CAMERA OBSCURA
קאַמעראַ אָבסקוראַ
CELEBRATE │ INVESTIGATE │ DOCUMENT
Pre-Second World War Lithuanian Jewish photographs provide a unique and irreplaceable record of a civilisation that no longer exists.1 Camera Obscura is a combined cultural history and provenance research project that celebrates these images through the eyes of the mostly forgotten women and men who made them, that investigates their theft and near-total destruction during Nazi Germany’s occupation of Lithuania between June 19412 and January 1945, and that documents the present locations and—wherever possible—the previous life stories of the few photographs that survived the war. Camera Obscura is funded with assistance from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the EVZ Foundation, the German Federal Ministry of Finance, the Jewish Historical Society of England and a wide range of kind and generous individuals around the world. The project is ongoing, and is far from complete. If you’d like to make a financial contribution towards its continuing development, please don’t hesitate to send an email for more information.3 To find out how to get involved as a volunteer, please send an email to the same address.
1 Lithuanian Jewish photographers were once active in cities, towns and villages throughout Lithuania and beyond, until nearly every single one of them who was alive in Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War—professional or otherwise—was robbed and murdered. Over eight decades later, the many Lithuanian Jewish contributions to both Lithuanian and international photographic culture still go largely unrecognised. Camera Obscura is a long-term project to fix this.
2 March 1939, if you include the Klaipėda Region/Memel Territory.