The exhibition, organized by the JDC and currently on display at the International Center of Photography in New York, includes other specially commissioned works by international Jewish and non-Jewish artists.
The exhibition moves to the Miami Art Museum in 1999 and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, in the year 2000, with other venues still to be decided.
Besides Berliner, the exhibition includes the French-born photographer, Gilles Peress, who works in New York; the Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz; American multi-media artists Pepon Osorio, Fred Wilson and Wendy Ewald, and the painters Leon Golub and Terry Winters.
Berliner’s “Gathering Stones” — an installation of white-framed portraits from the JDC collection projected onto a rectangular field of black pebbles – – combines a monumental “family album” with the Jewish ritual of leaving stones at the graves of loved ones.
By participating in the ritual, visitors are encouraged literally to reach out to unknown ancestors and forgotten villages, to what he calls “a heritage or lineage they can no longer see, let alone understand.”
Creating such connections to history is one of the exhibition’s aims. Moreover, “To the Rescue” presents viewers with an opportunity “to explore art’s connection to the pressing issues of our time and to question our actions and responsibilities as citizens of the world,” the exhibition brochure explains.
For 85 years, the JDC has been responding to global distress, beginning in 1914, when it began to send aid to Jews living in Palestine. In subsequent years, the JDC provided services, set up schools, orphanages and training for Jews in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and later in North Africa.
During World War II, the agency rescued Jews from the Holocaust and helped resettle displaced persons. Most recently, it has helped evacuate Jews from places like Iran, Syria, Yemen and Ethiopia, and has provided non-sectarian aid and relief in countries such as Armenia, Bosnia and Rwanda.
Throughout its history, the JDC at times was forced to keep its activities a secret in order to protect the populations it served.
Now “the time has come to talk,” said Marshall Weinberg, a lifetime honorary JDC board member and the force behind the exhibition.
“The iron curtain has fallen, the situation in the Middle East and North Africa has lightened up. We feel very free to talk,” said Weinberg, who serves as chairman of the board of JTA.
In deciding what the agency’s contemporary message would be, Weinberg, who is also the chairman of the JDC’s archives committee, struck upon the idea for the exhibition as a way to update the JDC’s image.
The two curators hired to evaluate the archives, Marvin Heiferman and Carole Kismaric, suggested inviting contemporary artists to interpret the history represented in its vast holdings.
They also brought in the Russian-born architect Constantin Boym to create the exhibition design. Boym left Russia for Italy in 1981 with the JDC’s help, and his first-hand experience of refugee life is reflected in the subtle use of exhibition fixtures that resemble packing crates.
Weinberg explained that the creative edge was hoped to engage the kind of people who frequent museums of modern art — a “sophisticated” crowd of affiliated Jews, assimilated Jews, non-Jews, young and old.
Living in an era of affluence and freedom, the exhibition’s creators say, many Americans today have never experienced poverty or oppression and have therefore lost a visceral tie to the disadvantaged and dispossessed.
“We’re hoping to shake them up,” said Weinberg, whose involvement with the JDC spans more than 30 years. Nearly five of those years have been consumed with searching for museums willing and able to take on the exhibition and raising the over $400,000 necessary to bring it to fruition.
Whether the exhibition’s opening night crowd — a mix of hundreds of Jewish organizational representatives, art school students and museum professionals – – were moved to social action has yet to be seen, but most were clearly impressed with the exhibition’s mission and the artwork it produced.
“Archives are endless,” said Veronica Roberts, a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Looking at photograph after photograph, “you would start to get numb to it,” she said. “You have to do more.”
She pointed approvingly to a set of four framed images in Fred Wilson’s installation.
One pair shows a group of children arriving in the United States earlier this century, each holding a small American flag; below it, a scene from a concentration camp, with dazed-looking prisoners in striped uniforms.
Next to these, two frames held the same images obscured to reveal only identical patches of stripes: from a flag and from a uniform.
“You could go to the Holocaust museum and see this photograph,” said Roberts, “and it would be pretty powerful.”
What Wilson has done, she said, “is moving it a lot further.”
Wilson said that his search through the JDC archives was “frustrating.”
“You always get the feeling you’re missing the most important thing.”
Yet looking at the images, he said he experienced “a direct human response.”
Like Wilson, Wendy Ewald strived to convey this emotion in her work.
Her project paired students in a recently integrated Durham, N.C., elementary school with photographs and case histories of children who had survived World War II.
Ewald said her biggest challenge in working directly with the students, she wrote in the exhibition catalogue, “has been how to communicate my experience to the kids so that the images I saw became part of their own experiences.”
By learning about the survivors and preparing presentations, which Ewald videotaped, the children clearly were able to relate to the Holocaust and to apply that realization to their contemporary experiences of race and minority persecution.
“This is incredible!” a man said as he pulled his female companion by the hand into a screening of the final video installation.
Another visitor to the exhibition, Jonathan Feldschuh, himself an artist, said that the eight artists had successfully overcome the risk of letting “emotion become the message” of their contributions to the exhibition.
Feldschuh said he was moved by the exhibition’s themes of Holocaust and survival, which are “powerful to the identity of Jews in the 20th century. It’s not hard to feel connected.”
His friend, James Murray, a painter and gallery owner, quickly added that the experience was universal.
“It’s world history, not just Jewish history,” he said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
