The Lonka Project. Man numbered

The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center presents the exhibition “The Lonka Project. Person number ”, timed to coincide with the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The project features over 60 portraits of people who have passed through the Shoah.

The history of the Lonka project began in 2018. Eleanor (Lonca) Nass was a Holocaust survivor, but she rarely shared her experiences with children. “I grew up in a house of silence,” says Rina Castelnuovo, Lonca’s daughter. “I knew what a barracks was and who the Nazis were, but when my mother died overnight, responsibility for the past passed onto us.”

After the death of her mother, Reena and her husband Jim Hollander, photojournalists specializing in the Middle East, decided to preserve the stories of the survivors by taking photos and recording their memories.

Rina and Jim approached professional photographers to create portraits of Holocaust survivors. There were no criteria for a photo: it could be a color or black-and-white photo taken from any angle.

The global photography community responded to the request: more than 300 photographers from 30 countries took part in the project. Among them are members of the Magnum agency Alec Sot and Gilles Perez, World Press Photo laureates Ed Kashi and Jane Evelyn Atwood, as well as Roger Ballen, known for his collaboration with the Die Antwoord group.

Each of them was able to convey the fragility and strength of the surviving women and men in their own way. The photographs show Anita Lasker-Walvis, a cellist who played in the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz; British street photographer Dorothy Bohm; Liliana Segre - Senator for Life of Italy; weightlifting champion Sir Ben Helfgott; and Oscar-winning filmmaker Claude Lelouch.

The curators of the exhibition at the Jewish Museum are Anna-Patricia Kahn, director of the CLAIRbyKahn gallery in Zurich, member of the Lonka project; curator of photographic projects Nina Gomiashvili and curator of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center Liya Chechik. They have selected over 60 photographs that invite you to touch history through the prism of individual lives. In their selection, the curators sought to reflect the emotional dialogue between photographers and survivors: “We are the last generation to have an exceptional opportunity to cross the eyes of the ages and hear the personal memories of Holocaust survivors,” they emphasize.

The Lonka project continues to be replenished with new works. The Jewish Museum also acted as a partner in a global project and invited Russian photographers to participate in it. Egor Zaika, Olga Izakson and Anna Shmitko have already joined Lonka to make portraits of Russian Holocaust survivors. Among them are playwright Alexander Gelman and theater director Kama Ginkas.