Yad Vashem's Museum of Holocaust Art is dedicated to the world of Jewish creativity during the Holocaust, and presents works by artists who were active in ghettos, camps, hiding places and forests.
The works in Yad Vashem's unrivalled Art Collection will soon be preserved and stored in Yad Vashem's new Shoah Heritage Collections Center, the heart of the new Shoah Heritage Campus being built on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem. The new Collections Center aims to preserve, catalogue and display these items as everlasting witnesses to the horrors of the Holocaust.
The German Nazis were determined not only to annihilate the Jewish people, but also to obliterate their identity, memory, culture and heritage," remarked Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev. "For many, all that remains are a treasured work of art, a personal artifact that survived with them, a photograph kept close to their person, a diary, or a note. By preserving these precious items – that are of great importance not just to the Jewish people, but also to humanity as a whole – and revealing them to the public, they will act as the voice of the victims and the survivors, and serve as an everlasting memory."
FFranz Petr Kien (1919 - 1944(. Portrait of Jan Burka, Prague, 1940. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Yad Vashem Art Collection, Courtesy of the bequest of Friedel Stern