Kickstarter Campaign for the Auschwitz Jewish Center

Our Kickstarter Campaign for the Auschwitz Jewish Center's project to save the home of the last Jewish resident of Oswiecim (Auschwitz) is well underway.  We just received our 50th contribution and crossed the $4000 mark.  Please take a look at the project and give whatever you can to support it.

Annual Gathering of Remembrance

Photo: Melanie Einzig

Yesterday, we observed Yom Hashoah at the Annual Gathering of Remembrance, which is held each year at Temple Emanu-el in New York City. More than 2,000 people were in attendance, including Holocaust survivors and their families.   And Today, at the Museum, we have our day-long observance, which features Holocaust survivors in our galleries talking about artifacts that they gave us and which are on display in our Core Exhibition. 

Here are the remarks that I delivered yesterday:

The cycle of the Jewish year has its rhythm.   Sabbath days, like a metronome mark the measures of the weeks.   Holidays and festivals give a cadence to the year, motifs and melodies that bring meaning to our days. The cycle of a Jewish life has its rhythm as well, the high notes of simchas – births and weddings – the dark chords of death and the ritual of mourning. The cycle of our year has brought us again to this day and to this place to carry out our sacred task.

 

As I look out and see this magnificent space brimming with people -- two thousand of you -- I am reminded of the paradox that our gathering defines.  We have each made our way here today from far and wide, but we have come together essentially to be alone.  Today we confront the lonely task of remembering and mourning.  Strengthened by our numbers, we dig down in our solitude to find that place where we can be alone with our deepest thoughts. 

In that place, we remember and we mourn what we have lost as individuals and what we have lost as a community.  Although it may be possible to identify our personal  losses and the losses that befell our families and marred our communities, no one can possibly quantify the vast potential that was denied our people and robbed from the world.  We mourn a loss that grows in time as we consider generations that were never born, creativity that was never expressed, achievement that could never be realized.

In this place of solitude and community, we also honor those who survived and demonstrated the power of the human spirit to recover and to rebuild.  Having witnessed the worst in the human experience they found the best in themselves.  The presence here today of so many survivors, although sadly, fewer and fewer, and the presence of their children and their children’s children, and, yes, even their children’s children’s children, is a potent demonstration of the exponential power of survival.

And so we come together and gather alone, moved by our resolve – a resolve that like a stone, is formed by the pressure of memory and the weight of sorrow, a resolve that moves us each year to come to this place, to follow the cadence of the days and the course of the calendar.   Today, we will remember and we will honor and we will mourn.

And this year, among the many whom we mourn privately, as a community we recall the loss of two people who were so important to this gathering.  Vladka Meed, who along with her beloved husband, Ben, was a driving force behind the move to remember. Her own conduct in the Warsaw Ghetto, 70 years ago, was an inspirational example of courage and action.  And we remember Mayor Edward I. Koch, who did so much for this city and who, at this commemoration 31 years ago, conceived of the idea that became the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

 

Vladka Meed

Vladka Meed at the Museum in 2007 (photo by Melanie Einzig)

Vladka Meed, a powerful voice for Holocaust memory and education died on November 21. 

Her obituary in the New York Times recounts the fascinating details of her life. She and her late husband, Ben, were strong supporters of the Museum and entrusted us with the responsibility of organizing and running the annual Yom Hashoah event in New York City, which they founded neary fifty years ago.  Vladka was a courageous woman of remarkable intellect and dedication, and her passsing leaves a a great void.  I shall miss her.

Wallenberg

We marked the centennial of Raoul Wallenberg's birth in a program at the Museum this week. With our partners, the United NationsOutreach Programme and the Permanent Missions of Hungary and Sweden to the United Nations. Deputy Secretary of the United Nations Jan Eliasson (above) addressed the overflow audience, which included senior representatives of 33 nations.

The evening included a discussion with two Wallenberg experts, Professor Bengt Jangfeldt for Sweden, who has written the most recent biography of Wallenberg, and Kati Marton, who wrote her Wallenberg book three decades ago. It was a lively discussion which covered Wallenberg's heoric deeds, the open questions about his fate, and the potent legacy he left behind. 

  

Bengt Jangfeldt, KatiMarton, DGM

(Photos by Melanie Einzig)

Gitta Sereny

Photo: Don Honeyman

I learned recently of the death of Gitta Sereny, a great personality and a remarkable journalist and writer.  I first met Gitta Sereny in the mid-1980's, when she arrived at our office in the Justice Department with certain documents that, if genuine, would have described the use by US intelligence of the notorious war criminal, Odilio Globocnik.  

 It had long been thought that Globocnik had committed suicide at the end of the war to avoid internment and trial for his participation in the murder of Jews in his capacity as SS and Police Leader in Lublin and for his involvement in the liquidation of the Warsaw and Bialystok Ghettos.  The documents that Gitta presented to us related to the activity of the Army’s CIC and indicated that Globocnik had been recruited and used by the US in the postwar period.  Gitta had reason to question the authenticity of the documents, and we agreed to assist her in determining whether they were genuine because we knew that, if they turned out to be authentic (or if they were to be made public), we would be called on to investigate the circumstances that gave rise to them.

Without going into detail, we conducted, among other things, a forensic analysis of the documents, including a linguistic evaluation, done with the help of Prof. Murray Miron, who had consulted on the Son of Sam investigation.  At the same time, Gitta, in her inimical way, carried out creative and indefatigable research about Globocnik.  In the end, she was able to locate the British officer who arrested him and located a photograph of him after his death.  Knowing that the documents were forgeries, Gitta was spared embarrassment.  She went on to write up the story in The Guardian of the forgery and of her tracking down and confirming Globocnik’s fate.   

Gitta was grateful for our help, and, through the close contact we established during the Globocnik case, we became friends.  I tried to be of assistance to her over the years, especially when she was conducting research in the US concerning her own activities following the war, when she worked for UNRRA, in attempting to reunite children, who had been removed from their families, with their parents.

In 1994, Gitta wrote a cover story for The Independent on Sunday about the Berlin Document Center (BDC) and its transfer from US administration to the German government.  I was then the director of the BDC and experienced firsthand Gitta’s renowned skill as an interviewer and investigator.  She reported the story with the same kind of intensity that she devoted to her other efforts.  A focused and fearsome interviewer, she believed that she – and, it seemed, she alone -- could get at the truth.  Like a surgeon, she posed questions and follow-ups with precision -- cutting through layers of obscuring gristle to reach the heart of the matter.  She followed her deft questions with a piercing and searching look -- both a signal of kinship and a warning.  She employed this unrelenting and remarkably effective technique in all her work, including the classic book, Into that Darkness, in which she dissects the commandant of Treblinka, Franz Stangl, as well as in her biography of Albert Speer.

I was fortunate to have met Gitta Sereny and was richer for having known her.

Our Lady in Mystic

Early this week, we visited the Gerda III, our Danish Rescue boat, which is moored at Mystic Seaport.  A gift from the Danish Parliament, Gerda was a lighthouse tender that ferried Jews to Sweden during the rescue in 1943.  The conditions in New York Harbor (traffic, wake, etc.) make it impossible for us to have Gerda nearby as origniially planned.  We are grateful that she has such a comfortable home in Mystic.

Space Shuttle

Space Shuttle Enterprise Passes by the Museum (Photo: Frank Camporeale)

You never know what you will see outside our windows.... Yesterday, the space shuttle made its way up the Hudson River to its new home on board the USS Intrepid.