Stockholm, Sweden – A Swedish artist has done the unthinkable and is now being accused by Sweden’s Jewish community of desecrating the bodies of Jewish Holocaust victims.
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The Telegraph reports (http://bit.ly/RCBN1v) that Carl Michael von Hausswolff stole the ashes of Holocaust victims on a 1989 visit to Majdanek, where an estimated 79,000 Polish Jews were murdered between 1941 and 1944. Mr. von Hausswolff later mixed those ashes with water and incorporated them into a painting featuring grey streaks. The so-called artwork is now hanging in a Swedish gallery in the city of Lund. The gallery owner has said he will not take down the painting despite the controversy.
The display has angered many in Sweden’s Jewish community, including prominent leader Salomon Schulman who has called the painting “revolting.”
In a letter to a local newspaper, Mr. Schulman wrote, “Who knows? Maybe some of the ashes originated from my relatives. No one knows where they were deported: all my mother’s siblings and their children, and my grandparents. I will never go to this gallery to view the desecration of Jewish bodies. I am sickened by his work and obsession with necrophilia.”
Mr. von Hausswolff has defended his act of taking the ashes saying they seemed to “contain the memories and the souls of people: people tormented and murdered by other people in the most vicious war of the 20th Century.”
Sickening!! His painting should be buried by court order!! These were not HIS ashes!! NOT HIS FAMILY!!
why doesnt someone just steal the painting and bury it?
I can not do anything today other than put my voice on the line and hope that the sensible people can anneal this sin and wh*redom, but I will give some money to the US Holocaust Museum to prevent this from happening ever again.
The author and physician dr Salomon Schulman is NOT a prominent leader in the Jewish community of Sweden. As far as I know he is not a leader outside his medical clinic. He is a kind of Bundistish Yiddishist and wellknow for his books and articles about Yiddish and Yiddish writing authors, like Abraham Sutzkever (אַבֿרהם סוצקעווער). He is also known for his leftist critcism of the policies of Israeli governments.
That said, he is often criticizing when someone is trying to trivialize the Holocaust. And he does it very well.
They should burn this guy and use his ashes for a painting
They weren’t murdered in a WAR they were murdered in a GENOCIDE.
Saying they died as part of the war makes it sound like they were two armies fighting against eachother, where unfortunately casualties are inevitable. This was regular sick murder
While I certainly think that this painting is a shanda to every human being, I have a better question–why are the ashes still in Majdenak? Why hasn’t the Asra Kadisha taken these ashes to be buried?? HUH?