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Judaism

The harrowing and moving story of the 1946 survivors’ Haggadah

A sister pays homage to her brother's very special artworks

March 26, 2021 20:38
ehedbilvad
2 min read

 Just as Seder night is different from all other nights, so was the Holocaust Haggadah created by survivors for survivors seventy-five years ago for Passover 1946.

“Haggadah” means “retelling”. On this occasion, that reflected the gruesome modern-day reality of having been “slaves” to Hitler.

The radical, manmade A Survivors’ Haggadah was written in Hebrew and Yiddish by Yosef Sheinson, a Lithuanian Hebrew teacher and survivor of the Kovno Ghetto. Accompanying the book were seven haunting woodcuts of the War, illustrated by Hungarian artist and Theresienstadt survivor Miklos Adler.

One brutal illustration corresponds with the well-known sentence “for not only one has risen against us to destroy us.” It depicted a soldier shooting several prisoners. In the final woodcut, smoke is seen curling up from tall chimneys, becoming the disembodied heads of an old couple and a child. At the top of the picture are the words: “Go forth to the Land”. The caption below in Hebrew states, “therefore we are obligated”.