This Holocaust Survivor’s Tapestries Show Her ‘Affirmation Of Life’

The Fellowship  |  June 24, 2019

A tapestry from the Jewish Center.

Ted Comet hosts tours through his home, which displays the tapestries his late wife and Holocaust survivor created. He tells The Forward that creating these tapestries allowed her to work through the horrors she witnessed during her childhood in a healthy way and release some of her deep emotions and trauma. Now Comet hopes to inspire others to do the same:

At the age of 40, out of the blue, she bought a loom and began weaving. “I was stunned by what she created,” he says. “I expected pillows for the sofa.”

It’s a moving experience to hear Comet describe the meaning behind the largely abstract tapestries. He weaves his own tale of his beloved wife of 60 years; a survivor, accomplished artist, and psychotherapist who once spoke eight languages, but later lost her memory, voice, and light to Alzheimer’s, and passed away in 2012…

“War,” one of the least abstract, hangs in the middle of a triptych over Comet’s rectangular dining room table. In it, a plane drops bombs on a field, while a dead child lies on the ground surrounded by flowers, “whose heads are bending in sorrow.” The child has a broken right arm, yet a bloom grows from his left wrist.

Only after she took the work off the loom, did Shoshana realize that she had in fact replicated an experience she lived through during the Holocaust, he explains.