Stefania Heilbrunn, of South Africa and Ester Wilhelm Tepper, of Beverly Hills, both were young girls when Hitler and the Nazis ruled over and occupied their town of Radomsko, Poland and now, decades later, the two women have reconnected with the publication of “Children of Dust and Heaven: A Diary from Nazi Occupation through the Holocaust,” available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle eBook.

Beverly Hills, CA, April 11, 2013 --(PR.com)-- After the end of World War II, as a young teen, author Stefania Heilbrunn, returned to her hometown to search for fellow survivors. A young boy ran up to her, thrust a diary into her hands and ran off. The diary was written by her schoolmate, Miriam, who had died during the war. Miriam’s diary, which is incorporated into this book, propelled the author to research and write this powerful collective memoir.

Ester Wilhelm Tepper reconnected by telephone with Stefania and instigated the new publication of this powerful book. Based on years of research, interviews and her own harrowing experiences, author Stefania Heilbrunn, gives a vivid account of how the Nazis occupied her hometown in Europe and ruthlessly, systematically captured, tormented and killed almost all 14,000 Jews, living in her town with a total population of 30,000.

Starting with Hitler's orders and the Nazi Occupation, the author details the travesties beginning with the over-crowding of the ghetto, the countless beatings and ruthless killings. She describes the heroic acts of those who fought back to survive, as the Nazis ordered mass deportations to the concentration camps, work camps and death camps, slaughtering thousands upon thousands. Heilbrunn describes the day to day banalities of evil, as well as the courageous acts of bravery and miracles that enabled survival to just a few hundred Jews of her town.

This new publication of the book, now in paperback and in eBook, contains dozens of photographs, including several photos that Ester Wilhelm Tepper recently provided, which her father, Zelig Wilhelm, an accomplished European portrait photographer, took during the Nazi Occupation. One particular photo is a photograph that the Nazis commanded Zelig to take and was intended to document the systematic Nazi killings of Jews. This is the first publication of this photo, a grueling image of a German soldier standing in front of several hanging dead Jewish men and it is included in this book to provide historic evidence of the Holocaust.

“Compelling details and dozens of historic photos make this book an enduring document of truth,” says Terry Helms of Remember Point. “Remember Point publishes this collective memoir, authored by Stefania Heilbrunn, to honor the millions who perished during the Holocaust and that their memories may bring forth peace and understanding throughout the world.”

All profits derived from Remember Point’s publication of this book will be donated to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

Article also available here

By Ryan Torok

As Holocaust survivor Robert Geminder led a walking tour in Pan Pacific Park on April 7, pre-arranged memory markers — labeled “ghettos,” “camps,” “resistance” and “rescue” — transformed an outdoor path into a historical timeline.

“The No. 1 reason I’m talking to you here is my luck,” he said.

Stopping at “camps,” Geminder, who was born in Poland, discussed how he and his family escaped from a train bound for Auschwitz, where death would have been all but a certainty.

“We knew what was behind those Auschwitz gates,” the 78-year-old said.

Organized by the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH), the walking tour was part of a day of activities that commemorated Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), which officially began on the night of April 7.

In addition to the walking tour, there were poetry readings and performances by dance company BodyTraffic and Cantor Estherleon Schwartz that drew attendees to an amphitheater at Pan Pacific, a public park adjacent to the museum. Afterward, a ceremony of commemoration featured a musical presentation by actor Theodore Bikel and a keynote lecture by University of California, Irvine, professor emerita Ruth Kluger, a Holocaust survivor. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa also made an appearance.

Geminder spoke of the relative good fortune he’d had during the Holocaust. When he was just a boy, he and his family were packed with other Jews into a graveyard in the Stanislawow Ghetto in Poland. He watched as Nazis gunned down thousands of Jews — but those remaining, including Geminder and his mother, grandmother and older brother, were told to go home as it had become dark and begun to snow.

Among those participating in the walking tour was the Taurus Squadron Cricket Club, a British military unit made up of soldiers ages 19-21. They were on a cultural visit in Los Angeles.

“I thought this would be an ideal opportunity where these guys could learn something that affected everyone…[and] learn about the good work [the British military] did with the U.S. in the 1940s,” said Sgt. Rohit Mohan, the group leader.

