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WEDNESDAY
Photographer David Goberman was born in Minsk six years before the Bolshevik Revolution and has managed to survive well past the fall of the Soviet Union. He spent much of his artistic career documenting headstone carvings from the Pale of Settlementthe lands between the Baltic and Black Seas where Russia once decreed that Jews must live. Jewish cultural history wasn’t always a favorite subject of the Soviet authorities, but Goberman persevered, and he wound up preserving a now largely vanished heritage. In Goberman’s hands, 17th- and 18th-century headstones are rendered elegiacally, in timeless, yellow-tinted photographs. The 70 images of “Carved Memories: Heritage in Stone From the Russian Jewish Pale”on display through Jan. 30 at the District of Columbia Jewish Community Centerinclude both wide-angle depictions of weedy, teetering headstones and close-ups of impressively delicate surface carvings, ranging from animals to intricate floral and geometric patterns. Their symbology is often obscure, but former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, author of the introduction to the accompanying catalogue, will shed some light when he discusses Goberman’s work at 7 p.m. at the DCJCC’s Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery, 1529 16th St. NW. $20. (202) 518-9400. (Louis Jacobson)