The Virginia Holocaust Museum is launching a special project next spring. It's a statewide initiative in which Holocaust survivors and their family members are photographed and their stories shared, to explore how survivors' experiences continue to shape their families.
Virginia Holocaust Museum Director Sam Asher is looking for subjects to have black and white photos taken for the forthcoming Legacy Portrait Project.
Asher recently spoke with VPM News' Morning Edition host Phil Liles about the initiative.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Phil Liles: Samuel Asher, what are you hoping to achieve with this initiative and where did the idea come from?
Samuel Asher: Interestingly enough, my fiance and I were in France over the summer and we were in a town called Arles. Arles has a photographic convention, if you will, every summer, and every building in Arles has photographs, different kinds of photographs, etc.
We entered into this beautiful church building, and in the whole ground floor was an exhibit of intergenerational Holocaust survivors: a person who went through the Holocaust, a child or an adult, children and grandchildren. We were able to see all of these portraits and the stories of all of the families, and Roberta and I said, we're bringing that back to Richmond. So I went to my friend who's an amazing artist and photographer. I said, 'You're gonna come help us do this.' And he said, 'Absolutely.'
How many families are you expecting to document and how are you finding your subjects?
We are the Virginia Holocaust Museum, so we're statewide. We've had two or three families that have already done the photography. Dean Whitbeck is the photographer who already took just the photographs of the survivor community, which are in our upstairs gallery at the museum right now. And now, Dean has come back to do this project.
We have probably about 30 to 40 families we think we can entice into doing this, and we invite the survivors to contact us to have the whole family photograph. And we'll have the history also along with the photographs to show who these folks were, how they got out of the Holocaust or endured it, and here are their family and what they're all about. It's a great opportunity, and we want to reach out all over the state.
How are you doing that?
We know the survivors' communities in Richmond, Virginia Beach and Roanoke. We're reaching out through all of those different touch points, and then we're putting publicity out also to try and get more and more people involved and on the internet. We're doing pretty well; we've already got quite a few photographs taken.
Where will the photos be displayed?
We have the holographic theater that you all know about and right outside of the holographic theater, we have a whole set of photographs right now of the survivor community. We're gonna take those down and put these up in the spring of 2027.
And the location of the Holocaust Holocaust Museum is?
The Holocaust Museum is in Shockoe Bottom, 2000 E. Cary St. You can't miss it. Come down Cary, come down Broad. You'll get to the museum.
If you want to be involved in this legacy project, reach out to me, Sam Asher at the museum, or Laurie Crouch at the museum. We'd love to have you participate.
This is about teaching the history, and it's so important for us to have the legacy of our families. About 150 families came to Richmond, Virginia, and also to Tidewater and Roanoke and other parts of the state. Their history, we tell their history, we hold their history, and it's so important for us to continue to exhibit the photographs as a way of connecting to our history and to the families here in Richmond and also in Tidewater and Roanoke and even Northern Virginia.
Samuel, thank you so much.
Thank you for having me.
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