They say taking a photograph can steal part of one soul. But what about discovering the soul of those long gone with a photograph?
That is what photographer Todd Weinstein has done in his long career of shooting the lost people and places of the Holocaust.
So many souls were lost, gone up in smoke at the concentration camps. Todd’s ability to find meaning and holiness in photography to reflect the indescribable loss of the Jewish people is extraordinary.
It has been a calling, a mission, to document and to remember.
Much of Todd‘s inspiration can be traced back to growing up in the Jewish community of Oak Park Michigan in the late 50s and 60s. Todd’s heritage includes family members who died at the hand of persecutors. Todd was also particularly moved by his friends’ parents who had survived the horrors of World War II.
Growing up in Oak Park was quite idyllic. Kids were safe in the streets both day and night. Ice-skating in the winter, baseball in the summer and lots of fun social events in between. The community swayed to the rhythms of the Jewish calendar. Stores and schools emptied on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Streets were crowded with people coming and going from synagogue on Shabbat. A family did not have to be particularly observant to feel culturally Jewish. You just had to live there.
It was a given that young boys at thirteen would become a Bar Mitzvah, as Todd himself did, as well as his brother Lee did, when their time came.
A certain bond was formed between the young people of Oak Park in those days. The politics, the assassinations, the changing morality, the freedom, the rock ‘n’ roll, the experimentation, all played a part in forming young peoples’ characters. The friends made in the streets, classrooms, temples, synagogues and even pool halls of Oak Park were friends for life.
Todd’s father Hy jumped into the fray when he opened a night club that became the center of the teen scene called the Mummp. There was the drumming beat of rock ‘n roll, the long hair, the tie-dye hippie clothing, mixed with all the political protest of the 60’s. Those were fertile times for creativity, soul-searching, taking chances and becoming who you were meant to be.
With that kind of self confidence, Todd went to East to pursue his dream of becoming a professional photographer in New York.
The Detroit riot of 1967 ignited even more determination and creativity to young artists in its midst.
In 1983 Todd traveled to Washington DC to attend the opening of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Quite accidentally he ran into Paula and Max Weiner, parents of his childhood friend and Holocaust survivors from Hungary and Poland. It was the beginning of a lifelong journey for Todd who has been using his photography document and find meaning in the Holocaust.
For years Todd has photographed an abstract series called the “36 Unknown.” Based on Jewish oral history, the 36 unknown represent 36 righteous people who are required for the world to exist. One of them may be the Messiah.
Since one never knows where or when they’ll appear, they remain mystical and mysterious. Todd’s series of photographs examines the potential of salvation and grace in ordinary objects that just might be one of the 36 unknown who can save the world.
Todd’s engaging, curious and always friendly personality has earned him a world of friends and fans. it also attracted photographic mentors, who took young Todd under their wings and trained him as an apprentice. Ernst Haas, an Austrian-American photographer (1921-1986) innovated many techniques to express his reality and imagination through photography.
From Todd‘s first visit to Auschwitz in 1995 to his travels through Romania, the Ukraine and Hungary he searched not only for his own relatives but all those lost there in the Jewish world.
Todd also had his experience with anti-Semitism. Even the insulation of Jewish Oak Park could not protect him name calling or nasty insults from a downtown photographer who once leant him a camera.
-Nancy Magnus Irwin
Santa Barbara, California, 2022