Congressional Holocaust Commemoration Soft Launches SHIN-DC Project

Multicultural Jewish Arts Museum, honoring 25th Anniversary of landmark Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art.

Edited by: TJVNews.com

Sephardic Heritage International in DC (SHIN-DC) invites the public to attend its sixth annual Congressional Holocaust Commemoration on Wednesday, January 17, 6-7:30 p.m. (EST), in the Congressional Gold Room of the Rayburn House Office Building featuring Dutch survivor Louise Lawrence Israëls. The commemoration, which will also be livestreamed, includes an art display that constitutes a soft launch of SHIN-DC’s new Multicultural Jewish Arts Museum (MJAM). The exhibition also honors the 25th anniversary of the signing of the landmark Washington Principles on Nazi Confiscated Art, which broadened prospects for Holocaust victims and their heirs to recover missing art.

Additional Commemoration speakers include HE Stuart Eizenstat, Chair of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Special Negotiator for the Claims Conference, and former US Ambassador to the EU (a few of his titles) who, as Undersecretary of State, negotiated the Washington Principles with 44 countries.

In a videotaped statement prepared for the Commemoration, Ambassador Eizenstat notes that in March, the Claims Conference will announce the best practices that they have culled over the past 25 years regarding art recovery.

“Thanks to the work of SHIN, the Claims Conference recognizes the Holocaust was not only an Ashkenazi catastrophe but also Sephardic communities in Greece, the Balkans, areas in Amsterdam, and even Vienna were destroyed,” Ambassador Eizenstat added.

SHIN Director Afraim Katzir remarked, “MJAM, a project of SHIN-DC, is the only Jewish Arts Museum in Washington, DC and the world’s first Sephardic Arts museum.  It aims to strengthen Jewish diversity by exhibiting and maintaining artworks and hosting concerts that express multidimensional Jewish narratives linked to African, Asian, Hispanic and American Jews and their communities.”

The Exhibition “Coming Out of Hiding” features images by non-Jewish Dutch artist Anton Witsel documenting a community of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews who, throughout the Nazi occupation, held regular secret religious services at the home of the sexton of the Portuguese synagogue.

Congressional Representatives Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Greg Landsman (D-OH), Mike Lawler (R-NY), Kathy Manning (D-NC), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), and Elise Stefanik (R-NY) will also share remarks, along with Ambassador Francisco António Duarte Lopes of Portugal, Ambassador Birgitta Tazelaar of the Netherlands (video), and Reverend Salomon Vaz Dias who served as clergy for the Portuguese Jewish communities in Amsterdam and NYC.

In her videotaped remarks, Ambassador Tazelaar asserts that the “horrific attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023 has ripped open the wound of the Holocaust. We’ve seen a sharp rise in antisemitism, Islamophobia and intolerance, in its wake…It is therefore essential that we, together, combat antisemitism, and one way of doing this is through commemoration.”

SHIN Director Afraim Katzir noted that this year’s Congressional Holocaust Commemoration theme “coming out of hiding” has taken on additional meaning since October 7, as Jewish people have to combat an alarming rise in antisemitism and are responding with a surge of Jewish pride, as expressed in November’s Washington rally for Israel and the Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

Sephardic Heritage International (SHIN-DC), is a DC-based non-profit focused on celebrating Sephardic arts and culture to raise awareness of the histories of the world’s under-represented Jewish communities.