Yom HaZikaron poster released by Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem has been holding a competition to design the official poster for Holocaust Remembrance Day for over a decade…and has released this year’s winner.
Under the auspices of the competition, entitled “Designing Memory,” Yad Vashem called on students of design, designers and artists to submit their proposals for the poster. As in previous years, Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies has created a lesson plan for Holocaust Remembrance Day based on the winning poster, to be distributed to schools across Israel.
The winner of this year’s competition is 25-yr-old Itamar Maggid a first-year student in Visual Communications at Shenker College.
Maggid – the grandson of Holocaust survivors – described the inspiration for his work. “On the poster appear three paper boats, which represent different types of documentation – writings, drawings and music. Their reflection in the water creates a shape that is partly a Star of David or a Yellow Star. The historical importance that the boats represent – that we are still alive – and the memory of the Shoah travel together over the water towards a new reality of hope and dreams. I tried to impart the feeling of the eternity of the past and belonging to the future with the paper boats, which sail along once turbulent but now quiet waters.”
The judges for the Poster Competition was headed by David Tartakover – a former winner of the Israel Prize in the Field of Design. “The image of the boats – which are made from real Holocaust documentation – express the spirit of life during the period of the Holocaust and the importance of the power of creation in defiance of the murder and persecution of the Jews,” he said. “The folded paper boats, which remind us of a children’s game, symbolise the innocence of the victims, who could not have foreseen their impending fate and tried to hold onto their cultural standards… The difference of colour – which is almost unnoticeable – between the sky and the water portray a blurring of borders and represent the loss of moral boundaries during the Holocaust. The original thought of the artist, which does not rely upon cliched imagery, enables personal reflection on the different ways the individual and the collective coped as their world imploded around them. Together with this, he leaves enough space for hope in the commemoration of the Shoah for generations to come.”
The chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate of The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority Avner Shalev said: “This competition invites Israeli designers to express the meaning of the Holocaust for them through the means of visual language, and thus we are witnesses to the shaping of Holocaust remembrance throughout the Israeli populace. It is our hope that Holocaust education and its place in our culture will influence public perception, and engender an authentic and diverse dialogue regarding Holocaust remembrance.”
