Ed Serotta - Out of the Shadows
Within the pages of Out of the Shadows, a group of women survivors meet for a high school reunion in Budapest, a concentration camp survivor visits the site of a mass murder, a sculptor in Belgrade stands in front of the Holocaust memorial he built, children attend Hanukkah services and Passover ceremonies in a grand, old-world banquet hall seem to be taking place in another time, before the wars’ devastation.
Photographer and writer Edward Serotta took these sensitive and beautiful images as he visited Jews in their homes, offices, schools, and studios over a five-year period. He has brought back for the rest of the world to see this portrait of Jewish life in all its great variety, as it is now. He has documented the grand, well-maintained synagogues and those that stand crumbling; the cemeteries tended with care and those reclaimed by forests; former ghettos; memorials to the murdered. All have been painstakingly sought out.
As Serotta discovered, there are no “last Jews of Eastern Europe” but Jews who have made a dynamic life filled with culture, religion, and politics in these homelands, in spite of their tragic history there. Out of the Shadows stands as a loving testament to the infinite variety, dignity and durability of human life. Edward Serotta’s photographs have appeared in Time, the New York Times and the London Independent. He is the author of Jews Germany Memory: A Contemporary Portrait and Survival in Sarajevo: How a Jewish Community Came to the Aid of its City.
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