Faces of Survival, an intimate, powerful series of portraits honoring and celebrating the 24 current living Holocaust survivors in Tidewater, made its debut in April at Yom Hashoah at Congregation Beth El. The series exhibited at the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond during June and July.
This month, the portraits are on display in the lobby of the Slover Library in downtown Norfolk. Following the Slover exhibit, the portraits will move to their permanent home at the Reba and Sam Sandler Family Campus in Virginia Beach.
Faces of Survival is a documentation project for Holocaust education which bridges the survivor stories to places and times in the past, offering insight with relevance for present day.
The portraits were created by Richmond photographer Dean Whitbeck, who did a similar exhibit for the Weinstein Jewish Community Center in Richmond in 2015 to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. Similar projects have also been created in Buffalo, N.Y., Washington, DC and Vancouver, Canada.
Vivian Margulies