Works of artist Leo Haas at city hall Exhibit sponsored in part by Holocaust Memorial Centre, Montreal Gazette

Works of artist Leo Haas at city hall Exhibit sponsored in part by Holocaust Memorial Centre

THOMAS SCHNURMACHER

Several members of Montreal´s consular corps were among the guests at the opening of the Visualizing Memory exhibition at city hall last week.

Among those who spoke at the opening were the chairman of Montreal´s executive committee, Noushig Eloyan, Austrian consul-general Ulrike Billard, Israeli consul-general Daniel Gal, and Stephen Bleyer, a concentration-camp survivor who is president of the Holocaust Memorial Centre.

The exhibition features works bythe late Leo Haas, an artist who was interned in the Terezin/Theresienstadt concentration camp, as well as impressions of the camp by contemporary artits from the Anton Lehmden masterclass of the Academy of Visual Arts in Vienna.

The exhibition, which continues at city hall until Dec. 4, is sponsored by the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, the embassies of Austria and Israel, the consulates-general of Austria and Israel in Montreal and the Projekt Gedenkdienst (Serving Memory), a project sponsored by the government of Austria and initiated by Dr. Andreas Maislinger in Innsbruck in 1992.

The project enables young Austrians to do volunteer work in Holocaust Memorial centres around the world in lieu of military service.

Among the guests at the exhibition opening were Quebec MNA Lawrence Bergman, Russian consul-general Nikolai Smirnov, Belgian consul-general Louis Engelen and his wife, Michèle, Portuguese consul-general Antonio de Carvalho, Aliette Cottafavi Selvaggi, who ist the wife of Italian consul-general Carlo Selvaggi, and Elio Traina, head of the Italian Cultural Institute.

Also there were Bill Surkis, executive director of the Holocaust Memorial Centre, Thomas Hecht, Barbara Zaharescu, president of the German Benevolent Society of Montreal, and her husband, Dim Zaharescu, Robert and Tania Plaw, and Katja McCloud, a nice of artist Haas.

Other guests included Dr. Hans Moeller, Professor and Mrs. Karl Steiner, Colin and Emmi Everard, Gretl Laurin, Mr. and Mrs. Erich Kirchberger, Pierre and Elisabeth Tourigny, Marlene Schnitzhofer, Marsha Shuster, Beverly Jung Sing, Joshua and Gerda Fink, Elisabeth Canisius, Elaine Kleiger, Bella Cottler, Bluma Littner and Dr. Norbert Kazdan and Eva Kazdan.

The Visualizing Memory exhibition was the brainchild of Naomi Kramer, who hat the idea after seeing a solo exhibition by Leo Haas at the Maison de la Culture de Notre Dame de Grace last spring.

Kramer worked with Stephen Bleyer and Judith Pfeifer, a young Austrian woeman who spent a year at the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre.