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  Conspiracy of Goodness

  This exhibition tells the story of how an isolated Huguenot community in the Haute-Loire region, saved 3,500 Jews from Nazi Germany and the soldiers of Vichy France. Villagers of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the surrounding villages, joined together to conceal, rescue, and provide false documentation for Jews and French Resistance fighters, at great risk to their own lives. Click below to…

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  The Jacket from Dachau

  In July of 2015, the KHC was contacted by a vintage clothing dealer about a recent acquisition of a unique garment at an estate sale. In the back of a walk-in closet, amid a variety of old shirts and vintage dresses, hung a faded striped jacket. We now know Benzion Peresecki, a young Jewish man from Lithuania, wore this jacket…

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  Survivance & Sovereignty on Turtle Island

  The exhibition addresses the histories and present-day realities of the first people of this continent through contemporary Native American art. Turtle Island is the name given to North America by the Anishinabek, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), and the Lenape—some of the Indigenous people of this region. The artists address survivance: a term that emphasizes both cultural survival and resistance in the…

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  Testimony Across The Disciplines: QCC Students Respond to Genocide through Art and Writing

  The 2014-15 Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center (KHC) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Colloquium, Testimony across the Disciplines: Cultural and Artistic Responses to Genocide, was a student-centered, large-scale interdisciplinary pedagogy project that integrated Queensborough Community College’s (QCC) cultural and academic resources amongst 300 students, 20 faculty members, 10 academic disciplines and 5 colleges. The pedagogy project both…

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  The Train From Auschwitz: Journey From Shame to Self-Realization

  Artist David Gev’s mixed-media sculpture and video installation interprets his father’s journey in a livestock train cart to Auschwitz. His accounts of starvation, coldness, fear, exhaustion, and death are the genesis of Gev’s art. He imagines a colored landscape with ever-changing horizon lines seen through a slit in the wooden panels.

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  Genocide Among the Flowers: Seymour Kaftan’s Ponary Paintings

  This exhibit tells the story of Vilnius’ Jews starting with the Nazi invasion, and including the Ponary tragedy. It does so through the visual images recorded by Seymour Kaftan—born Szepsel Kaftanjski—in 26 oil paintings. A Holocaust survivor—he was 15 years old when the Nazis invaded his hometown—Kaftan documented his personal ordeal, depicting the horrors of Nazi brutality, the loss of…

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  The Art of Samuel Bak

  This three-part exhibition explores landscape, object, and person through Samuel Bak’s themes of loss and the Jewish dictate of tikkun olam (“repair of the world”). Bak’s work is born of catastrophe. His canvases are filled with artifacts and ruins of Jewish life, images of Greek mythology, and childhood objects—all presented in fragments half-buried in the ground, hovering above water, or…

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