Photo designed by Itamar Maggid Itamar Maggid, 25, is the winner of the 2019 national Poster Competition for Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day. He was awarded the prize by Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev on March 28.
Maggid is a first-year student in Visual Communications at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Israel.
Shalev said in a statement that the competition “invites Israeli designers to express the meaning of the Holocaust for them through the means of visual language, and thus we are witnesses to the shaping of Holocaust remembrance throughout the Israeli populace.”
For more than a decade, Yad Vashem has been holding the competition to design the official poster for Holocaust Remembrance Day.
This year’s theme “Designing Memory,” called on students of design, designers and artists to submit their proposals for the poster.
Maggid is the grandson of Holocaust survivors and said he used them as inspiration for his design.
The poster displays three boats, which Maggid says represents different types of documentation. Viewers can also see the Stars of David in the water’s reflection.
“The historical importance that the boats represent – that we are still alive – and the memory of the Shoah travel together over the water towards a new reality of hope and dreams,” Maggid said in a statement to the Journal. “I tried to impart the feeling of the eternity of the past and belonging to the future with the paper boats, which sail along once turbulent but now quiet waters.”
In years past, the winning design becomes a vital part in the museum’s International School for Holocaust Studies which distributes lesson plans to schools across Israel.
“It is our hope that Holocaust education and its place in our culture will influence public perception and engender an authentic and diverse dialogue regarding Holocaust remembrance,” Shalev said.
Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day 2019 will be on Thursday, May 2. The State opening ceremony will be held at Yad Vashem on Wednesday, May 1
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