Megan Scauri, AJHS: The World in Front of Me is presented by Jay and Gretchen Stein, with generous support from the Knapp Family Foundation, the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation in Honor of Alan Bloch, Scott and Dianne Einhorn, The Karetsky Family, and Michael Koss.
In NYC? Visit the companion exhibition on view at the Center for Jewish History, now through May 2026.
Ruth Ellenson: What do you think makes for a great portrait?
Bill Aron: Emotion. Whether it’s—you know—there’s all sorts of technical things you can do—lighting, positioning. But a good portrait will make the viewer feel an emotion looking at the person, um looking at the image.
Host Ruth Ellenson: That’s Bill Aron, prolific photographer of Jewish life. I’m your host, writer Ruth Andrew Ellenson. I was fortunate to grow up being photographed by Bill, and welcomed the opportunity as an adult and a journalist to explore the legacy of his work, and the context in which it was created. Over the course of our series, we’ll travel with Bill across five decades, and hear his stories about documenting Jewish communities around the world.
From The American Jewish Historical Society, welcome to The World In Front of Me with Bill Aron. This is episode 5: Thriving Survivors.
After spending time on New York’s Lower East Side, in the small towns of the American South, and the Jewish communities of the USSR, Bill was invited by the 1939 Society and Chapman University in California to capture the portraits of Holocaust survivors living in the United States.
Ruth Ellenson: In your documentation of Jewish life, you also did a series of photographs of Holocaust survivors. Can you tell me a little bit about how that project came to start, and what your thought process behind it was?
Bill Aron: There’s a group of Holocaust survivors. They originally started—their purpose was to support each other and to provide educational services to both the Jewish and non-Jewish community about what really happened in the Holocaust. After they got started and they managed to accumulate some funds, they began establishing Holocaust studies departments in a variety of institutions.
Host Ruth Ellenson: The 1939 Society was formed in Los Angeles in 1952. The fourteen original members were survivors of the Holocaust and came together to support each other and pass on valuable lessons through education and remembrance.
To learn more about these survivors and their experiences, we asked Dr. Hasia Diner, Professor Emerita at New York University and author of We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust.
Hasia Diner: I can’t say what people talked about in their homes that, you know, if somebody would say, “Well, we never talked about it in our home.” I don’t know. I can tell you what they talked about in their synagogues or in their youth groups or in the publications of their organizations or, and on and on and on.
And I’d say there was nobody who didn’t, there was no segment of the community in which this wasn’t prominent. They didn’t necessarily all derive the same lessons from it because their lessons, what they derived from it, reflected who they were and what, you know, what they believed and, and so on. But they were all involved in this in one way or another.
The memorialization in the post-war period is very, is both very different, and not so different from what comes later. And it’s very different ’cause there are no agencies that are behind this. But each organization, each institution, they each do it on their own.
Host Ruth Ellenson: Over the latter half of the 20th century, the 1939 Society grew in size and impact. And in 2005, Bill was approached by Marilyn Harran of Chapman University’s Holocaust Studies department to photograph 100 of the 1939 Society members. The project of portraits and oral histories was named: The Indestructible Spirit.
Ruth Ellenson: And these portraits also marked your transition from black and white photography to color, is that correct?
Bill Aron: Correct. The grant that I had—the people who gave me the grant—made it clear that they were not interested in photographs that represented people who had suffered. They said that they were collecting oral histories. The head of the Holocaust studies department at Chapman University in Orange County—was supervising students who were taking the oral histories of a hundred Holocaust survivors. She said, “The words will be fine for that, but what we want are photographs that show people who have led interesting, successful, important lives, established families, had children, grandchildren, were successful economically, gave back to their communities. We want to represent that.” And that, to me, was a revelation because when I first heard about the possibility of getting this grant, I thought, Hmm, Holocaust survivors, tattoos on the arm. Stereotypically. And this was totally different. I mean, these people were happy. Given that color was available, it didn’t seem right to do that in black and white.
