When Audrey Gelman began searching for wall coverings for her Hudson Valley inn, The Six Bells, she had no idea that it would lead to a deep self-exploration of her family legacy.
Amidst the crop of historical prints that Gelman’s interior designer, Adam Greco, presented, she was particularly taken with the Bavarian folk patterns from the Wallach Project. When Greco told Gelman about the family’s story, “I just became obsessed with it,” she says, adding that she snapped up anything Wallach on eBay.
The Wallach House of Folk Art Munich was founded by two Jewish brothers, Julius and Moritz Wallach, in 1900. The pair were later joined in business by their brother, Max, and grew the business into a bustling European textile and fashion hub, even helping to popularize the dirndl in Germany. But, along with other Jewish-owned businesses in Germany, the Bavarian textile emporium was annexed by the Nazis in 1937 and officially seized on August 1, 1938. Still, the Wallach House remained active in the region. Until 2022, the brothers’ original textiles were produced by Josef Fromholzer—who worked at the company from age 12 through his 90s. (Fromholzer died in 2023.)
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Not all of brothers would make it out of the war alive. Max was murdered in Auschwitz, while Moritz fled to New York and Julius wandered Europe and Canada before landing in Pennsylvania. But almost 90 years later, the Wallachs’ descendants, have reclaimed their family legacy and their textiles. Together, a group of the brothers’ great- and great-great-grandchildren from across the United States, Greece, and Brazil founded the Wallach Project, which preserves and reimagines their original printmaking practice.
Gelman is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors herself, a point of bonding with the Wallach cousins. Her great-grandparents, innkeepers in modern-day Belarus, were massacred by the Nazis along with most of their town. Her grandfather was able to escape and later fought against the Nazis in the Russian Army. Gelman had never publicly engaged with her own family history, but was moved by the Wallach Project’s story. So she contacted Jamie Hall, Max’s great-grandson and the chair of the Wallach project, broaching the possibility of a collaboration. “I just reached out cold,” she says. “I got on a call and I told him a little bit about my own story.”
