By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer

At Columbus Museum of Art, needleworks depict survival

The 36 needlework images by Esther Nisenthal Krinitz on display at the Columbus Museum of Art are deceptively bucolic. Scenes of the Polish countryside appear at first to resemble the style of Grandma Moses.

But the story behind them illustrates how Krinitz survived the Holocaust, pretending to be a Catholic farm girl.

Fabric of Survival: The Art of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz is on exhibit at the Columbus Museum of Art from April 3 to June 14, to coincide with Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Day of Remembrance, April 15.

Krinitz and her younger sister, Mania, were the only members of their family to survive the Holocaust. When she was 15, Krinitz defied a Nazi order for the Jews in her Polish village to report to a railroad station for relocation. She and her sister escaped to the countryside.

At the age of 50 in 1977, Krinitz began crafting her fabric art pictures to show how she and her sister managed to escape the horrors of the Nazis. She continued creating the works over a 20-year period, and died in 2001.

The exhibition also features the 30-minute documentary film, Through the Eye of the Needle, which presents Krinitz’s story in her own words.

For more information, call 614-221-4848 or go to www.columbusmuseum.org.

Cincinnati Freedom Center exhibit about Auschwitz

Unlocking the Gates of Auschwitz: 70 Years Later is on display at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center through May 31.

The exhibit — developed through a partnership of the Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education, Cincinnati Museum Center, and the Freedom Center — features documents and artifacts on loan from the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, the Klau Library of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and private collections.

The Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education curated Unlocking the Gates of Auschwitz with guidance from Holocaust scholar Dr. Michael Berenbaum.

The director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust at American Jewish University, Berenbaum oversaw the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as its project director. He has also served as director of the U.S. Holocaust Research Institute and as president and CEO of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

Between 1940 and 1945, approximately 1.3 million men, women and children, mostly Jews, were deported to Auschwitz. Before the camp was liberated by Soviet forces in January 1945, 1.1 million had perished there; only 7,000 survived.

For more information about the exhibit, contact the Freedom Center at 513-333-7500 or go to www.freedomcenter.org.

To read the complete April 15 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.