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March 30, 1996
An Effort to Restore Jewish Memory
By Gustav Niebuhr
If the Holocaust is understood as not just an
attack on Europe's Jews but on their history as
well, then Aaron Ziegelman's project is an effort
to restore a portion of Jewish memory and reverse
some of the Nazis' destruction.
Mr. Ziegelman, is best known as a New York
businessman who has converted more than 100
apartment buildings to co-ops since the 1970s.
He also serves as general chairman of the
Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote,
Pa.
Less well known is his work of the last two
years, assiduously gathering documentary evidence
on the pre-World War II life of Jews in
Luboml, a village a couple of hundred miles
southeast of Warsaw.
For Mr. Ziegelman, 68, this is an intensely
personal project.
He was born in the village, but immigrated
to the United States in 1938 as a 10-year-old with
his older sister and their widowed mother. They
left behind a community of about 5,000 Jews,
who called the town by its Yiddish name,
Libivne. By the time the Soviet Army liberated
the village from the Germans in 1945, only 51 of
the Jewish residents remained, and they were
scattered.
The history that Mr. Ziegelman is recovering
extends well beyond his own family.
"It's Aaron's personal search," said Fred
Wasserman, an independent curator who is director
of the Luboml Exhibition Project "But it's
gotten a lot bigger," he added, becoming "a
search for a town."
Mr. Wasserman developed exhibits for the
Ellis Island Immigration Museum and served as
a guest curator for the New York Public Library's
exhibition on gay and lesbian history, "Becoming
Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall."
The Luboml project includes more than
1,500 photographs and about 300 personal objects
that belonged to residents of the town. Some
items are to be displayed at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust
museum in Jerusalem, in October.
For now, a tiny portion of the collection-
38 photographs and a videotape in which elderly
people describe life in the village--is on display
weekday and Sunday afternoons airough
April 15 at the West End Synagogue, at
Amsterdam Avenue and 69th Street. (The exhibit
is closed during Passover, April 3-5.) The remainder
of the collection is in fireproof cabinets at
the project's offices on Broadway.
One recent morning, Mr. Ziegelman and Mr.
Wasserman showed a visitor around, talking
about the photographs. Some have the quality of
professional work, like the ones that show
Luboml's synagogue, a fortress-like building.
Other photographs have the feel of the snapshots
that they were, taken by friends of friends. In one,
a smiling woman, about to immigrate to Palestine,
bids goodbye to a friend. In another, a beaming
young mother holds her infant son aloft.
Mr. Ziegelman paused before a photograph
of a crowd at Luboml's railway station. It records
his family's departure. Of the more than 40
people gathered around his mother, sister and
him, only one survived the Nazis.
At one point, Mr. Ziegelman choked up and
stepped away to compose himself. He said he felt
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