Pilsen, (Bohemia) Czech Republic, 80 km SW of Prague had a Jewish settlement as early as 1338. This memorial was made by school children in a synagogue not used after 1892. Most of the 2,800 Jews of Pilsen were murdered in the holocaust
The majority of Holocaust monuments with some rare exceptions (Budapest, Berlin, Boston, Pilsen) are of a dubious artistic quality. But honestly, most (if not all) of the dead never cared about the art and especially the sculpture anyway. Nevertheless here is a collection of some Holocaust monuments around the world.
The exile killed the religion uprooting it from the natural metaphors, turning imagination into lifeless abstractions. And then was the second blow of the Holocaust. Just when Jews developed a fledgling voice in Europe with the theater, literature, art, Zionism, science, it was all crashed. The Jews reacted by abandoning the art and turning post-traumatically into the reenactment of the cold goth army of corpses and abstractions. Welcome to the Judaism as we know it. Is there a monument for the walking dead?
Pebbles depict all the holocaust victims from Pilsen and surrounding areas.
It takes school children in Czechoslovakia to create the most meaningful monument.
Julius Eckstein (born in Pilsen) died in hospital in Podiebrad, (Bohemia) Czech Republic in December 1945 after his liberation from Theresienstadt. Officially he is not classified as a holocaust victim. We remember him here as such, together with all the other unnamed pebbles, large and small. By his grandson, Dr Wolf-Erich Eckstein in Vienna.
Photos flickr/alexandria42