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WALTHAM, Massachusetts — In an ostensibly everyday photo of three young women cuddling a dog, one thing that stands out is the haunting look on the faces of Tema Schneiderman and her two friends. That’s because the trio served as partisans in Lithuania and Poland during World War II. Tragically, Schneiderman was captured in the Warsaw Ghetto in January 1943 and killed by Nazis at Treblinka. She was just 26.
Schneiderman is among a group of young Jewish women and girls who were victims of the Holocaust and are receiving a unique tribute — a multimedia exhibit, “Lives Eliminated, Dreams Illuminated,” or “LEDI,” on display at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University through October 25. A collaboration between US-based artist Lauren Bergman and Israeli composer Ella Milch-Sheriff, the exhibit incorporates art, music and historical images. It debuted at the school’s Kniznick Gallery in September. Future stops are scheduled for the Jewish Museum of Florida in Miami and the Memory and Tolerance Museum Mexico City.
Tragically, midway through the exhibition’s stay at Brandeis, real-time terror erupted in Israel. On October 7, Hamas launched a brutal onslaught when 2,500 terrorists swarmed into Israel under the cover of a barrage of rocket fire, killing, burning, and torturing 1,400 Israelis — mostly civilians — and taking an estimated 220 hostages. A building across from Milch-Sheriff’s home in Tel Aviv took a direct hit from a Hamas rocket.
The victims included many women and girls, such as 21-year-old French Israeli Mia Schem, captured during the bloody massacre at the Supernova rave near Kibbutz Re’im. Employing psychological warfare, Hamas has released a video of Schem in captivity.
“LEDI is happening today,” Milch-Sheriff reflected. “It is not a piece of history, not a piece of what had happened 70 or 80 years ago. It happens now. It happened just [nine] days ago, and it happened in the Jewish state. ”
In follow-up interviews in the aftermath...