JERUSALEM (EJP)---During a tour of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on Friday, US President George Bush will visit the Holocaust History Museum, the Museum of Holocaust Art, hold a wreath-laying ceremony in the Hall of Remembrance,and visit the Children’s Memorial.
Bush will arrive in Israel Wednesday to start an eight-day trip to six countries in the Middle East, his first state visit to all the countries on his itinerary except Egypt.
During his Yad Vashem visit, Bush will be accompanied by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Shimon Peres.
At the end of the visit, Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev will present President Bush with a special gift, a replica of an illustrated Bible by Jewish artist Carol Deutsch.
The original is on display in the Museum of Holocaust Art.
Recently Yad Vashem decided to produce a special, numbered series of the portfolio limited to 500 copies, the first of which will be presented to the President.
Deutsch created the works while in hiding in Belgium. He was informed upon, and died in 1944 in Buchenwald, leaving behind 99 vividly colored prints in an illustrated wooden box, which he bequeathed to his daughter Ingrid.
Carol Deutsch and the Bible
Ingrid survived the war with her grandmother, Regina Braunstein, hiding with a Catholic family in North-Eastern Belgium.
After the Liberation, Regina and her granddaughter learned that Fela and Carol Deutsch had been deported in September 1943 from the Mechelen barracks to Auschwitz, where Fela was murdered.
Carol had been transferred to Sachsenhausen and from there to Buchenwald, where he died in December 1944.
When Ingrid and Regina returned home to Antwerp in early 1945, they discovered that the Nazis had confiscated their furniture and valuables.
However, miraculously one item was left untouched: a large, meticulously crafted, wooden box adorned with a Star of David and a seven-branched Menorah.
Inside was a collection of biblical illustrations labored over by Carol Deutsch between 1941 and 1942.
Under the stressful conditions of curfew and persecution, the artist had produced a work that proudly affirmed his Jewish identity-a patrimony he devoted to his young daughter.
The 99 strikingly painted gouaches depict the biblical scenes with a unique iconography and palette, reflecting the artist’s boldness and originality.
The illustrations combine Art Nouveau ornamentation with stylistic influences of the Bezalel School, echoes of Deutsch’s 1936 visit to Israel.
The biblical illustrations Deutsch bequeathed to his daughter exhibit exceptional vitality and constitute a stalwart expression of defiance to everything for which the Nazis stood.
This father’s intimate and intellectual bequest to his daughter, donated to and displayed at Yad Vashem’s Museum of Holocaust Art, is instilled in the collective legacy.