Project Background

During the nineteen thirties, with its foundation firmly set in place, the furor of Nationalism in Eastern Europe gave way to the venom and savagery of Nazism. Living in Berlin during that time was Roman Vishniac, a young Russian physician and Doctor of Oriental Art. His passion, however, was photography. This love of picture making led him to create a documentary for which he is most universally known.

With an almost prophetic vision VIshniac wandered the ghettos of Poland and Hungary, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia and Latvia with concealed Leica and Rolleiflex cameras, often at great danger to himself. Vishniac sensed he was capturing more than just the depredation of a people, as he wrote many years later, "...it was my duty to my ancestors, who grew up among the very people who were being threatened, to preserve – in pictures, at least – a world that might soon cease to exist."

Unfortunately, Vishniac's haunting images never found a home as a complete collection until 1947, two years after the liberation of the infamous concentration camps. Thanks to such friends as Cornell Capa and Roger Straus, his pictures were eventually published by Schocken Books under the title 'A Vanished World.'

At war's end and with the world witnessing what remained of Hitler's 'final solution,' America eased its stringent immigration policy. In 1948 the Displaced Persons Act was passed allowing some 400,000 refugees to start a new life with new hope in America.

A high percentage of these refugees were survivors from the "camps." Speaking little if any English they arrived carrying the scars of their torment and many were still haunted by the question, "Where was God?" Once settled in their new country they found the answer to the question by assimilating and rejecting much of their Jewish culture.

Artist's Statement

My documentary is focused on those whose faith held strong, the question for them was never, "Where was God," but rather, "Where was Man?" And for these Jewish emigrés there was never any quavering in their direction, they were the lamp bearers of Judaism. Opening learning centers and communities in all the major cities they followed the only way they knew, the way their fathers and their fathers' fathers had lived, by following the laws prescribed by the Torah.

Now, many of these Yeshivas and communities are led by the sons and grandsons of the original Rabbis. Little has changed between Lodz 1937 and Los Angeles 1987, except maybe for the baseball-mitt and sneakers worn by the young Yeshiva students of today.

Many of the people I have photographed are themselves survivors from the camps, the last generation to hold witness to the Nazi atrocities. In turn these pictures hold testimony that Hitler did not win, that Dr. Vishniac's world did not totally vanish, but it continues strong and vibrant here in America, being passed on from generation to generation.

Whilst working on this project, I was drawn by a piece written by Mark Twain for Harper's magazine in 1899 [Click here for Twain text]. In this article, Twain asks how it is possible that the Jew, whom he suggests is "a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the milky way in proportion to the masses," has gained such prominence. He concludes with the question, "What is the secret of his immortality?"

Was Vishniac right? Had the world of the Jew vanished some 40 years after Twain posed the question of its immortality? I hope that my photographs go some way toward answering that question.

The world of the orthodox Jew is a world that is guarded tenaciously, a world where outsiders are greeted with great suspicion. Accordingly, it allows the forces of xenophobia and racism to thrive. Hopefully, the pictures I have produced will open the door for both Jew and Gentile to a world that would otherwise be inaccessible and, by doing so, shed a little light on the darkness of ignorance.

Bernard Mendoza