Survival and Intimations of Immortality
The Art of Alice Lok Cahana, Rabbi Ronnie Cahana, and Kitra Cahana
January 26 – May 25, 2025
Talents are passed down from generation to generation. But are memories? The Cahana family provides a very strong argument for the transmission of both talent and memory via DNA.
Survival and Intimations of Immortality: The Art of Alice Lok Cahana, Rabbi Ronnie Cahana, and Kitra Cahana has its international debut at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education on Jan. 26 – the day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day – and closes May 25.
The powerful exhibition of 16 paintings, five multi-media sculptures, 18 photographs, three documentary films, 21 family photographs and videos, and poems displays the artistic expressions of three members – three generations – of the Cahana family: the grandmother who survived the Holocaust; her eldest son who is a poet and survived a brain-stem stroke; and her eldest granddaughter who is a photographer and filmmaker and documents her father’s recovery and whose use of visual metaphor echoes her grandmother’s.
Each featured artist – Alice, Ronnie, and Kitra – takes their own artistic and expressive path to provide a through-line to preserving the culture, identity, and memories that are their own, those of their shared family, and those of the Jewish people.
“We are thrilled to be the venue for this profound, transgenerational collection’s first showing in the U.S.,” Rebekah Sobel, OJMCHE executive director, says.
“The Cahana family itself is deeply connected to greater Portland,” Sobel says. “These pieces and their messages thus have special resonance here, for the city’s Jewish and non-Jewish community. We are grateful to display this powerful exhibition that honors the past and bridges generations.”
Ori Z Soltes, guest curator of Survival and Intimations of Immortality, writes in the comprehensive exhibition catalogue, “How, one might ask, do the issues of immortality and transgenerational continuity translate into artistic expressions when the first figure in the passage from grandparent to parent-child to child-grandchild was a Holocaust survivor?”
He continues, “The life-experience of a parent may profoundly affect the art of the child.”
This rings especially true in Survival and Intimations of Immortality.
The New York-based Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art co-organized this special exhibition with the OJMCHE.
Rachel Stern, the Fritz Ascher Society’s founder and executive director, says “the artistic expressions in this exhibition showcase how Alice Lok Cahana channeled the psychological wounds of her traumatic experiences during the Holocaust into paintings and sculptures.”
Stern continues, “It also demonstrates how Alice encouraged her children and grandchildren to make their lives count, find their own artistic voice, and channel their emotions into life-affirming endeavors.”
Potent perspective is provided in Survival and Intimations of Immortality via the arresting and award-winning works of Alice Lok Cahana, who died in 2017, son Rabbi Ronnie Cahana, and granddaughter Kitra Cahana.
The family matriarch, Alice, born in 1929 in Hungary, survived three concentration camps before World War II’s end. She pledged that if she survived, she would become an artist.
In pieces both haunting – like the mixed-media “Lamentation” (c. 1980) that uses dark colors and imagery from Auschwitz, one of the camps Alice survived – and more optimistic – such as “New Day” (c. 1980) that incorporates in watercolor and acrylic a huge smear of bright yellow – Alice dredges up and explores lived experiences.
Alice’s son Rabbi Ronnie Cahana (and older brother of Rabbi Michael Z. Cahana of Portland’s Congregation Beth Israel), expresses himself via poetry, even after a brain-stem stroke in 2011 at age 57 dramatically altered his life.
Ronnie, as omniscient narrator, opens his 2020 poem “Tortoiseshell” with instructions. It is, he writes,
“to be read breathlessly”
“Praise the Releaser of prayer:
please release me!
Bound in Your ground
underground lies
a gamboling-on man”
Kitra Cahana, Ronnie’s first-born child, is a documentary filmmaker and photographer, whose work has been described as “poetic.” Powerful subjects in her multi-layered and multi-faceted images include her father during his long-term recovery, as well as many marginalized by society, such as teen moms, spirituality seekers, those who suffer physical disabilities and mental illness, and migrants and refugees. As her grandmother once was.
Art and memory may not be an antidote to the Shoah’s overall destruction. But they certainly provide insights into those who suffered and survived the Holocaust and those born to them.
Survival and Intimations of Immortality is guest-curated by Ori Z Soltes and on display at OJMCHE. It was organized in cooperation with the Fritz Ascher Society, New York. Funding has been generously provided by the Craig E. Wollner Exhibition Fund, the Arnold and Augusta Newman Photography Fund, and the Judy Margles Education and Culture Fund.
The exhibit catalogue, “Immortality, Memory, and Survival: The Arts of Alice Lok Cahana, Ronnie Cahana, and Kitra Cahana,” is sponsored by the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in New York.
About the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art
Founded in 2014, the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art in New York fills a critical gap in knowledge of artists whose lives and work were marginalized, persecuted, or murdered during the German Nazi regime (1933-45) and remain largely unknown or under-appreciated. Innovative and rich in-person and virtual programs communicate the untold stories and put them in a larger cultural, interdisciplinary, and multigenerational context. For further information about the Fritz Ascher Society: https://fritzaschersociety.org/.
About Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education
The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education explores the legacy of the Jewish experience in Oregon, teaches the enduring and universal relevance of the Holocaust, and provides opportunities for intercultural conversations.