June 17, 2011
Holocaust exhibition repeatedly stolen in Romania
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Someone keeps stealing an exhibition about Jewish heritage and the Holocaust in Romania from a subway station in the country’s capital city.
The exhibition, created by Israeli photographer Shani Bar On and Austrian-born journalist Emil Rennert, was sponsored by the Austrian Culture Forum and installed on the walls of a major Bucharest subway station June 11, but within 24 hours all of its 22 text and photo panels had vanished.
Bar On and Rennert re-printed the panels and re-installed the exhibition on Wednesday. By Friday, 12 of the panels were again missing, despite improved security promised by the subway management.
Rennert said there was no evidence of anti-Semitic graffiti. “We have no idea who took them,” he told JTA. Rennert said no formal police investigation had been started yet, but that the Austrian Culture Forum would be following up the situation.
The exhibit is based on Rennert and Bar-On’s book “The Jewish Bucovina—Clues.” It features photographs of Jewish heritage and life today in northern Romania, as well as interviews and stories with Holocaust survivors detailing the deportation of Romanian Jews to camps and ghettos in Transnistria, part of Ukraine, during the Holocaust.
Before being mounted in the Bucharest subway station, the exhibition had been shown without incident at the University of Vienna and other locations in Romania and Austria.
