Samuel Bak’s Exhibition at the Kurkliai Synagogue

SEE YOU AT THE KURKLIAI SYNAGOGUE!

We’re excited to announce that our doors are open for the summer season! Visitors are welcome Wednesday through Sunday, from 10 AM to 6 PM.

From June 4 to September 21, the Kurkliai Synagogue will host the exhibition of artist Samuel Bak, who miraculously escaped from the Vilnius Ghetto.

Titled “City of Memories”, the exhibition offers a keyhole glimpse into Samuel Bak’s memory of the Jerusalem of Lithuania — Vilnius. Some works feature winding streets of his childhood Vilnius, captured in lithographs that often transform into the claustrophobic courtyards of the Ghetto. Others are visual requiems for the homes of his youth, their facades laid out like sandstone gravestones. Still-life compositions serve as fragments from a kaleidoscope of memories — pieces from the depths of the artist’s mind that together reconstruct a world of the past.

Samuel Bak held his first art exhibition in the Vilnius Ghetto at the age of just nine. Over the next thirty years, he traveled extensively across Europe, often changing his place of residence, until settling in Weston, a suburb of Boston, in 1993. He continues to live and work there today. According to art historian Ieva Šadzevičienė, Bak — who survived the Holocaust as a child — uses a symbolic language in his work that resonates with many and can serve as a powerful tool for healing.