‘Handwriting is very unique.
It’s like a fingerprint.’
By BEN FISHEREntry permit to Eretz Yisrael from 1947 of Rachel Tytelman, who is still well and active, and lives in Tel Aviv(photo credit: YAD VASHEM)
Yad Vashem isn’t content being the world’s leading Holocaust museum and research facility, but accessible only to visitors who can make it to the brick and mortar location on Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl.In order to spread its wealth of data around the world, its website is available in over a half-dozen languages, and the museum curates online exhibitions (some available in German, Russian and even Arabic) for those who want to learn more about the Holocaust but are unable to make it to the museum’s campus.The latest of such exhibitions is “We Shall Meet Again, Last Letters from the Holocaust: 1941,” a collection of nine digitized letters, the last messages ever sent from Jews killed in the Holocaust.The exhibition is being launched to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and will be the first in a series of online exhibitions of last letters from the Holocaust.The letters come from countries including Latvia, Yugoslavia, Serbia, France and Austria, and are in a variety of languages. Telling stories of love and devotion, they survived, while their owners did not.The curator of the exhibition, Yona Kobo, spoke with The Jerusalem Post Magazine, and said that what makes the letters so moving is the handwriting.“Handwriting is very unique. It’s like a fingerprint,” she said. “It’s been quite an experience working on this exhibition.”Online, the letters are presented with photos, and some of them include a voice-over of the text (in English and Hebrew), as well as the personal story of the author and his or her family.Some letters, Kobo said, are incredibly moving, but there isn’t any background information about them, no photos and no family to track down to address questions to, so they had to be skipped.Asked whether she thinks that viewing the letters online lessens the intensity of seeing them in person, Kobo replied that she does not think so.“We want people to relate to the subject of the Shoah in private because it’s a different experience than if you go to a museum,” she said.The letters have been donated to Yad Vashem’s massive archives over a 30-year period from the descendants of the relatives and friends to whom they were addressed. Two of them were featured in a book about the Holocaust from the 1980s, but the others are being presented to the public for the first time.Kobo said that while, of course, the museum’s archive is impressive in its grandeur, it doesn’t do any good having letters and documents just sitting in a dark room.“We want the letters to be accessible to the public, through a screen, any screen – your mobile, your computer, whatever,” she said.ONE OF the letters originated in the Warsaw Ghetto, where Perla Tytelman and two of her three children wrote in the autumn of 1941 to Yosef and Rachel, Perla’s husband and third child, who had been exiled to Siberia. The handwriting shifts from Perla’s to her daughter Rega’s to son Samuel’s, the last-known letter of all three.“You should be consoled by the thought that this has to end sometime, and that then we will once again be happy together. Our yearning for each other knows no bounds – Mamush [Mommy],” Perla writes.After the war, Yosef and Rachel made it to Haifa, but were exiled by the British to the Poppendorf Detention Camp in Germany. Later, they were among those aboard the Exodus 1947 sailing to British Mandate Palestine, where they settled for good. Rachel is still alive, well and active, and lives in Tel Aviv.The stories are all as compelling as that of the Tytelmans, and unlike a more orthodox museum exhibition, you don’t have to worry about getting there before it closes. As Kobo puts it, “It’s online, and it’s forever.”
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