Shelomo Selinger

Selinger's work on the Mémorial national des Déportés de France (French National Deportation Memorial) in Drancy, in rose coloured granite, took two years of carving by hand and was unveiled in 1976. The Mémorial de la Résistance in La Courneuve followed in 1987. In the meantime Selinger created the Requiem pour les Juifs d'Allemagne (Requiem for German Jews) (1980) in Bosen, Saarland and the Monument aux Justes parmi les Nations (Monument for the Unknown Righteous among the Nations) at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem(1987). Selinger started treating monumental statuary in open space in 1964 with his sculpture L’Esprit et la matière n° 1 (Spirit and matter n° 1), erected in Saint-Avold (Moselle), followed by L’Esprit et la matière n° 2 in Wissembourg (Bas-Rhin). The superb white marble Moise ou la Victoire de la lumière (Moses or the Victory of Light), set up in Aranđelovac (Serbia) has kept its head but the prophet's rays were destroyed by lightning.

Some of his other important open-air monuments are La tauromachie at the bullring of Le Bouscat (Gironde) in 1974, La Danse, a group of 35 flower boxes created in 1982, stretching from the place Basse of the Esplanade Charles-de-Gaulle, to the La Défense (Hauts-de-Seine), covering an area of 3.600 square meters and the Groupe de 13 sculptures (1991) in the Tel-Hai Industrial park in the Galilee, a part of the 24 granite and basalt sculptures bought by the Open Air Museum of Tefen. These works are on display in Tel-Aviv, in Omer or in Lavon. Since 1998, Le prophète Elie (The Prophet Elijah) towers over the Mount Carmel dominating Haifa.

Further recognition came to Selinger in 1973 when he won first prize in an international competition with his monument "The Gates of Hell", in memory of those who passed through Drancy internment camp on the outskirts of Paris during World War II.

In 1973 Selinger was named Chevalier to the prestigious French Legion of Honour by President François Mitterrand. Since 2006, he has had the title "Officier de la Légion d'Honneur".

The Jewish Museum of New York discovered Selinger in 1960 and displayed seven of his sculptures. After Paris art gallery owner Michel Dauberville became owner of his parents’ gallery, the Galerie Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, he gave many exhibitions of Selinger's work from the 1960s through the first decade of the 21st century.

In 1955 Selinger was awarded the Norman Prize of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. A year later he enrolled in Paris at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts where he studied traditional clay modelling with Marcel Gimond. However, he did not abandon his own personal style and continued carving directly on working materials with hammers, sledgehammers and chisels.

After his liberation from the camp, Selinger joined the Beit HaArava kibbutz near the Dead Sea. During the 1948 Palestine war he participated in the Sodom battle, while his kibbutz was destroyed. He was then one of the founders of the Kabri kibbutz in the Galilee, where in 1951 he met his future wife, Ruth Shapirovsky, who came to the kibbutz as a volunteer worker with her Haifa high school class. They were married in 1954. At that time Selinger began to fill in the gaps in his memory and to sculpt.

In 1946 he boarded the Tel Haï, a ship leaving La Ciotat and headed to the then British Mandate Palestine with a group of young death camps survivors who, with the help of the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, had crossed illegally through Germany, Belgium and France. The ship was seized outside the territorial waters of Haifa by the British Royal Navy. The passengers, none of whom had immigration certificates, were interned in the Atlit detainee camp.

He was discovered, still breathing, on a stack of dead bodies when the Terezin camp was liberated in 1945 by the Red Army. The Jewish military doctor who pulled him out of the pile of corpses transferred him to a military field hospital, where he recovered his health, but was completely amnesic for seven years.

Selinger was born to a Jewish family in the small Polish town of Szczakowa (today part of Jaworzno) near Oświęcim (Auschwitz). He received both a traditional Jewish upbringing and a Polish public school education. In 1943 he was deported with his father from the Chrzanów ghetto to the Faulbrück concentration camp in Germany. Three months later his father was murdered and Selinger remained alone in the camp. His mother and one of his sisters also perished during the Holocaust. Selinger survived nine German death camps: Faulbrück, Gröditz, Markstadt, Fünfteichen, Gross-Rosen, Flossenburg, Dresden, Leitmeritz and finally Theresienstadt, as well as two death marches.

Shelomo Selinger (born May 31, 1928) is a sculptor and artist living and working in Paris since 1956.

On the 103rd anniversary of the 1906 rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus, the first deputy mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, announced the creation of a new association. The association proposes to launch a national subscription campaign for the erection of a statue of Émile Zola on the Place Alfred Dreyfus in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. The sculptor will be Shelomo Selinger.