Opening Launch, Cape Town, 12 April 2010

What a night it was! We received a lot of positive feedback and Shivaun was swamped after the official program was over by people wanting to express what the exhibition had given them or their impressions of it. As a picture speaks a thousand words, I will leave the talking to the video below.

Some highlights:

• Selected clip of speech by Richard Freedman, the director of Cape Town Holocaust Centre, which encapsulates succinctly what the Surviving History: Portraits from Vilna exhibition is about.
• Selected clip from Shivaun Woolfson's speech - her touching tribute to the memory of her late father, one of the personal motivations behind this project and exhibition.
• A touching moment - a visitor at the Shoah Memorial installation painstakingly searches for the names of particular massacre sites/shtetls on the side of the bottles and finding the ones she is looking for, again painstakingly searches for their location on the map before placing it there
• A rousing performance of "Vilna" by several members of the Herzlia youth vocal ensemble (I heard Polina Shepherd sing this, once at Spiro Ark in London and when we opened this exhibition at Vilnius last year. Every now and then it still chokes me up, eventhough I don't know why.)
• And selected scenes of the 150 or so who turned up to experience the art installations and/or pay homage to their Litvak roots.