Outreach to Humanity Series of Projects, from 2013 onward
In 2013, Michael Rogatchi was invited to take a part in the IV World Litvak Congress that took a place in Vilnius, Lithuania. He was the only artist whose personal exhibition was the part of the official program of that important event.
Although the Congress did commemorate the 70th anniversary of the destruction of the Vilna ghetto and its Jewry, Michael whose grandmother was Sofia Litowska , and who family have had its tragic toll of Holocaust, decided to commemorate their memory in the way of gentleness and beauty, the way of creating the atmosphere where their smiles were as if present.
That’s how the artist’s famous Jewish Melody series was born, and that what was its main purpose for the artist – to create the images which would bring enlightened memories about the people and way of life that has been annihilated brutally and without any reason at all.
Many of the images from Jewish Melody series has become a modern classic by now. The series has been widely exhibited and reproduced. Many exhibition, lectures, interviews, panels were conducted based on this series in the project on Art as an Act of Memory, in many countries: Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, the UK, the USA, and the others.
The point and subject of this project, the one of the Outreach to Humanity series of projects, is to evaluate the art not just as a tool, but as as an act of memory, in all its rich diversity and wide possibilities. It is not only educates much better and deeper, on a level of compassion and with emotional engagement of the viewers, but it also communicates humanity directly which is a special mission of the real, soulful art.