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Home > Virtual Museum > CHGS Exhibitions > Remembering Luboml : About the Exhibit

About the Exhibit

Remembering Luboml: Images of a Jewish Community is a traveling exhibition brought to the Twin Cities by Jerome, Judith, Shai and Noah Ingber in loving memory of Leah Kejlis Ingber, and is co-sponsored by the Jewish Community Center of Minneapolis, the University of Minnesota Immigration and Research Center and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. It is not the "usual" Holocaust exhibit. There is no mention that the people who lived in Luboml were killed or even when or how they died. Instead, the exhibit is a tribute to life. However, in order to appreciate the exhibit's power, the viewer must also understand that in October 1942 Jewish life in Luboml came to an abrupt end when Germans and their allies murdered almost all of the town's Jews-men, women and children. Only 51 Jews from Luboml (excluding those who had emigrated before the war, such as Leah Kejlis) survived the Holocaust.

The exhibit that you will view is part of a collection of over 2,000 photographs and artifacts collected from families and archives around the world.

Photos in the exhibit date from the early 1900s to the 1940s, two years before the Nazis liquidated the Shtetl. The photographs in the exhibit depict very ordinary activities of daily life, such as ice skating parties, scenes from the market square, weddings and the synagogue. There is a photo from the 1930s showing a group of teenagers collecting funds for a Zionist cause. A 1937 photograph shows a man and his niece picking apples. There is a photo of the town's printing press employees, and there is another of a sewing class.

The exhibit also features personal objects: an embroidered matzhoh cover and a menorah fragment, a Passover greeting card and a 1914 prayer book. A small autograph book owned by Aaron Ziegelman records a note from a cousin, "When you leave these halls of study and venture into the distant world, remember sometime the cousins of your tender years."

The exhibit also includes a particularly rare find: a 1930s home movie. The 15-minute silent film is combined with a 15-minute documentary, which includes testimonies, to show life as it existed in Luboml.

According to the exhibit's creator, Aaron Ziegelman, "one hears about six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, but six million is a statistic. If we can show just one Shtetl, one town, who these people were-really live people who went to school, married, worked and went to dances-then at least we've preserved their memory and their dignity. It's not just a statistic." A brief narrative of Aaron Ziegelman, the founder of the exhibit, is provided below.

The exhibition's visit to Minneapolis includes personal mementos and photographs from the life of Leah Kejlis Ingber in Luboml and after.