Dispatch From a Holocaust Museum

Every morning on my journey to work, I walk past two physical landmarks with deep historical and personal gravity. The first, approximately 15 minutes into my 20-minute commute, is the Statue of Liberty. Even in winter weather, the statue makes its presence known, poking through the fog of New York Harbor to remind me of my great-grandparents and their escape from eastern Europe a century ago.

The second landmark, 19 minutes into my 20-minute commute, is a German freight car like those that were used to transport Jews to Auschwitz, now resting menacingly on a segment of train tracks installed in Lower Manhattan. The train car serves as a daily reminder of the fate that would have awaited my great-grandparents had they not found refuge in the United States twenty years before the Holocaust.

Five minutes after passing the statue and one minute after the freight car, I open the front doors of my workplace: the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. The museum, which was commissioned by Mayor Ed Koch in 1981 and which opened its doors in Battery Park in 1997, serves as New York’s Holocaust museum. I’ve worked there since 2018, when I graduated from Georgetown University and moved to New York.

Working at a Holocaust museum for the last fourteen months has been a deeply enriching experience. It has also been an educational one, as I have had the privilege of interacting with Holocaust survivors, scholars, and museum professionals who have helped me understand some of the trends and challenges facing the field.

Here, I offer brief reflections on three of these trends: planning for a post-survivor era, updating our telling of history, and revisiting the concept of “never again.”

Planning for a Post-Survivor Era

Since my museum and other Holocaust museums were established three decades ago, survivors have been the bedrock of our work. They lead tours of our exhibitions, preside at memorial ceremonies, and lecture to visiting school groups about their stories of survival and loss.

But the last remaining survivors with real memories of the Holocaust are in their 80s and 90s. In the very near future, we will no longer be able to rely on them as educators and advocates. This reality has presented new challenges and inspired new innovations which will define the future of Holocaust education.

Just a few weeks ago, I watched an awestruck young man approach a 97-year-old survivor named William in our museum lobby, tell him “I’ve never met a Holocaust survivor before,” and ask for a photograph. William, aware of his own mortality, readily obliged and asked the young visitor to share the experience with his peers.

The USC Shoah Foundation is doing some of the most innovative work to preserve the voices of survivors like William after they are gone. Founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994, the Shoah Foundation maintains a digital archive of 55,000 video testimonies — the largest in the world. In recent years they launched “Dimensions in Testimony,” a special initiative that allows visitors to engage in virtual conversations with survivors, asking questions to and receiving responses from a digital display or hologram.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage hosted a successful pilot installation of “Dimensions in Testimony” last year, as well as “The Last Goodbye,” another Shoah Foundation initiative that uses virtual reality to provide digital tours of concentration camps.

There is no replacement for meeting a survivor firsthand and hearing his or her testimony. But as we plan for a post-survivor era, initiatives like “Dimensions in Testimony” and “The Last Goodbye” will be the closest and most effective alternatives.

Updating Our Telling of History

All museum exhibitions, to varying degrees, reflect the political and social moment in which they are curated. Most Holocaust museums, which curated and opened permanent exhibitions in the 1990s, therefore tell the story of the Holocaust as it was understood thirty years ago. Much has changed since then in our collective knowledge about the Holocaust and the way we teach it, so museums must adapt accordingly.

For example, the generally accepted definition of “Holocaust survivor” has expanded in recent years. It now includes Jews with more complex relationships to Nazi crimes, including Sephardic Jews who experienced the impacts of the Holocaust in North Africa, and Jews who were forced from Europe into Asia during the early years of the war. Their stories were not well told in the Holocaust exhibitions of the 1990s.

As another example, we now understand more than ever before about the “Holocaust by bullets,” the coordinated campaign in which mobile SS killing squads murdered Jews in small towns without sending them to camps. This new knowledge is due in part to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which opened up major archives and research opportunities that were previously inaccessible.

It is also due to the recent efforts of tenacious researchers like Father Patrick Desbois, who I wrote about in The Shofar in Summer 2016 after traveling to Ukraine. The stories uncovered by Father Desbois and others like him were not well told in the Holocaust exhibitions of the 1990s.

In addition to gaining historical knowledge about the Holocaust over the last few decades, we have also witnessed new connections between this history and current events. Just as Holocaust museums in 2019 and beyond must update their telling of history to reflect modern Holocaust scholarship, and must plan to use new technologies to tell the stories of survivors in a post-survivor era, they must also teach the Holocaust in a way that addresses rising antisemitism, xenophobia, and nationalism around the world.

Revisiting the Concept of “Never Again”

This raises the most existential, and I believe most important, of the three trends: revisiting whether or not our efforts to teach about the Holocaust are an effective means to achieving the goal of “never again.”

For thirty years, the philosophy underlying Holocaust museums, education programs, and oral history initiatives has been this: by teaching the next generations about the horrors of the Holocaust, we can build a more tolerant, peaceful world in which those horrors are less and less likely to occur again. Millions of young people have visited museums and participated in programs grounded in this approach.

Yet our world has not become more tolerant and peaceful. The F.B.I. reported last month that hate crimes in the United States are at a 16-year high, including a resurgence in antisemitic hate crimes. Authoritarian leaders are seizing power in countries across the globe. Minority groups including the Rohingya, Yazidi, and Uighur people are facing state violence and ethnic cleansing.

I did not seriously face this reality until October 27, 2018, when the Tree of Life Synagogue was attacked in Pittsburgh. Just two weeks after starting my job at a Holocaust museum, I found myself reading contemporary news reports with startling similarities to the stories I told at work — stories about Jews killed for being Jews. The Pittsburgh attack awakened a realization in me, as earlier attacks had awakened many others, that we could not take for granted the effectiveness of Holocaust education efforts in the 21st century.

This historical moment, more than any since the end of the Holocaust eighty years ago, requires reevaluating our efforts and coming up with new approaches. Our challenge in the years ahead will be engaging the people who most need Holocaust education — not those who most readily seek it out — and helping them meaningfully apply the lessons of the Holocaust to contemporary events.

I’m grateful to work at a Holocaust museum during such an interesting and important moment for the field.

This essay was originally published in the winter 2019 edition of the Wood River Jewish Community’s quarterly magazine, The Shofar.