Women's American ORT: The Reporter Cover Story

ORTworks

ORT Driving Training School, Shanghai, China, c.1941-1950.

During World War II, many refugees from Germany and other countries
immigrated to Shanghai.

In 1996, when a collection of old ORT photographs, hand-delivered by French historian and renowned Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, was brought to New York City's not-yet-opened Museum of Jewish Heritage from ORT Paris, there was talk. Talk not only of the extent of the collection -- 2,000 never-before-seen black and white photos, negatives, vintage prints and publications -- but of the stories they could tell.

Two years later, a sampling from this treasure trove, which sat in a dusty Paris basement for 45 years, made its debut in a special exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Shari Segel, Curator of Special Exhibitions at the New York museum, says the 49 historical photographs on display in ORTworks: Modernizing Jewish Labor in the Early Twentieth Century, show ORT's efforts to improve the economic situation for Jews from World War I until the Holocaust. "It is quite amazing the kinds of professions and work that people were doing," she said, citing farming, tailoring, woodwork and metalwork as examples.

WAO member Lynn Leeb at the exhibit opening in New York.

The photographs paint a vivid picture of Jewish life, mostly from Eastern Europe, from the 1920s through the 1940s. They document both the economic activities of the Jewish communities and the languages its members spoke photo captions are handwritten in Yiddish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Polish.

At the exhibit's Oct. 26, 1998 opening, Serge Klarsfeld praised ORT as "one of the most solid pillars on which rests the education of the Jewish people. I knew these photos were not only the illustration of the work of ORT but were also linked to the Holocaust. ... Looking at these faces, we would so much like to be able to warn them, to enter the photos and tell them: Be careful! Escape! Go to Palestine! Take a boat to the United States! Run away!"

The history of the collection is shrouded in mystery. No one is quite sure who commissioned the photos, who assembled them or how they found their way to Paris. Serge Klarsfeld believes they may have been shipped from Geneva to Paris sometime between 1945 and 1950. It is also possible that the boxes were shipped directly to Paris, where the World ORT Union moved its headquarters in 1933 after fleeing an increasingly hostile Germany.

There are still many more stories to be uncovered from the photographs. The exhibit is only the first step in the process.