This year marked Yom HaShoah’s 60th anniversary. Since its 1953 inauguration by the Israeli government, Yom HaShoah has provided an opportunity for survivors like Geminder — a congregant of Ner Tamid in Palos Verdes who regularly speaks at LAMOTH and at schools, synagogues and churches — to give firsthand accounts of what happened during the Holocaust.

As survivors age and pass on, those telling the stories on this national memorial day will change.

“I worry about the responsibility of being a survivor’s child and how I will pass this on,” said Geminder’s daughter, Mindy, who joined her father’s walking group.

Beth Chayim Chadashim’s Rabbi Lisa Edwards, joined by other members of the synagogue, prepared a note to add to one of the walls of the Goldrich Family Foundation Children’s Memorial, which featured 1.2 million holes signifying each child who died during the Shoah.

Survivor Max Stodel, who attends Temple Akiba in Culver City and turns 90 on April 12, appeared to enjoy the physical activity and conversations that came with Yom HaShoah as he joked with the museum staff and security. Yet his upbeat disposition did not mean the pain of all that he had to endure — he was interred in nine camps during the war — isn’t still with him, his daughter, Betty Lazarus, said.

“I said to my father, ‘At least you have a day out today,’” Lazarus said. “And his response is, ‘At what cost?’ ”

Read this article online here

OAA’s 2013 best in design winners unveiled

PATRICIA WILLIAMS

staff writer

The Ontario Association of Architects (OAA) has honoured the best in architectural design in its 2013 awards program.

A total of 15 new projects built in the province and elsewhere have been recognized in the design excellence category.

Winners range from sustainable single-family houses to redevelopment of key cultural and civic destinations.

The awards will be presented May 10 during the association’s celebration of excellence gala at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

Recipients of design excellence awards are:

— Assuta Medical Centre, Tel Aviv, Israel: with Moore Architects Ltd. and M. Brestovisky Architects & Urban Design. Conceived as a “healing” village, the 500,000-square-foot project is envisioned as a model for sustainable healthcare facilities. The first phase was completed in 2009.

— Cedarvale ravine house, Toronto: Drew Mandel Architects. The 3,350-square-foot infill house sits on a midtown residential street, but opens to protected woodlands at the rear of the property. A glass-enclosed, single-storey space is at the rear.

— Centre for Green Cities, Evergreen Brickworks, Toronto: Diamond Schmitt Architects Inc. Designed to achieve LEED Platinum certification, the five-storey building is the centrepiece of a project that involved the adaptive reuse of a brownfield heritage site in Toronto’s Don Valley.

— Claire and Marc Bourgie Pavilion of Quebec and Canadian Art, Montreal: Provencer Roy + Associés Architectes. The $28.8 million project involved both creation of new museum space and restoration of a heritage church.

— Clear Lake cottage, Sequin Township: MacLennan Jaunkalns Miller Architects Ltd. The four-season cottage was designed to blend in with the rural character of the quiet lake community and provide a “clean and modern” environment that engages the landscape and captures a “cottage feel.”

— Division 11, Toronto: Stantec Architecture Ltd., architects; E.R.A. Architects Inc. (heritage consultant). The Toronto Police Service project integrates a historic school building with a two-storey, contemporary structure. Sustainable design features were incorporated in the project.

— House on the Bluffs, Toronto: Taylor Smyth Architects. Perched on a dramatic site in Scarborough, the light-filled residence was built on the foundations of a 1960s home. Reuse of the foundation and basement walls saved time and cost.

— Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, Los Angeles: Belzberg Architects. The 32,000-square-foot, subterranean building is LEED Gold certified. The architects took steps to limit the museum’s carbon footprint.

— Place des Festivals + Vitrines habitées Quartier des spectacles, Montreal: Daoust Lestage inc. architecture design urbain. Situated in a previously derelict area, the public space hosts festivals and urban entertainment.

— Regent Park Aquatic Centre Toronto: MacLennan Jaunkalns Miller Architects Ltd. Conceived as a park pavilion, the $14.8 million aquatic centre is a key civic amenity in the revitalization of the once marginalized neighbourhood.

— Rotman School of Management, Toronto: KPMB Architects. The 15,000-square-foot expansion is directly connected to the original Rotman building and integrates a Victorian-era residence.

