Ruth Platner: Yom Hashoah - A Holocaust Remembrance through the Arts a Leichtag Foundation

By Patricia Frischer

Ruth Platner's exhibition: Yom Hashoah: A Holocaust Remembrance through the Arts at the Farm House Gallery of the Leichtag Foundation is a Holocaust survivor's story in painting and drawings. 

Ruth Platner's painting are colorful and positive and because the show is introduced as a Holocaust survivors exhibition, these seems to be at odds. But Ruth who is 92 and in attendance wrote a stirring message that was read by her daughter. she explained how as Jew in Germany in WW II she was banned from school and bomb shelters. Her parents managed to take her into the country side and one day on the way home from school, she came across the crater created by a bomb. She reached in and grabbed some clay which had been revealed after the top soil was blown away. Soon she was sculpting a head and found that the war had revealed art as her passion. The art in turn has been a large component in healing her from the war.

She attended the Hamburg Art Institute, married Fred Platner in 1949, moved to Wisconsin and in 1978 to Carlsbad. She created and administered the OMA School of Art and her incarcerated veterans program is based her book  “Meditation and Art”

To see this show which is up for a limited time in May contact Naomi Nussbaum 

The evening also supported the the Butterfly Project by having the attendees painting one ceramic butterfly in commemoration of each child who perished in the Holocaust.  This will be put on permanent display in The Hive which is a community workshop at the Leichtag Foundation. 

The Anti- Defamation League gave a presentation about how their No Place for Hate  program strives to support anti-bias and bullying interventions on school campuses across the country. Presentations by two local students was sad and heartening at the same time.