March 16



USA/MICHIGAN:

In Suburbs, Reminder of Horror


In Farmington Hills, on a busy street in suburban
Detroit, with a Starbucks and an Arby's restaurant as its
neighbors, a new museum of the Holocaust has begun to
receive visitors.

But even before the formal opening of privately financed
Holocaust Memorial Center of Michigan, tentatively set for
April 5, its architecture is telegraphing what lies inside.
The $14 million center, actually a group of three museums,
has been designed to evoke a concentration camp.

Its front walls are decorated with striped gray metal
siding, meant to bring to mind a prisoner's uniform. Above
its entrance soars a rectangular tower whose cupola
resembles a guardhouse. An oversize elevator shaft is meant
to be a crematorium stack. Wrought metal wiring, resembling
barbed wire, sprawls up the side of the building.

Walking through a courtyard, visitors unavoidably trample a
large Star of David, set into the brick. Inside they stand
beneath six skylights, which commemorate the six million
Jews killed by the Nazis.

Reaction in this upscale bedroom community, located in
Michigan's richest county, has been mixed, Mayor Vicki
Barnett said.

"Some people have called this beautiful in its own way,"
said the mayor, who helped negotiate the real estate
package that led to the museum being built on the site of a
demolished cineplex. "Some people have called it ugly. It's
meant to represent a horrible period in history, and to
suggest otherwise would be wrong."

While many of the 20 museums in the United States devoted
to the Holocaust have incorporated references to
concentration camps in their architecture - the United
States Holocaust Museum in Washington has a spire meant to
evoke a guard tower - the Michigan center goes further.

That is on purpose, said Rabbi Charles H. Rosenzveig, the
center's founder and director.

"This is not a theater," he said during a tour of the
center. "This is not an entertainment building. We want to
incite people to come here."

"What people have noticed is the uniforms," he added,
meaning the striped dcor. "What some people have not
noticed is the message." Rabbi Rosenzveig, 74, was born in
Poland, he said, spent World War II in hiding there and
came to the United States in 1947 to study at Yeshiva
University.

The new building replaces the center's original home, the
Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield, a few miles
away. There is little chance for residents to avoid the new
structure, built among strip malls, and separated by just a
bit of lawn from Orchard Lake Road, the city's main drag,
where nearly 50,000 people zoom by each day.

Although the center is not complete, tour groups have been
viewing it by appointment since the beginning of February.

It is scheduled to open to the public on April 5, but the
date has been pushed back several times, in part because
fund-raising has fallen far short of the $25 million that
Rabbi Rosenzveig had planned for the project when it was
envisioned in the late 1990's.

The old center focused solely on the Holocaust, but the new
one also has two additions, a Museum of European Jewish
Heritage and an International Institute of the Righteous,
which bracket the main exhibition on the Holocaust.

Visitors to the center, designed by Neumann/Smith &
Associates of Southfield, Mich., first see a timeline,
wrapped around a semicircular wall. It shows centuries of
Jewish history and compares it with other global events.
The goal is to depict anti-Semitism as a continual threat,
not just a 20th-century phenomenon, Rabbi Rosenzveig said.

The timeline is three-quarters finished before the
Holocaust is even mentioned, and then it takes up little
room. And it is not even touched upon in rooms that depict
Jewish life in Europe.

These exhibitions include murals of a 19th-century Jewish
wedding and central European village life. (There is also a
small theater with a lively film featuring Jewish
performers in the United States, like the actress Molly
Picon and the Marx Brothers.)

But soon visitors turn a corner and come face to face with
a soaring picture of Hitler, which is the beginning of a
descent into the Holocaust period. A series of ramps lead
past an exhibition evoking the burning of books by the
Nazis; past photographs and charts tracking the development
of concentration camps and the deportation of Jews from
various countries; and past a replica of the gates at
Auschwitz.

When it seems like the imagery cannot be any more
harrowing, visitors turn yet another corner. "Now we are
entering the Abyss," Rabbi Rosenzveig said. It is a narrow
ramp, wide enough for only one person to pass at a time,
leading to a dark room.

Seven screens hang from the ceiling, each showing 10
minutes of film, in color and black and white, taken by the
United States military when the concentration camps were
liberated in 1945. Some of the film has not been shown
publicly before, said Rabbi Rosenzveig.

Five decades later the images of corpses, body parts and
barely conscious, skeletal survivors still make a deep
impact.

The emotional barrage is softened slightly by a light at
the end of the corridor, providing the first view of an
eternal flame, commemorating Holocaust victims.

The exhibitions become brighter, too. Up another ramp and
around another corner the museum shifts to the post-World
War II era, depicting the founding of Israel, the reunion
of Jews made homeless by the war and the subsequent
apologies by the Vatican and various European governments.

From there starts the museum of the righteous, still being
installed, which focuses on efforts to fight injustice
since the Holocaust.

By presenting the Holocaust in context, the center can
chart a new path, said Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a historian
and author of "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary
Germans and Their Role in the Holocaust" (Knopf, 1996).

Until recently museum accounts of the Holocaust were told,
Mr. Goldhagen said, in a "passive voice," listing the
number of Jews who died and depicting atrocities, but
rarely giving a complete picture.

"If I were to be asked about what to do, I would say that
would be not just to tell a tale of horror," he said, "but
to ask the difficult questions and give the best answers we
can give."

(source: New York Times)