— Ryerson Image Centre/School of Image Arts, Toronto: Diamond Schmitt Architects Inc. The project involved renovation and expansion of a 100,000-square-foot building. The building’s exterior has double-skin glass cladding that conceals a LED lighting system.

— Stone Residence, Toronto: Hagy Belzberg Architect. The 9,000-square-foot, single-family residence in north Toronto was designed to take advantage of the site’s natural features and also serve as a hub for a growing international family.

— The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) Campus, Waterloo: KPMB Architects. The non-partisan think-tank is housed on the site of the former Seagram distillery. The plan organizes two, three-storey interconnected buildings and the auditorium pavilion around a landscaped courtyard.

— University of British Columbia, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences/Centre for Drug Research and Development, Vancouver: Saucier + Perrotte Architectes & Hughes Condon Marler Architects. Located in the heart of the university campus, the $92 million project houses a mix of classrooms, teaching and research labs, lecture halls and academic offices. LEED Gold is targeted for the pharmacy building.

This year’s recipients of design excellence awards were selected from more than 170 submissions by a jury chaired by David Sisam, principal in Montgomery Sisam Architects.

Entries were judged on creativity, context, sustainability, good design/good business and legacy — the project’s contribution in establishing a new benchmark for architectural excellence.

Beverly Hills Courier

The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the oldest such museum in the country, will host a city-wide Holocaust Remembrance Day Commemoration with multiple events Sunday, April 7.

The museum, at 100 The Grove Dr., in Pan Pacific Park, across the street from CBS and The Grove, will be open from 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

The day’s schedule includes:

• 10 a.m. – Survivor speaker: Thomas Blatt

• 11:30 a.m. – Poetry reading by Tom Greening (amphitheater)

• Noon – Museum tour

• Noon – Traffic Dance Performance (amphitheater)

• 12:30 p.m. – Poetry reading by Hadasa Cytrynowicz (amphitheater)

• 1 p.m. – Survivor speaker: Renee Firestone

• 1 p.m. – Musical performance by Cantor Esther Leon Schwartz (amphitheater)

• 2 p.m. – Ceremony of Commemoration – Keynote speaker Ruth Kluger, professor emeritus of German, UC Irvine and a Holocaust survivor.

She is also the author of the bestseller Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered about surviving in multiple concentration camps.

There will also be a special musical performance by Theodore Bikel.

Dignitaries set to attend include the Israeli consul general and Jay Sanderson, Jewish Federation president.

All events are free and open to the public. Tickets are not required.

For more information, call 323-651-3704 or email info@lamoth.org.

Due to security issues, no backpacks or large bags are allowed.

By Ryan Torok

The names of 8,000 Italian Jewish victims of the Holocaust were read aloud on Jan. 25 as part of four area events in honor of Italy’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The names were split among four venues in L.A. County: the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH) in Pan Pacific Park, Milken Community High School in Bel Air, Bishop Conaty-Our Lady of Loretto High School in Harvard Heights and St. Bede the Venerable Catholic church in La Canada Flintridge.

“We vow never to forget the sanctity of their lives,” Rabbi Mark Diamond, director of the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) Los Angeles chapter, said of the victims. He read names at LAMOTH, where he was joined by Giuseppe Perrone, consul general of Italy in Los Angeles; Perla Karney, vice president of LAMOTH’s board of directors; and the Rev. Alexei Smith, director of ecumenical and interreligious affairs for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

In 2000, the Italian government declared Jan. 27 a day of remembrance, which honors the 8,000 Jewish Italians deported by the Germans to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps following the fall of Italy’s fascist government in 1943. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated Jan. 27 — the date in 1945 when Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau — as International Holocaust Remembrance Day to commemorate the more than 8 million victims of the Holocaust.

This was the second year that AJC and the Italian Consulate General in Los Angeles co-sponsored a remembrance ceremony.

One of the 8,000 Italian Jews was Dario Gabbai, 90, a Holocaust survivor and former member of the Sonderkommando, a team of prisoners forced to move and cremate the bodies of those killed in the gas chambers. Gabbai visited Milken and the LAMOTH to read names aloud.

Reading in the morning from the list at Milken, Gabbai paused when he came upon one he recognized. 

“I knew him,” he told the crowd, explaining how this friend had died in Auschwitz.

