Shelomo Selinger

Shelomo Selinger was born in 1928 in Jaworzno

Selinger was born in 1928 to a Jewish family in Szczakowa, Poland, today part of Jaworzno. He had a traditional Jewish upbringing and attended a Polish public school.

In 1943 he was deported with his father from the Chrzanów ghetto to the Faulbrück camp, where his father was murdered. His mother and a sister also died in the Holocaust. He survived 9 camps and 2 death marches, and in 1945 a military doctor found him alive on a pile of bodies at Theresienstadt.

In 1946 he sailed on the ship Tel Hai, was seized by the British and held at Atlit. He joined kibbutz Beit HaArava, later helped found kibbutz Kabri, and married Ruth Shapirovsky in 1954. Around then his memory returned and he began to sculpt.

After winning the Norman Prize in 1955, he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris with Marcel Gimond. He carved directly in granite, stone and wood, and Constantin Brâncuși gave him a sandstone grindstone. His work Motherhood won the Neumann Prize and is held by the Paris museum of modern art.

The Jewish Museum in New York showed 7 of his works in 1960. In 1973 he won an international competition for a memorial to the Drancy camp. He was made a member of the French Legion of Honour.