July 2022 Portrait of the Month — Anna Steinbach

Anna Steinbach

In April 2022, Memory Project Productions founders Roz Jacobs and Laurie Weisman were invited to a Yom HaShoah commemoration event at a synagogue near Philadelphia. In addition to the moving speakers, which included our very own Roz Jacobs, the synagogue presented an exhibit of portraits created by congregants and religious school students at a Memory Project Productions workshop. One of them was this powerful portrait of Anna Steinbach.

Anna was Sinti, an ethnic group that was badly persecuted in Europe both before and during the Holocaust. The Roma and Sinti are an ethnic minority in Europe, originally from northern India. They were called Gypsies, a derogatory term, because Europeans mistakenly thought they came from Egypt.

Early next month marks the anniversary of the liquidation of the Zigeunerfamilienlager (“Gypsy Family Camp”) of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, during which almost 3,000 Roma children and adults were killed in gas chambers. Under the Nazi regime, an increasing number of anti-“Gypsy” laws subjected tens of thousands of Roma and Sinti to sterilization, deportation to camps, forced labor, and mass murder. It is estimated that between 220,000 and 500,000 Roma and Sinti throughout Europe were killed during the Holocaust.

Read more about Roma and Sinti Genocide Remembrance Day and the Roma Education Fund.