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On an exterior wall of the Solomon Merrick Building at the University of Miami, a large bronze relief by American-Jewish artist Herzl Emanuel, was installed in 2006 at the building which houses the Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies.

The relief, titled Homage to Janusz Korczak, had been donated to the university in April 1983 by Dr. and Mrs. Phillip Frost, at the time of an exhibition of Emanuel recent work at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. It gift became part of the university art collection, but was not displayed.

When created by the artist, it was an “Homage,” probably not conceived as a Holocaust memorial for a specific place. When it was re-dedicated, however, in its present location in the breezeway by the entrance of the Miller Center and the School of Education by Dr. and Mrs. Frost in 2006, it took on the role of de facto Holocaust memorial. The artwork is now very visible close to the entrance to the Jewish Studies Program and the Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Jewish Studies. There is a new bronze plaque that provides historical information on who Korczak was and how he and the orphans under his charge were deported from Warsaw and killed in Treblinka.

Herzl Emanuel was a note American sculptor who spent much of his career in Europe, including 20 years in Rome, during which time he made this work. He was deeply influenced by the flattened perspective of medieval Italian art, and he found inspiration in Renaissance humanist art. But, according to Virginia M. Mecklenburg, who interviewed the artist in 1988 for the Smithsonian Museum of American Art,

 “it was Picasso’s Guernica that had the most dramatic impact in his life. Calling it the most significant work of art of the twentieth century, Emanuel has sought to achieve in his own work a fusion of abstracted form with tragic content that parallels Picasso’s powerful statement. Since the 1930s, his sculpture has evolved from an Analytical Cubist format to an Expressionism in which the human form is distorted to convey the human condition. Yet by intertwining limbs and connecting gazes in multifigural compositions, he offers up human relationships as notes of hope that temper the effects of a tragic existence.”

This perfectly describes Homage to Janusz Korzack. Beginning in the 1970s Emanuel created several works about the Holocaust. A smaller version of the Homage to Janusz Korzack was made in 1978. Two other large works in this series of are “They Fought Back,” and “The Final Solution.”