“I felt it was something I had to do,” she told Ynetnews. “Millions of people were murdered based on the moral laws of a certain country, under a certain regime. And if these are the laws, I can go there and act according to my own laws. The statement I’m making here is that laws are determined by humans, and that morality is something that changes from time to time and from culture to culture.”

Ms. Bides later told The New York Times that the items “are not from the Auschwitz camp and not from the Auschwitz museum, but from the nearby area,” but she declined to elaborate. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum is a sprawling site covering hundreds of acres.

The artwork was meant to be part of an exhibit starting on July 26 at Beit Berl College in Kfar Saba, a city near Tel Aviv, Israel. But the college removed it, according to a statement posted on its Facebook page, after reports circulated that it contained stolen artifacts. The college has recommended Ms. Bides for “disciplinary action” and said it “condemns the theft of items from any place, and certainly from an extermination camp.”

The college said Ms. Bides’s decision to use the materials in the piece came from “a lack of public sensitivity and a misunderstanding of its criminal significance.”