Hasia Diner: The organizers saying they want people to look joyful and not victims is very profound. There are people who will hear that and be appalled. I think it’s really important and positive. You know, in the immediate post-war period, the survivors, when they come and they form organizations and they’re groups from New York, you know, Holocaust survivors who go for two weeks to the Catskills every summer, and they. You know, like, yes, I mean all that horrible stuff happened and yes, I mean they are no doubt totally traumatized and weep, but you know, “I want my two weeks in the Catskills and I wanna be joyful.” It’s such an affirmation of humanity. And, I think there will be maybe Holocaust scholars, critical analysts who will see that as appalling. But the question is, to what degree would presenting oneself as a victim and being morose and, unable to experience joy, undo the past?
Ruth Ellenson: So, your directive and going into these photographs is to really capture Jewish people who are Holocaust survivors in a way that really documents their joy and happiness in their current lives.
Bill Aron: Correct, correct. For me, this was a project of—it really awakened something in me about people who had been through unimaginable hurt and harm and had come out the other end stronger. I mean, at some point, you figure if you hit people enough, they’re going to stay down. But these people just pick themselves up and went on with their lives. One of the photographs of Jack Pariser—this man had just a wonderful way of playing with us in a jovial manner. It was myself, my assistant, and Jack. And he would run around the house; he’d suggest places. And at a certain point, he said, “Here, follow me.” And he took me out onto his roof, and he spread his hands out, and he said, “This is great. This is just like Tavia.” And I asked him at one point, I said, “How could you be such a jovial person after all you went through?” And he shrugged his shoulders, and he said, “That was then, and this is now.”
Ruth Ellenson: A lesson in how to live life.
Bill Aron: Boy, it sure is. No matter how difficult the past is, to dwell on it is only going to ruin the rest of your life. There’s a quote about—to dwell on your worries will rob the future of your joys. So, these people were perfect examples of that.
Ruth Ellenson: It’s also striking to me about how many portraits capture people laughing or smiling or touching. That was intentional?
Bill Aron: You know, not so much intentional as that’s just who they were. I’ve noticed that, and I’ve thought about it. I said, “Oh, why didn’t I have more, you know, of this?” But they didn’t show me that.
Selma, Selma Konitz. This is a family that couldn’t stop cracking jokes. They’re all laughing in the photograph because I didn’t have one picture—I mean, they’re all not only laughing, but they’re all just relating to each other. There wasn’t one picture in the whole photo shoot where they’re looking at the camera and have even a mildly serious expression on their face. So, she told me this, “We have tried not to live in the past, only to remember it. Both my husband and I never knew what growing up meant, what it was like to be a teenager and not have to worry about beatings, ovens, and gas chambers, death, and the fight to live. So we gave our children the dearest gift. And the only gift we had, the gift of love and the will to survive no matter what the obstacles.” And to have that in your background but still be able to experience a joyful aspect of life is herculean to me.
Hasia Diner: The survivors are, they just arrive and they are strangers in a strange land. And they are young, I mean, they’re young families and their goal, is they have to make a living and, they have to get their kids fed, the kids have to go to school. They have to, you know, move out of housing that’s provided by the Jewish Child and Family Services to paying their own rent.
And so while they do form organizations and they also, do, there are some political, um, acts they are not in a place age wise, or resource wise to say, “The world has to hear from us now as to what we went through.” That happens in the seventies, which by definition means their kids who are all born in DP camps in the late forties are now out of the house. You know, they’re now launched, you know, in college and in careers. “Okay, so now it’s time for us to tell our story.” And it’s not that nobody told them they couldn’t tell their story before. It’s just that was not the priority and it wasn’t even that they were hiding it.
Um, but you know, the day to day is, you know, getting, you know, that junk shop that we’re running, um, to be a profitable venture so we can move out of, you know, the kind of substandard apartment we were given to having a better apartment or maybe buying a house.
Ruth Ellenson: Your photography focuses on a postwar era, not just in America, but also globally. Were you surprised to have the Holocaust come up as a subject, or was that something you think is necessary as a Jewish photographer to explore that subject matter in some capacity?
