Kaddish in Wood – Woodcarvings by Dr. Herbert Savel

Kaddish in Wood is an exhibition of handmade woodcarvings by Dr. Herbert Savel, a physician who lives and works in Elizabethtown, New York. Trained in the German woodcarving technique, Savel creates these three-dimensional reliefs after Holocaust-era photos of Nazi victims. While he has created several hundred of these woodcarvings, this exhibition is made up of 130 children, with a focus on the French.

Dr. Savel says, “the goal of my art project is to represent the Holocaust in terms that the human mind can comprehend. Through my art, the suffering is returned to the level of the individual and, the unimaginable atrocities of the Holocaust are, in essence, re-humanized.”

kaddish
wood carving of women and children soon to be executed at Auschwitz
Rachel Frankensztej, deported from Paris to Auschwitz in 1942, and murdered