Never Again Spokane

n this year's high school division of the Jessica Stein Memorial art contest there were so many excellent pieces we selected several runners up. One of those runners up was Zoe Sherman, a 9th grader at Ridgeline HS. Her piece is titled “One Woman’s Story.” We were inspired by her very moving personal story and her ability to capture such detail in the hat and bureaucratic papers. We felt that her family’s story reminded us of the intergenerational dangers of indifference. She wrote:

“This art piece was inspired by my great great-grandmother Chaye Weissberg. She was a Jewish widow who fled from Poland to America with her six children less than two months before the N**is invaded. The papers laying under the hat is a collage made from her immigration documents and the number on the hat is the number at the top of said documents. The dog tag represents how she changed our name from “Weissberg” to “Sherman” to protect us. She did such a good job doing this, until about three years ago we thought we came from an Italian and English ancestry and never knew about our real last name. This art piece is a tribute to my amazing great great-grandmother and all the other amazing men and women who not only suffered through those trying times, but the ones who saved themselves and others.”

The first place winner in the middle school division of the 2023 Jessica Stein Memorial art contest was Jonah Elster! Jonah is in the 8th grade at Salk Middle School. It's hard to see in the photograph but Jonah made such a meticulous effort to capture the difference between the barren landscape of indifference and the heroism involved in protecting and defending one's community. The more we looked at it the more this piece really captured the spirit of our theme- "The dangers of indifference". Congrats Jonah!

The piece is entitled "Giving Hope" and Jonah wrote:

My art piece is of two sides divided by a wall. One side of beauty and harmony, and the other is a side of despair. On the side of beauty and harmony there are people holding hands in unity, and acceptance. On the side of despair there is death and dehumanization. In the despair, all those people are is a beaten down to a silhouette of the person they used to be. They are not seen as equal or as human. They have no hope because people just don’t seem to care. There is a tree on that side, the tree used to be grand with words of happiness. The tree is now dead. In the center, there is a wall, put there to stop the people in despair to go to the place of beauty. But the center was broken down by a hero. The hero is pulling a stranger out of the despair and darkness because they care. Because they care, this absolute stranger now has hope.