The Spill the Honey Foundation is an alliance of Jewish Americans and African Americans dedicated to using the arts to promote human dignity by advancing public awareness of the European Holocaust and American slavery. In addition, the group draws attention to contemporary social injustices and systemic oppression to advance cultural tolerance. They strive to spread dignity, goodness, and kindness among all people in a cross-generational effort to improve the DNA of the soul by countering racism and antisemitism.
This non-profit organization takes its name from the inspirational story of Eli Ayalon, a teenaged survivor of the Nazis. Forty years after maintaining his self-enforced silence after World War II, Ayalon shared the story of how his mother told him the family was going to be separated from the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland and send east to the concentration camps. She knew they would never see each another again.
Young Ayalon was allowed by the Nazis to leave the ghetto and return because he ran errands for their German oppressors. “When you leave tomorrow,” his mother told him, “never return. Never! Struggle to survive.”
His mother gave him a small, gauze-covered cup with some honey in it. “Eli,” she said, “honey sweetens the sting of hate. Close your eyes to see beyond the pain and suffering to celebrate the sweetness of life. Spill the honey.”
From this
painful memory between a mother and son, Eli Ayalon went from being a survivor
to becoming a messenger of hope. The Spill the Honey Foundation was inspired by the Jewish wisdom of Elizer Ayalon and the civil rights movement of Dr. Martin Luther King.
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| DeVon Cunningham and me in his art studio. [11/11/2021] |
In 2018, the Spill the Honey Foundation under the direction of Dr. Sheri Rogers brought Detroit docuartist DeVon Cunningham on as art director to create a series of eighteen original paintings for display in each of the eighteen Holocaust museums nationwide.
The collection was scheduled originally for its debut at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit’s Cultural Center in 2020. But due to Covid restrictions, the debut exhibition was cancelled. Mr. Cunningham is working to reschedule the exhibition while the collection is still intact.
Many of Mr. Cunningham's Spill the Honey paintings contain the melding of the Christian crucifix and the Hebrew Star of David to symbolize the underlying ties of both religious traditions. The Spill the Honey Foundation is a model to show how different communities can find common goals and work together.
The shape of the hexagon appears in several paintings as a unifying image linking the concept of the honeycomb, the bees, and the honey of the natural world to the goals of the Spill the Honey Foundation, which are to spread peace, harmony and justice, using college student ambassadors to bring the movement to young people.
Reconciling the inequities of history will not happen without bearing witness to the documented truths of the past—the good, the bad, and the ugly. I believe we owe future generations that much.
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