Reception
for Dora Reym’s Art Exhibition
“A
Survivor Remembers and Imagines”
followed
by Screening
of Diamonds
in the Snow
The
New Haven, CT JCC will hold a reception on June 6th, 5pm for its exhibit of Dora
Reym’s oil
paintings, watercolors, and charcoal drawings, A
Survivor Remembers… and Imagines.
The exhibition is now open and runs until July 2nd
2012.
Dora
Reym, 97 years old and a resident of Hamden CT was a participant
in this year’s “Adopt a Survivor” Program. As a young woman,
Dora Reym survived two winters in the Auschwitz death camp. In her
60s she taught herself to paint and draw.
The
74 pictures in the exhibit tell a moving and inspiring story.
The narrative begins with scenes of Jewish life in pre-war Poland as
well as charcoal drawings of family members who perished in the
Holocaust and it progresses to portraits, landscapes and still life
paintings in oil and watercolor that depict life reclaimed and
re-imagined.
~~~~
The
reception takes place at 5pm and will be followed at 7pm by a
screening of the prize-winning documentary, Diamonds
in the Snow,
which
includes an interview with Dora Reym as well as some of her artwork.
The film has been shown on PBS as well as in Europe, Mexico and
China. It was made by Dora Reym’s daughter Mira Reym Binford, a
filmmaker and Quinnipiac University Professor Emerita. A Q&A with
the filmmaker will follow.
Diamonds
in the Snow
tells of three women who as children were rescued from the Nazis, and
of the strangers who risked their own lives to save them. Focusing on
Bedzin, Poland – a town close to Auschwitz – the film also tells
the story of the destruction of a vibrant Jewish community.
“An
intensely personal documentary… vivid and powerful, exceptionally
sensitive, yet direct and unflinchingly honest…” -The
New York Daily News
“…a
work that manages, through the experiences of a few people, to evoke
the annihilation of a culture.”
-The New York Times
Date:
June
6, 2012 Reception at 5pm. Film at 7pm
Place:
JCC of Greater New Haven, 360 Amity Rd., Woodbridge, CT, 06525
Contact:
Anat
Weiner 203-387-2522 Ext. 313 anatw@jccnh.org
“A
Survivor Remembers… and Imagines”
THE
ARTWORK OF DORA REYM
Dora
Reym (originally Dora Pacht
Rembiszewska, from Bedzin, Poland),
now 97 years old and living in Hamden CT, did not begin painting
until she was in her 60s. She taught herself to draw and paint by
studying art books and reproductions and copying them, and taking a
few classes in life drawing.
Although she had never suspected she had artistic talent, she does
remember as a child having a special love of color and pattern, and
later making photo albums she covered with English linen on which she
painted landscapes and roses. And she always had “a good eye”…
in the snows of Auschwitz she once caught sight of a diamond, which
she traded for a piece of bread.
Dora
survived two winters in Auschwitz. She was reunited with
her husband Mark and their daughter Mira, and after four years of
waiting in Germany, they were finally allowed to immigrate to the
United States in 1949. Living in New York, for the first ten years
she worked long hours in factories, doing piecework until she was
promoted to forelady.
When
she began painting, she experimented with various media including oil
paint, watercolor, gouache, pencil, and charcoal. She worked daily
and intensively – she would lay down a tarp near a window, put up
her easel, and paint all day… and when dinnertime neared, she would
clean her brushes, roll up the tarp, pack all her materials into a
closet, and by the time Mark came home from work, dinner was ready.
She and Mark were a team. He prepared her canvases, framed the
paintings and drawings, numbered and photographed them, sat patiently
for portraits, and above all, loved and supported her work. When he
became seriously ill, she devoted herself to his care, and her
artwork stopped, never to be resumed.
She
nurtured a passionate longing for the large family and the way of
life lost in the Holocaust, and she poured that longing into
nostalgic charcoals of pre-war Jewish life and especially into the
portraits of members of her own and her husband’s immediate and
extended families, thirty-six of whom were murdered by the Nazis.
She
has completed a wartime memoir begun a few years before she started
painting. Excerpts have been published in the United States and
in Mexico and Spain in the journal Letras
Libres.
Dora
Reym’s work is in the collections of Mary Green, Palm Beach and New
York City; Sumner Katz, Silver Spring MD and Boca Raton FL; TAPIT/New
Works, Madison WI; and Giovanna Pascarella, Palm Beach. Several
of her portraits are seen in the film, Diamonds
in the Snow www.jewishfilm.org/Catalogue/films/Diamonds.htm#inst
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