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Faces of Hope A Tribute to Las Vegas’ Holocaust Survivors By Lynn Wexler-Margolies Photographs by Lyn Robinson
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tepping into the storefront at 4794 Eastern Ave., home to the Sperling Kronberg Mack Holocaust Resource Center, reveals a sprawling wall of jovial faces. The black-and-white photographs represent 60 Las Vegas Holocaust survivors. It’s an unusual, almost jarring “welcome” for a visitor expecting a somber experience relevant to an organization that chronicles the dark realities and disturbing emotions of human atrocity. The Wall of Hope, the uplifting photographic exhibit that opened last September, was inspired by a similar display in Los Angeles, according to Myra Berkovits, the resource center’s educational specialist. Crafted by design, the arresting arrangement covers the length of one wall, boldly showcasing the framed and smiling portraits of those who suffered and lost the unthinkable in Nazi concentration camps. “It’s meant not only to honor Southern Nevada’s Holocaust survivors, but to celebrate their lives well lived despite the horrors of the past,” said Doug Unger, the center’s chair. It’s been almost 70 years since allied soldiers liberated emaciated internees from the horrific Holocaust, a word of Greek origin whose literal translation is sacrifice or total consumption by fire. Ordinarily, holocaust is not a word that necessarily connotes evil, or one that demands a capital letter. But Hitler’s Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, statesponsored persecution or burning of more than 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. German authorities targeted other groups as well because of their supposed inferiority, such as
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Roma (Gypsies), the disabled and homosexuals. “We knew exactly what we wanted in approaching the design of our Wall of Hope,” said Berkovits. “We posted the job specification at the Fine Arts/Photography department at UNLV. Lyn Robinson, a recent graduate from that department, applied and was awarded the commission. We think she’s more than fulfilled the mission. She’s captured the vitality and spirit of each survivor, portraying triumph over tragedy in each of their faces. We couldn’t be more pleased.” The 21-year-old UNLV art history/photography graduate, who is not Jewish, applied for the assignment because “it sounded like an important thing to do.” She began to photograph her subjects in the fall of 2011, and it “took almost a year to capture all 60 of the survivors.” “They are some of the neatest people I will ever meet in my life,” she says. “It astounds me how they each went through something so horrendous and unimaginable, yet went on to find happiness, spread joy and create amazing lives.” Robinson says most of her sessions with the survivors were intense. “These are men and women who have come a long way,” she says. “They have incredible stories that often brought me to tears.” But Robinson wanted her subjects to smile, to underscore that the exhibition is “a celebration of the people who triumphed over (incredible) events, and not about the events themselves.” She spent considerable time coaxing each survivor to share sorrows and successes, in hopes of revealing the person within. “I wanted to capture their natural smiles. So I thought of things to
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make them giggle, and then I would take the shot,” Robinson says. “It was fun because they were fun.” Berkovits believes that “all who witness The Wall of Hope, with its real-life beautiful and happy faces, will learn a thing or two: that if we find ourselves in the throes of hell, it’s possible that we, too, can come out of it.” “I want people to leave appreciating humanity,” Berkovits says, “and how people can rise above even the worst of circumstances.” She hopes the survivors will understand from the exhibit just “how much we admire and appreciate them.” The Sperling Kronberg Mack Holocaust Resource Center opened its doors in 1980 (in a different, more obscure location), under the auspices of the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas. The center was funded through an endowment from the Lloyd and Edythe Katz Family, in memory of Edythe’s parents, Gertrude and Hyman Sperling. At that time its purpose was to acquire books and materials relating to the Holocaust, and be a resource and lending library for the Las Vegas community. Back in 1980, Edythe Katz-Yarchever – now 92 and still very much involved with the repository – was appointed chair of both the center and the Nevada Governor’s Advisory Council on Education Relating to the Holocaust. The center, no longer a part of the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas, lists among its objectives continuing “to serve the Nevada Governor’s Advisory Council, and providing print, non-print, and electronic resources free to the public to support the Council’s
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mission to develop programs for the education of children and adults in issues relating to the Holocaust, tolerance and diversity.” The center comprises more than 3,000 resources on various Holocaust-related topics, ranging from Nazism, ghetto life, survivor memoirs, genocide, liberation to Holocaust denial. Along the way, it has accumulated a substantial library, a media center (thanks to continued donations from Lillian and Henry Kronberg and Judy and Ron Mack) and a growing Holocaust memorabilia collection. The archive features such items as a teapot reported to have been made in the Polish factory of Oskar Schindler, the subject of the film Schindler’s List, along with a Nazi uniform, helmet and film camera. The center also is engaged in collaborations with the Clark County School District; the Holocaust Survivors Group of Southern Nevada; the Northwest Reno Library (site of an additional Holocaust Collection made possible by a Ron and Judy Mack Education Foundation grant); the Washoe County School District; the Nevada State Department of Education; the ADL’s (Anti Defamation League) No Place for Hate program; and other local and national Holocaust education organizations. “Its main purpose is, and always has been, to educate the community through the lessons of the Holocaust, by teaching respect for human dignity and the value of cultural and ethnic differences,” Katz-Yarchever says. “And we’re free and open to the public.” Center librarian Sue Dubin adds: “Our efforts and programming have expanded significantly over the past few years. We are a full-
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service facility, offering educational materials and activities and suggested programming and resources for Holocaust studies. We even have space for special events and meetings.” Bryan Kessler is the resource center’s education liaison. He also teaches high school-level Judaics at the private K-12 Adelson Educational Campus in Summerlin. “In addition to The Wall of Hope, I think I’m most proud of our teacher-training workshops on various themes of the Holocaust,” he says, “much of which I’ve developed and written.” Having worked in the curatorial departments at the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Kessler promotes Holocaust Education throughout the state and serves on the Nevada Governor’s Advisory Council on Holocaust Education. He designed and taught a specialized course on the Holocaust and Intolerance for the Clark County School District, resulting in the 2011 Yom HaShoah exhibition, Making Their Story Our Own. “We have a great outreach program, which offers a variety of learning opportunities for community and educational institutions to teach Holocaust awareness,” Kessler says. Ben Lesser, an 83-year-old survivor, says that “the Holocaust Resource Center exists and has grown to be available to the greater Las Vegas community for education and awareness, especially for the school children, is beyond important.” Lesser “spent five years of hell on Earth” in the camps from the age of 13. “Not many of
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us left. A few of us have died since the photos have been taken. To memorialize us in that way is very special.” Ray Fiol, president of the Holocaust Survivors Group of Southern Nevada, says her parents “worked in the labor camps and saw what was going to happen. They found a French family to smuggle me out, and so I survived. But I better than survived, and the Wall of Hope is a testament to that!” Survivor David Berkovits could never forget it was May 1944 when “I was taken in a kettle train with my family to Auschwitz. That day, I became an orphan. My whole family was killed instantly; gassed, burned; that was the end of it. I have carried on and built a life in their honor and in spite of Hitler.” Deuteronomy 4:9 reminds us: Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life. And you shall make them known to your children, and to your children’s children. Vigilance must be heeded at all costs; the same goes for education and awareness, to prevent a haven for evil to exist and grow through ignorance, complacency, fear and silence. The Holocaust Resource Center reinforced that creed through its motto, Remembering the Past to Preserve the Future. The faces on the Wall of Hope remind us that, in the end, good triumphs over evil if we choose life over its alternatives. That’s what the 60 survivors provide through their smiles, and through lives well lived.
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