Today is Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Curator for the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica at the UF Libraries recently curated an online exhibit, The Gathering Storm. From the first page of The Gathering Storm online exhibit:
The Gathering Storm: Jewish Life in Germany and Eastern Europe in the 1930s features items produced by or pertaining to European Jewry before the advent of the Second World War. While the subject of Jewish experience during the war has been widely explored, life for Jewish people in the period immediately before the war is less well known and demand for relevant resources is increasing. Showcased here are rare German and Yiddish newspapers and periodicals, as well as ephemeral publications such as calendars, yearbooks and other communally inspired commemorative works. The selected materials form part of a much larger hidden collection of un-cataloged works held in the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica. The Gathering Storm also serves as a prelude to the upcoming exhibition Testimony featuring primary sources relating to the Holocaust.
The Testimony Exhibit runs April 1, 2013 – June 14, 2013 in the Smathers Library Gallery, 2nd Floor. The exhibit:
Inspired by recent donations to the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica, Testimony showcases primary sources that bear undeniable witness to the fact of the Holocaust. Featuring the last letters from victims of the Nazi terror before they were murdered, the papers and autobiography of a concentration camp survivor, photographic evidence of the camps taken by the U.S. Signal Corps in 1945, newspapers published during the Second World War, memoirs produced by survivors and dispersed communities in the decades following, as well as unique responses to the Holocaust manifested in later works of art. Testimony documents the impact of the Holocaust on the victims and survivors, and it gives voice to the immense aftershock felt by subsequent generations.
Both exhibits are curated by Rebecca Jefferson, Curator for the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica. More about the Price Library is available online.