The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that more than 10 million people just on German soil were displaced during and just after the Holocaust. Evidence indicates that currently there are more than 70 million refugees and internally displaced people in the world today and the average amount of time someone will be displaced is seventeen years. The impact of this upsurge of refugees, the most the world has ever known, has only begun to be felt. Education, national security, humanitarian aid, social services, policies, economics, children, families and identities are being impacted in communities all over the world. This is a truly global issue that is quickly transcending the boundaries of displacement camps, receiving countries, and war-torn nations. These combined projects also address the rising tide of today’s world-wide anti-Semitism.
1. Moses Man the musical
Moses Man a developing new musical, portrays the indomitable spirit of survival as it recounts the true saga of a Holocaust survivor who fled Vienna, Austria during Hitler’s annexation and chronicles his perilous nine-year journey through Europe, Cyprus, Palestine, and Africa before finding freedom and home in America. It also juxtaposes the historical story and brings to focus issues of discrimination, bullying, persecution, displacement and genocide in the context of contemporary life for diverse audiences. DEEP Arts has been working closely with scholars at The Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, helping bring current stories of displacement to the forefront and lend their humanities expertise, highlighting past and present intersections and collisions so necessary to address in today’s world.
2. Finding Home Documentary Film
Working in partnership with Emmy-award winning documentary film director Dave Marshall of Blue Sky Project , Finding Home, a full-length documentary film explores the intersection of artmaking and real life by following artists’ work related to global displacement. The film centers on the development of the musical Moses Man and its writer/producer Deborah Haber. The musical is the true story of Holocaust survivor and refugee Kalman Haber and its collision with those of contemporary refugees, linking them across generations by discrimination, persecution, genocide and displacement. By capturing Moses Man’s creative team engaging with scholars and other artists whose work also relates to the lived stories of refugees and (including collaborating international artists who were part of the refugee/displacement experience), Finding Home brings the overwhelming scale of these global catastrophes down to the personal, shines a light on the seamlessness between “them” and “us, and instigates consideration, commitment, and change.
3. Finding Home: Shine the Light Exhibition
Finding Home: Shine the Light, is a multi-art exhibition encompassing theatre, visual arts, and film that illuminates social justice issues through the historical lens of the Holocaust and the current lens of displacement. The arts create an entry point for participants to connect the past with the present and to more meaningfully and intimately understand the experiences of refugees and their quests to “find home” through their real-life stories. DEEP Arts is in the planning stages for Finding Home: Shine the Light to become a nationwide traveling museum exhibition; weaving together the musical’s contributing artists in a very unique multi-arts form to extend audience outreach and institutional partnerships. Exhibition audiences will be active participants of the refugee journey experiencing select audio and visual testimony of the film, the actual work of the artists identified in the film whose work expresses their experience of displacement and finding home. Accompanying the exhibition the full documentary film Finding Home and musical Moses Man will be presented, either within the individual museum or partnering with leading cultural institutions in the vicinity.