Bill Aron: It was an opportunity to expand into something. And as it turns out, not only into an area that I had not ventured, but also in a way that I hadn’t photographed before. So, it really was an opportunity that I jumped at.
Ruth Ellenson: As someone who photographs Jews and Jewish community, is the concept of somebody looking Jewish anything you ever contemplate or anything that comes out in the images that you create? What do you think of that idea that someone looks Jewish?
Bill Aron: Two aspects of it. Do they look Jewish because they look like you and me? Or do they look Jewish because they have a beard and maybe payes hanging down over their ears, or maybe they wear a certain kind of hat or a black suit with a white shirt? I—I looked for those trappings of being Jewish in the beginning. And then I began to, through my experience at the Havurah, began to realize, boy, there are all sorts of Jews. And they don’t all look like that, or Roman Vishniac’s photos, which were appropriate for the time, but there needs to be a different way to express Judaism in photographs.
Host Ruth Ellenson: Roman Vishniac, for those of you who may be unfamiliar, was a Russian Jew who lived in Berlin during the 1920s and 30s and documented the rise of the Nazi party and the persecution of Jews. Here’s Hasia Diner for more on his work.
Hasia Diner: So Roman Vishniac, is in some ways, I would go out on a limb and say the most important Jewish photographer, to date. It’s almost like he defined the field of Jewish photography. He took commissions from the Joint Distribution Committee, to take photographs of Polish Jews in the years leading up to World War II and the Holocaust. Well, obviously nobody knew that that’s what was in the offing. Because they were commissions from Jewish social service agencies, they had a particular slant. And so the Polish photographs, while they’re beautiful and they have been reproduced so many times. The photographs do not represent the sort of spectrum of Polish jury.
There were huge swaths of Polish Jews who looked like they could be living in New York or Chicago or London. Poland suffered tremendously from the worldwide depression but, these were not small town and as the American Jews, like to say, “shtetl Jews,” but they were living in big cities and they went to the movies and they knew American Hollywood stars and popular music and so on.
But if you look at the Roman Vishniac photographs for all their beauty, and again, from a technical point of view and from the empathy that, I think they evoke even now, he went out of his way to photograph pious Jews, poor Jews. Jews who look really sad. The purpose of this was, frankly, to elicit and solicit contributions. To say to Jews seeing these photographs, to those Jews with means outside of Poland, “Your grandparents once looked like this. These are your people, even if they look really different and they’re suffering.” And yes, dig deeper in your wallets.
Ruth Ellenson: Was Roman Vishniac an influence on your work at all?
Bill Aron: I think Roman Vishniac, rightfully so, set the standard. He was photographing Jews on the eve of their extinction, whereas I was trying to photograph Jews on the eve of creating something new and something joyful.
Ruth Ellenson: How did the survivors react when you presented them with the portraits?
Bill Aron: The Holocaust survivors, they really liked it. They all wanted prints, so I assume that means they liked it. There was a big luncheon that they had. And I made a PowerPoint presentation of everything. And sometimes, they laughed. Sometimes, they clapped, you know? So it was, in general, a good reaction.
Ruth Ellenson: Are there any words that specifically define for you what it is to be Jewish or a Jewish artist?
Bill Aron: The only thing I can say is that I feel privileged that so many people have opened not only their homes but their hearts to me and allowed me to enter their lives, to speak with me and to photograph them, and try and represent an aspect of their life that means something, that it really is truly a—it has been an honor and continues to be.
Ruth Ellenson: That’s lovely.
I love you, I’ll talk to you soon.
Bill Aron: Love you, too, Ruthie.
Audio: Camera shutter click and flash.
Host Ruth Ellenson: From the American Jewish Historical Society, I’m Ruth Andrew Ellenson. This episode was written by Rebeca Miller and produced by Sarah Hopley. Our executive producer is Gemma R. Birnbaum. Recording, sound design, and mixing were done at Sound Lounge and Studio Awesome.
For exhibit information. For episode transcripts, additional resources, and links to a selection of Bill’s photographs that inspired this episode, please visit ajhs.org/bill. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us, which helps others discover our series.
