The Anne Frank Center (www.annefrank.com) offers a wide range of museum, school and community based programs for students, teachers, administrators, young families, and other engaged in the missions of peacemaking, courage, resilience, justice, and ending discrimination and bullying. PFW has provided The Anne Frank Center with a grant in support of Debbie Rosenfeld’s photographic exhibition The Jews of Cuba. Ms. Rosenfeld was a Puffin Grant recipient in 2012. Ms. Rosenfeld’s photographs take viewer into the lives of a small and vanishing population of the remaining Jews living in Cuba. Although Jews have lived in Cuba for centuries – peaking at 24,000 in the 1920’s – it is estimated that there remain only 1500, mostly elderly Jews, now on the island. Following the revolution Jews were discriminated against, as were other religious peoples. The history of the Jewish population in Cuba is part of history that should not be lost even though, for the most part, these people have been forgotten. Rosenfeld’s diptych formatting of pairing a portrait of a person and then a still life of their Spartan living environment takes the viewer in and invariably the on-looker makes up a story about the face they just encountered. The exhibit will run from late May throughout the summer. When you go to the Center catch the performance of Letters from Anne & Martin which is an imagined meeting of mind and heart, drawn entirely from the text of Anne Frank’s Diary and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.
