Shoah Art Institute

Shoah Institutions, most notably Yad Vashem, have made and are making valiant efforts to gather, document, and archive the names and identities of as many Shoah victims as possible from historical documents and survivor testimonies. In most cases, visual traces of these once vibrant individuals, such as photographs or portraits, a key to their remembrance, do not exist. 

Our short term mission is to develop curricula and projects for students of all ages, instructing them on the application of forensic artistic techniques to visually recreate the vanished images and forgotten souls of hundreds of thousands of Shoah victims. In this way, they may be remembered, honored and given a visual place in history that they didn’t previously have.

Our long term mission is to apply these techniques to victims of other genocides, and forge connections with other peoples and cultures. Students will develop tools which will allow them to memorialize other painful historical events, using art as a tool for memory and healing.

Student artists will develop deep and meaningful experiences whereby they will form connections with the memories of the Shoah victims that they are visually and spiritually reconstructing. This provides a person with an active, as opposed to a passive Holocaust educational experience.