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OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
B A LT I M O R E J E W I S H H O M E . C O M
THE BALTIMORE JEWISH HOME
JULY 23, 2020
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T
he artists of the Holocaust era had a story to tell. Though much has been lost, the remaining art is a testimony to the lives they lived and the horrors they encountered. Liz Elsby is determined to share their stories and preserve their legacies. Elsby is an artist, educator and tour guide at Yad Vashem the World Holocaust Remembrance Center Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, Israel. Elsby has been working at the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem (ISHS), since 2006. ISHS provides Holocaust education to diverse audiences from Israel and across the world, including training for educators to teach the Holocaust. It is the only school of its kind, utilizing an interdisciplinary approach of educating through art, music, literature, theology and drama. “I was always really fascinated by the Holocaust,” shares Elsby. “My dad’s whole family came from Grodno, Poland and from Riga. Almost all of them were murdered either in Treblinka or Auschwitz…so that was always kind of there in the background. It’s not something my dad felt comfortable talking about, but I was always fascinated by the subject.” Born in New York, Elsby and her family moved to Texas when she was 12. Illustrating and painting since she was a little girl, she was a National Scholar in the Arts and attended an art high school in Houston. She received a full scholarship and attend-
ed university for a year and a half in Philadelphia. Discontented in with Jewish life in Philadelphia and Houston in early 1980’s, Elsby decided to join a Kibbutz Ulpan in Israel for six months. She made Aliyah to Israel in April 1984. “That ‘six months’ turned into 36 years -- I’ve been here ever since. I was a little Jewish kid from Long Island when we moved to Houston and I was the only Jewish kid in the class. I felt very disconnected. My family was very Zionistic and I always kind of dreamed of going to Israel.”
In 2006 Elsby’s career took a new path when a friend told her about an opening at Yad Vashem as a content writer in the web department. Elsby was grateful to be accepted with no background in history. Once Yad Vashem learned of her graphic design background, she was recruited for that role as well. By 2007 Elsby took the course to become a museum tour guide. “I absolutely fell in love with teaching and educating and teaching people about the Holocaust.” At Yad Vashem, Elsby’s love of art gave birth to a unique form of holo-
As I stand on the border between life and death, certain that I will not remain alive, I wish to take leave from my friends and my works…My works I bequeath to the Jewish museum to be built after the war. Farewell, my friends. Farewell, the Jewish people. Never again allow such a catastrophe.
Elsby served as a graphic artist in the Israel Defense Forces from 1985 to 1987. She went on to The Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, graduating in 1991 with a BFA degree in illustration and graphic design. She worked as freelance illustrator and artist for many years, and served as a courtroom artist at the 1996 trial of Yigal Amir, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
caust education. Art is not only as a portal to the past but as a memorial for those who would have otherwise been completely erased…? “As fascinated as I am with the Holocaust, I began to really really hone in on what it meant to create art during this terrible time. That as an artist you could still create art under such terrible circumstances and that the art wouldn’t only be what people
think it would be – kitschy images of barbed wire and yellow stars – that people could go beyond that a find a place inside themselves. I became fascinated by Holocaust art and got into it more and more. I was very grateful that I had a platform at Yad Vashem.” “Holocaust” art refers to the art created during the period of 19331948, from the year the Nazis came to power until three years after the war ended in 1945. Yad Vashem houses the world’s largest and most comprehensive Holocaust-era related collections, with a few smaller collections housed at other museums. Between ten and eleven thousand pieces of art survived, and Elsby explains that it is a mere fraction of what was created over those years, with most being lost or destroyed. Some artwork was entrusted to friends or hidden, but most was never retrieved, and many pieces were confiscated and destroyed by the Nazis as Jewish art. Much of the surviving Holocaust art comes from Theresienstadt. Though her family originated from Poland, Elsby became very focused on Czech Jewry and Theresienstadt. Before her parents passed away last summer, Elsby would meet them yearly in Prague to visit the city and study Jewish life and the art of Terezin. Theresienstadt/Terezin was a camp 30 miles north of Prague in the Czech Republic. Considered the “better“ ghetto, Theresienstadt was a hybrid concentration camp, transit camp and ghetto established by the Nazis during World War II in the fortress town Terezín, located in a
