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Official Poster Marking Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day 2025
On Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day the State of Israel unites in commemorating the six million Jews murdered by the German Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust. It is a day of personal and collective memory, which continues to evolve in Israel's public arena.
Now in its fifteenth year, the "Shaping Memory" competition invites contemporary Israeli artists to portray the Holocaust’s complex and diverse layers of significance – through a visual prism. This gives expression to the manner in which artists relate to the memory of the Holocaust, and to their influence on the shaping of memory in Israeli society.
The winning poster, chosen from dozens of entries by a panel of judges, was created by multidisciplinary artist Avraham Yadan, a graduate of the Avni Institute's industrial design course, with his own design and art studio.
40-year-old Yadan, a resident of Almagor, explains that for him, the significance of the Holocaust lies in the physical and emotional space where the profound internal process of transition occurs: from pain to growth, and from the total loss of everything we hold dear to unfathomable levels of empowerment and rebirth. The striped shirt is symbolic of the suffering and anguish of the Jewish people, robbed of all freedoms, incarcerated and massacred. All these elements connect graphically and merge with the keys of the piano, emblematic of liberty, joy and love, and of the uplifting power of music.
This year’s competition to design the official poster marking Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day focused on the theme, "Out of the Depths: The Anguish of Liberation and Rebirth, Marking 80 Years since the Defeat of Nazi Germany".
In early May 1945, when Nazi Germany unconditionally surrendered to Allied Forces, jubilation spread throughout the world. World War II in Europe had come to an end, although fighting still continued for several months in the Far East. This was a war that had wreaked destruction on a scale unprecedented in history: roughly 80 million dead; millions of refugees of many nationalities spread throughout Europe and beyond; cities destroyed and infrastructures shattered. Allied soldiers banded together on the smoldering ruins of Berlin, and military parades and public celebrations took place the world over, as well as on the European continent just freed from the clutches of the Nazi regime.
Yet one nation did not take part in the general euphoria – the Jewish people. For them, victory had come too late. The day of liberation, the one for which Jews had longed throughout the years of the Holocaust, was for the most part a day of crisis and emptiness, a feeling of overwhelming loneliness as the sheer scale of the destruction was grasped, on both a personal and communal level.
With the advent of liberation, probing questions arose for the survivors: Where could they feel secure? Who had survived somehow from their families and communities? How would they be able to go back to living a "normal" life, to build homes and families – and where? On European soil or elsewhere? How should the legacy of the murdered be preserved and commemorated? How would the perpetrators of the heinous crime be brought to justice? Were the survivors to seek vengeance?
As early as the first days and weeks after liberation, survivors began to recover and organize themselves, despite the grief, physical weakness and extensive hardships. They formed new families and an independent leadership, set up educational and foster-care facilities for children and youth, published dozens of newspapers and magazines, collected testimonies on the fate of Jews during the Holocaust, and became a significant factor in the Zionist movement's activities. However, not all the survivors succeeded in rising from the ashes and building their lives and futures anew. Some were too sick, or could not muster the emotional strength to reenter a society and humanity that had betrayed them. Their voices were not always heard, and they remained isolated, prisoners of their own anguish.
In spite of everything, in numerous ways Holocaust survivors contributed to building a better world for themselves, for their children and for future generations, so that others would never experience the horrors of the Holocaust. They raised families, established communities, and were active in a variety of fields and professions. Among their many endeavors, they established organizational and legal frameworks designed to prevent the recurrence of crimes such as the Holocaust.
(Excerpt from Yad Vashem's rationale for this year's designated theme).
Judges' Panel
- Prof. Merav Salomon: Head of Animation Studies, Visual Communication Department, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design
- Prof. Tamir Shefer: Director of the Visual Communication Department, Holon Institute of Technology (HIT)
- Prof. Terry Schreuer, Dean of the Azrieli Design Faculty, Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art
- Yaron Shin, Senior Lecturer, Haifa University
- Galit Wahba Shasho, Director of State Ceremonies and Events, Prime Minister's Office
- Mr. Dani Dayan, Yad Vashem Chairman
- Ms. Eliad Moreh-Rosenberg, Chief Art Curator, Museums Division, Yad Vashem
- Ms. Inbal Kvity-Ben Dov, Director, Commemoration, Culture and Public Engagement Division, Yad Vashem
- Ms. Iris Rosenberg: Director, International Affairs and Communications Division, Yad Vashem
- Dr. Yael Richler-Friedman, Director, Content Development and Pedagogy, International Institute for Holocaust Education, Yad Vashem
- Ms. Shlomit Steiner, Coordinator, Content Development and Pedagogy, Education in Israel Department, International Institute for Holocaust Education, Yad Vashem
From the judges' considerations when choosing the winning poster
The poster depicts the amalgamation of two symbolic images: the striped shirt, which over the years has become one of the iconic emblems of the Holocaust, and the piano, symbol of creativity and culture. The fusion of these two symbols alludes to the fact that the persecution and mass murder of the Jews in the Holocaust period was perpetrated in the heart of Western civilization by so-called cultured individuals.
The charcoal drawing on a bruised background, that gradually becomes lighter at the point that the striped shirt and the piano meet, creates a kind of journey through time. The prisoner garb, uninhabited by a human form but not lacking volume, connotes the sloughed-off skin of the inmate who has been liberated at the camp, and who moves fearfully and sometimes even clumsily towards the process of physical, emotional and cultural rehabilitation. The merging point, at which the two images seem to integrate seamlessly, hints at the question of whether this rehabilitation is even feasible. Is a return to life within the realm of possibility? Can one rejoin the human race after the horrors of the Holocaust? Survivors such as Primo Levi, Jean Amery and other writers and thinkers grappled with this existential question.
The slightly skewed piano in the poster hints at a path or ladder on which one can strive upwards, and the poster thus suggests another layer of connection with Jewish images such as Joseph's coat of many colors and Jacob's ladder. This serves to reinforce the singular dimension of the Holocaust as a period in which each and every Jew under the occupation of Nazi Germany and its collaborators was hunted down with the purpose of annihilation. While Nazi Germany's defeat was a joyful event for the world, for the Jewish people it marked the beginning of the complex processes of mourning and rehabilitation, as they discovered and gradually comprehended the enormity of the devastation.