Designer Velda Shimanovsky, the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, won a Yad Vashem competition • A poster she created corresponds with the annual theme "Until the Last Jew"
On Thursday, Yad Vashem will award a prize to the designer Vlada Shimanovsky, who is responsible for the state poster chosen to mark Holocaust Martyrs 'and Heroes' Remembrance Day 1941. The state poster was selected as part of the Yad Vashem "Designers of Memory" competition.
This is the 12th year that Yad Vashem is holding the state poster design competition to mark Holocaust Martyrs 'and Heroes' Remembrance Day, which will open this year on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 7.
Based on the winning announcement, the pedagogical staff of the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem has developed a lesson plan.
This year, the designers were asked to create a poster on the annual theme "Until the Last Jew - Eighty Years to the Beginning of Mass Extermination."
In designing the poster, the winning poster designer, Vlada Shimanovsky, sought to present the dehumanization that Jews underwent during the Holocaust by designing the words as a barcode.
In contrast to the numbers usually located at the bottom of the barcode, the letters that make up the phrase "until the last Jew" are at the top and thus add a human-human dimension.
The proclamation symbolizes a call for the Jewish people to find, document, commemorate and remember the victims of the Holocaust until their last death.
"Visual reality for the desire to destroy with"
Shimanovsky, 33, from Rishon Lezion, holds a master's degree in molecular biology from Bar-Ilan University.
She immigrated to Israel from Ukraine in 1996 with her late mother Margarita. Her grandfather, the late Holocaust survivor Nussin Dayan, survived the war with his parents and extended family in the Ukraine's Zmarinka ghetto.
She has always loved to create and paint, so in the past year she has decided to leave the field of science and convert to studies and work in the field of graphic design.
From the judges' reasons for choosing the winning poster: "The poster poetically uses the phrase 'until the last Jew' and conveys the process of thinning and flattening, as an image of the course of memory over the years. Visually for the desire to destroy the entire Jewish people and for the various ways in which this destruction took place until it reached its final stage - the industrial.
The crushed letters create in the background another image of a thicket of bushes and forest and thus correspond with the subject of the competition. The visuals of the poster and its characteristics are reflected in the difficulty in the literal description and in the story of the Holocaust and the challenge of preserving its memory for future generations. "