(Jewish Group) NYC's Holocaust museum uses personal objects to tell stories of lives lived and lost
A young child’s diary, a favorite doll, a cookbook of family recipes, a report card, a Torah scroll smuggled to the United States and a silver spoon found among the rubble at a concentration camp.
All of these objects are on display in “The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do,” an expansive new permanent exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan that opened over the holiday weekend. The exhibit emphasizes the individual human stories and the Jewish lives lived before, during and after the Holocaust.
The 12,000-square-foot, two-story exhibit attempts to shed new light on Holocaust education by creating a compelling narrative of the Holocaust, antisemitism, Jewish resistance and perseverance. The exhibit weaves together the individual stories of 750 objects and artifacts, as well as first-person testimonies, photographs and text.
For Judy Baumel-Schwartz, the exhibit’s curator and Holocaust scholar at Bar-Ilan University, working on the exhibit “has been one of the high points of my professional career.
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