The Yellow Badge: Dialogue with a Symbol

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The Yellow Badge: Dialogue with a Symbol

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Israeli painter Sabine Saad will show her works of art, which deal with the Holocaust, with the yellow badge, with modern anti-Semitism, and with Jewish identity, from 28.3.09 until 1.5.09 in the Eran Shamir Hamoshava Museum at Mazkeret Batya.

One of her works show a Yellow Badge jumping out of a box on a spring, like a demon that was hiding in a box. The Yellow Badge is bigger than the box so that once it’s out there’s no way to put it back. On the sides of the box are painted the flags of Italy, France, Germany, Poland and Holland. 

Artist Sabina Saad spent many years in Italy before she came (in 1969) to Israel.  In Italian the comics “balloons” are called FUMETTO, which means small smoke.  Sabina painted (Ink and color pencil on paper) a Yellow Badge along with a FUMETTO, alluding to the fact that Jews in the holocaust went to Heaven in a Big Smoke. There are no words in these “balloons” since Jewish victims’ voices were not heard at that time, and since many Jewish survivors stopped believing in God.

Sabina painted a Yellow badge with cuts in the canvas that reveal underneath a black background to show that the original meaning of the yellow color (light, life) was distorted by the Nazis, and started actually to mean what the black color conveys: darkness and death.

The work titled: Color Doesn't Matter – you’ll always be a Jew, shows the Yellow Badge on a colorful canvas. The concept is that Communist Jews (red), environmentalist Jews (green) are considered by their governments to be first Jews, no matter what their other affiliations are.

Another work (Acrylic on canvas shows the Yellow Badge in blue and white, illustrating the idea that Israelis and Jews are still marked as targets by their enemies as if they still have a Yellow Badge. That's why Israelis and Jews have to hide those signs of belonging (language, Yarmulke etc.) while they are among non-Jews.

Sabina Saad was born in 1950. Her parents left Germany and moved to Italy in 1933. She lives in Moshav Ramot Meir.