I love museums that take you back in time and The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City does just that, for it gives visitors a great sense of what the world was like during the 30s and 40s. Walking through their core exhibit I felt transported back to Europe during the Holocaust.
David Marwell
I’d visited the museum before and loved it, but when David Marwell, Director and CEO of the museum agreed to meet with my friend Stacey Fitzgerald, a documentary filmmaker working on a project about Ravensbruck and she asked me to join her I jumped at the chance to re-visit.
Garden of Stones
The first thing David showed us was the Garden of Stones, a living memorial garden, created by artist Andy Goldsworthy. It’s an incredibly moving, reflective space, in which enormous boulders are arranged, each bearing a living dwarf oak tree. As a living memorial, the garden is a tribute to the hardship, struggle, tenacity, and survival experienced by those who endured the Holocaust. I love the idea of strength coming from adversity and related to the cold stones giving life to the trees, since my novel Lilac Girls is centered on the idea that lilacs only bloom in the spring after the coldest winter.
It’s hard not to feel the weight of the Holocaust upon entering the Core Exhibition, housed in a six-sided building symbolic of the six points of the Star of David and the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. The exhibition quickly drew us in as we walked through Jewish life in the 20th and 21st centuries. Through a collection of 25,000 artifacts, documentary films and photographs, the Core Exhibition tells the story of the Holocaust from the point of view of those who experienced it.
Core Exhibitition
While we walked through the hall, several tours of schoolchildren were touring as well. Their questions were an education in themselves–often poignant, making it clear this is a place that does its job everyday, educating new generations about the horrors of the Holocaust.
Against the Odds exhibit
Next we visited an incredible exhibit focused on how hard it was to enter the U.S. as a Jew from Europe: Against the Odds: American Jews & the rescue of Europe’s Refugees 1933-1941. Using the actual letters, documents and real stories of families trying to escape Nazi persecution, it’s a moving, beautifully presented exhibit that takes you back to the 1930s and 40s, to show how incredibly difficult it was to gain entry into the US from Europe at the time.
With David Marwell and Stacey Fitzgerald at the museum’s new Auschwitz exhibit, A Town Known as Auschwitz.
If you’ve never been to the Museum of Jewish Heritage it’s well worth the trip. (If you want to see the Against the Odds exhibit, it closes February 15th.) It’s a wonderful place, one lucky to have David Marwell at the helm.
