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"Remembering Luboml" in ProvidenceAn exhibit called "Remembering Luboml: Images of a Jewish Community" is on display at the University of Rhode Island's Alan Shawn Feinstein College of Continuing Education from Sept. 4-28. The exhibit recreates a swatch of life of Luboml, a village in the province of Volhynia, Poland, which the Nazis emptied of all its citizens on October 1, 1942. Most were later murdered. A former Luboml resident, Aaron Ziegelman, now a New York businessman and philanthropist, initiated the exhibit. He will give a gallery talk on Sept. 13 at 7 p.m. in the Paff Auditorium. The exhibit and talk at the URI Providence Campus is in collaboration with the Rhode Island Holocaust Memorial Museum with support from the Shuster Family Foundation. The Jewish community of Luboml dated back to the 14th Century and was one of the oldest in Poland. By the 1930's Libivne (as it was called in Yiddish) had a vibrant community of at least 4,000 Jews. In fact, Jews comprised an overwhelming majority of the town's population - 91.3 percent according to a 1921 census. Yiddish was the language of the home and daily life. Luboml was a market town with some industry (three large flourmills, a lumber mill, and a distillery). By the mid-1920's the new Polish government granted limited autonomy to the Jews and they elected the first official council. There was a synagogue, prayer houses, a bath, a community-run school, and social welfare agencies. It was a time of astonishing cultural ferment and change. Jewish life came to an abrupt end, and thus too did the town, in October 1942 when the Nazis killed nearly all of the Jews there. Only 51 citizens, including those who had emigrated previously, survived the Holocaust. In 1994, Ziegelman, who had immigrated to the United States in 1938, initiated the Luboml Exhibition Project to preserve the history and memory of the village. It now includes a collection of over 2,000 photographs and artifacts, along with videotaped oral histories. "Remembering Luboml" is a traveling portion of the collection that is currently touring internationally. For more information, call Artist-in-Residence, Steve Pennell, at 277-5206. By Jan Wenzel |
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