This blog starts with the period from 29th January to the 4th March 2013 and a trip to work at the Grafikwerkstatt in Dresden , my mother’s home city. The newest blog is always at the top and you need to scroll down for older posts. There is also some additional material on Facebook.
Thursday 11th May 2 pm on Zoom
May 8, 2023
Monica Petzal will be in conversation with Michael Newman , Chair of the Association of Jewish Refugees about the film ‘Here Lived’ she has made together with Eileen Haring Woods. They will discuss the laying of Stolpersteine in Berlin and anti-semitism. The Zoom link is https://ajr-org-uk.zoom.us/j/84210753203
Holocaust Memorial Day 2023
January 30, 2023
Here Lived a film by Monica Petzal
December 2, 2022
In September 2022, we gathered in Berlin to lay Stolpersteine for six of our immediate family who died in the Shoah. The ceremony was filmed by Maria Aguilar, and I have worked with editor Eileen Haring Woods to create this film. Email monicapetzal@gmail.com to contact me about this film and the issues it raises.
European Judaism from the Leicester Conference
August 22, 2022
In 2021 I made a presentation in Leicester about the making of the prints for my exhibition Dissent and Displacement which was in the New Walk Museum from February 2020 until lockdown. As a result the organisers of the conference were asked by European Judaism if they could publish the papers, to which I gladly […]
Age of Confidence: The New Jewish Culture wave
February 10, 2022
I am delighted to have an article and an image included in this new book published by the magazine Jewish Renaissance to celebrate their 20th Anniversary.https://monicapetzal.com/news/jewish-renaissance/
My Grandfather Dr Erich Max Isakowitz – Dentist
February 25, 2017
A fascinating article in the ‘Dental Historian‘:
Margate , “To a Death in Sweating Wakefulness’
October 28, 2016
This is the exhibition text for Margate: My parents were German Jewish refugees. My mother Lore Isakowitz (born 1915) and her family fled Dresden for London in 1936. My father Harry Petzal (born 1908) fled Berlin in August 1939. He left behind the rest of his family, who only escaped as far as Holland. Harry’s […]
Dismantling the Coventry Dresden Towers
April 19, 2016
Well the towers are no more and the lovingly (and expensively) made construction has been consigned to the scrap yard of art though much of the wood has been salvaged for re-use on another project. The prints however are safe and sound. None of this take down would have been possible without the intervention of […]
Herbert School Project
January 28, 2016
What a great time I had working in December and January with pupils from Whitley Academy in Coventry. The girls were enthusiastic, full of ideas and worked liked crazy after hours at school to complete their archival Coventry Monopoly Board. I set them the idea based on the thought that this could combine research in […]
A New Year
January 11, 2016
I greeted the New Year in Suffolk but shortly after went to Berlin which was suitably wintry, snowy and freezing.As well as visiting my family I was able to see some excellent exhibitions, Max Beckmann at the Berlinisches Galerie was an absolute treat with more self portraits grouped together than I had ever seen. There […]