Eliad Moreh Rosenberg receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award
Eliad Moreh Rosenberg holding her Lifetime Achievement Award
15 November 2021
Director of Yad Vashem's Art Collection and Curator of the Museum of Holocaust Art at Yad Vashem Eliad Moreh Rosenberg received the Lifetime Achievement Award, in the category of "European Cultural Manager 2021," of the European Cultural Brands Awards at a ceremony in Dresden last week.
Moreh Rosenberg was first nominated for this award in 2017, following the hugely successful exhibition "Art from the Holocaust" displayed at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, which she curated.
"The mission of the Art Department at Yad Vashem, and the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in general, is to collect, preserve, research and exhibit items from the Holocaust period, including artworks created during the time of the Holocaust," states Moreh Rosenberg. "Our collection, which is the largest of its kind in the world, tells the remarkable story of men, women and children who produced art at great risk to their lives – in order to ensure that humanity would know about them, their hopes and their dreams, as well as their fellow Jews. I hope that this recognition will give wider exposure to the memory of these artists and the incredible works they produced – which testify to the power of the human spirit to overcome the most difficult circumstances, and as such constitute a true source of inspiration for all of us today."
As part of the events surrounding the awards ceremony, Moreh Rosenberg met the Mayor of Dresden together with the other recipients, and participated in a local ceremony marking the 83rd anniversary of the November Pogrom (Kristallnacht), observed this past week.
Yad Vashem's Art Collection, the largest and most wide-ranging collection of its kind in the world, includes some 12,670 pieces, most of which were created during the Holocaust. These works represent a living testimony of Jews during the Holocaust who demonstrated an awesome creative power. The artists who produced them, in ghettos, in camps and in hiding, used their tools as instruments of expression and defiance during the most cataclysmic period in their lives, in order to leave a trace of their existence for posterity.
The Museum of Holocaust Art, inaugurated in 2005, is located in Yad Vashem's Square of Hope. The Museum's rotating permanent exhibition displays some 120 works of art. Most of these works were created during the Holocaust itself or immediately afterwards, or before the war by artists later murdered during the Shoah.
