Vishniac was born in 1897 near St. Petersburg; his family soon moved to Moscow where he spent his childhood and completed his university education, earning an MA in zoology. After the Bolshevik Revolution, like many wealthy business owners, his family emigrated to Berlin; there he completed his research and began to study photography. With the rise of Adolph Hitler to power Vishniac began to document the impact of Nazism on German Jewish life. Starting in 1935, he traveled throughout Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and Latvia photographing local Jewish life. In 1937, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (known as the Joint) hired him to take photographs that could be used in their publications both to document what was happening and to provide powerful images for their fundraising campaigns. His assignment to document Jewish life in Eastern Europe ended in 1938, when the Joint assisted him in making his way to the United States.

Once in the United States Vishniac continued to work for Jewish relief groups and documented American Jewish relief organizations, community life, Jewish hospitals, orphanages, foundations, schools, immigrants, refugees, etc throughout the 1940s and 50s (this represents 4 sections of the show) as well as the DP camps in Eastern Europe. He returned to his scientific work in the 1950s. Vishniac’s photographs of the Jews of Europe were displayed in 1944 at the YIVO Institute’s New York headquarters. Several volumes of his photographs have been published over the years, including Polish Jews: A Pictorial Record, The Vanished World, Children of a Vanished World, and To Give Them Light: The Legacy of Roman Vishniac. However, the exhibit now in Amsterdam includes never-before-seen photographs as well as film footage of rural Jews in the Carpathian region commissioned by the Joint.

What is so fascinating about Vishniac’s work is how it came to be. Although the end result was a photographic record of a vanished world, the Joint hired him just to take photos that would spur American Jews to open their pocketbooks to help fellow Jews in need. The rationale for his employment was to increase philanthropic contributions. At the time no one anticipated that the culture he captured on film would be totally wiped out by the end of World War II.

At the same time that German Jews lost their ability to earn a living, the Zionist movement was encouraging them to be trained for a new life in Palestine. Vishnaic provides us with an understanding of the agricultural training programs through photographs of the Gut Winkel training farm for German-Jewish youth. They show children learning to milk cows and collecting newly hatched eggs.

If you are unable to travel to Amsterdam to see this exhibit, you can see all of the photos and objects at this link: Explore the Exhibition. I hope you find the collection as fascinating and eye-opening as I did.

Following Amsterdam, the exhibit will travel to Paris, Warsaw, Houston and San Francisco.

The exhibition was generously supported by foundations including the Berg Foundation, Righteous Persons’ Foundation, Claims Conference, and the NEA, who also with the support of generous individuals endowed the archive and funded the digitization of every object in it – more than 40k objects total.

Stephen G. Donshik, D.S.W., is a lecturer at Hebrew University’s International Nonprofit Management and Leadership Program. Stephen was Director of the Israel office of the Council of Jewish Federations (CJF), 1986-94, and Director of the Israel office of UJA Federation of New York, 1994-2008.