Gerry Judah

Artist Statement

MENORAH 2025 - Gerry Judah

Gerry Judah’s Menorah is not a conventional symbol of hope—it is a stark reminder of endurance. Rendered in steel and silence, the sculpture transforms the sacred menorah into a brutal architectural elegy to survival, loss, and memory.

Composed of six skeletal towers flanking a ruptured central column, Menorah evokes not just ancient resilience but profound vulnerability. These half-standing, half-destroyed forms resemble bombed-out homes and shattered neighbourhoods. Though timeless in appearance, they resonate with haunting familiarity today. Menorah gestures toward a long history of displacement and violence - from ancient exile to modern catastrophe.

At the centre, the broken Shamash - traditionally the guiding flame - suggests not only destruction, but the collapse of moral clarity. In an age where civilian life is again caught in political crossfire, and entire communities are erased or silenced, Menorah offers no simple message of peace. Instead, it presents a challenge: what does it mean to carry memory forward in a world that keeps fracturing? And yet, even broken, the structure stands. That endurance - damaged but upright - is key. The menorah has long symbolized spiritual continuity, a flame that survives against the odds. Menorah does not deny the cost of that survival. It makes it visible. The ruin becomes not despair, but testimony.

Menorah is sharpened by its context. Gerry Judah’s earlier works - his Auschwitz-Birkenau model for the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition and his Great War Sculptures in St Paul’s Cathedral - interrogate how we remember atrocity. But here Menorah feels different: urgent, immediate. It belongs not to the safety of hindsight but to the fractures of now. It speaks to a world where cultural survival is still contested, and where remembrance itself becomes resistance.

Menorah offers no consolation. It casts no light. Its rubble is not debris — it is testimony. Its brokenness is not despair — it is defiance.