No restrictions on access
Portfolio
Enclosure for Tanusagtetel (Testimony), a commemorative portfolio containing 10 individual prints created by Sraga (Shraga ) Weil, a Hungarian artist and resistance member in Budapest during the war, depicting scenes of concentration camp inmates, camp life, and atrocities. The original drawings were dated 1945 and the portfolio was published in 1946.
Shraga Weil was born on September 24, 1918, in Nitra, Czechoslovakia. He attended the National School of Arts in Prague. Shraga was Hungarian and settled in Budapest. The Hungarian government had radical fascist elements and had been a German ally since the 1930s when Hungary enacted antisemitic measures based upon the Nuremberg racial laws. Jews lost their citizenship and were barred from many professions. World War II began when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. After Germany as forced to retreat from the Soviet Union in 1943, Hungary sought a separate peace with the Allies. In March 1944, Germany occupied Hungary. Sraga was active with the underground, and assisted in forging documents. The war ended when Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945. In 1947, Sraga reached Palestine on an illegal immigrant ship. He became a member of Kibbutz HaOgen. He went to Paris in 1953 to expand his skills at the Academy of Arts. He had a successful career as a book designer and illustrator. Beginning in the 1960s, he obtained commissions to create architectural designs. He was especially well known for his works featuring biblical and Jewish folklore themes. Among his realized projects were entrance doors for the Israeli Knesset and the President's residence, ceramic walls for the main synagogue in Tel Aviv, and painted fabric ceiling panels for the Israeli Lounge in the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Weil, age 92, died in 2009.
[4] p. ,10 plates in portfolio [plates are 8.5 in. x 9.5 in. / 22 cm. x 24 cm.) : ill. ; 22 cm. Black paper flap enclosure with a small adhered rectangle of paper with the cover title and image of a thin man covering the right side of his face with his right hand and touching his forehead with his left hand.
No restrictions on use
The portfolio of prints was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2005 by Sheldon Kaplan on behalf of his wife Hannah Kaplan.