Interested in forming Jewish partnerships worldwide, students at Milken, one of the largest Jewish day schools in the country, organized the Italian remembrance ceremony at their school. It was an unfamiliar, albeit rewarding, ceremony for Milken 11th-grader Jenna Goldstein, who co-chaired the event with fellow student Shauna Shafai.

“Most of my life, I’ve been honoring everyone as a whole, so it was a different experience to focus on Italian Jews,” Goldstein said.

St. Bede’s participation arose because the school’s leader, the Rev. Antonio Cacciapuoti, has a “close relationship with the [Italian] consulate,” said Gosia Szymanska Weiss, assistant director for international relations at AJC-Los Angeles.

As for Bishop Conaty-Our Lady of Loretto’s participation, it was born from past collaborations  between the AJC and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which oversees Catholic high schools, among other institutions. Representatives of the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles and of AJC joined the school’s students in reading 2,000 names.

Two days later, the LAMOTH honored International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Tours included pieces on loan from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum of Poland, and survivors spoke in person.

Perrone, the consulate general, is one of dozens of diplomats who works with AJC on global Jewish advocacy. He said that the Holocaust is difficult to talk about, and so, in this case, “We decided to let the names do the talking.”

A version of this article appeared in print.

Please click here for online article

Did you miss Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Museum? Click here to watch a short video commemorating the events.

The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH), which moved into a new $20 million building in 2010, is seeking a new executive director. 

According to LAMOTH board chair E. Randol Schoenberg, the board decided at a meeting on Dec. 2 not to renew the contract of its current executive director, Mark Rothman. Schoenberg will serve as acting executive director until a new leader can be found. The change was announced in an e-mail sent to the museum’s supporters on Dec. 6. 

“The person who has the full package of what we’re looking for will be someone with a real educational and curatorial vision, and someone can really inspire people intellectually and inspire them to donate to the museum, because that’s what we need to run the museum,” Schoenberg said in an interview.

Rothman served nearly six years at the helm of LAMOTH, as the museum built and moved into its current building, an architecturally ambitious structure in Pan Pacific Park. 

Schoenberg, who has chaired the LAMOTH board since 2005 and was re-elected at the Dec. 2 meeting for another two-year term, was involved in Rothman’s hiring in 2007. 

“He was the exact right person to guide us through that crazy process of building a building,” Schoenberg said of Rothman, who will serve as a consultant to the museum until March 2013, when his contract ends.

Rothman, in an email to the Journal, wrote, "I want to thank the Board of Directors, the staff, our volunteers and the entire Museum community for the opportunity you entrusted to me. I value the many inspiring and unforgettable people I have met and worked with during my tenure at the Museum. It has been a privilege and an honor to serve you and the Museum’s essential mission."

http://www.jewishjournal.com/los_angeles/article/l.a._museum_of_the_holocaust_seeks_new_executive_director

I spent several days at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. It is the oldest museum of its kind in the United States. Free to the public, the museum houses a lot of information and artifacts as well as serving as a platform for survivors of the holocaust to tell their stories. In the 1990s, Steven Spielberg made a movie called Schindler’s List. Before then, for almost fifty years, holocaust survivors really did not talk all that much about their experiences during the war. Most were trying to make a new life in a new country, learn a new language, find work, and make meaning of what was left of their lives. The memories were just too painful. Steven Spielberg organized a worldwide search for survivors and managed to get about 52,000 personal stories of survival recorded for posterity. An impressive part of this LA Museum is the multiple television monitors called the Tree of Testimony that fill a room with the many interviews of the survivors from all over the world which are now shared with the public, a continuous storytelling event from the 52,000 involved in the the Spielberg project.

I wandered through the museum on my own the first day. Reading old Los Angeles newspapers that reported world events back in the day when the Nazis were planning and implementing their answer to the “the Jewish problem”. Artifacts like the following poster gripped my heart. After teaching elementary school for 28 years, this poster which was used in schools to help teachers differentiate the facial characteristics between Aryan and Jewish children left me stone cold.

Day two brought me back with the intentions of hearing a Holocaust survivor’s personal story. The museum offers presentations to groups several times a week. I arrived early, as I am prone to do, and immediately spotted an elderly gentleman sitting in the wings. I approached him and asked if he was the speaker of the day. Sol Berger, a 93-year-old holocaust survivor from Poland, stood up to greet me with a bright countenance and thus began a 40-minute private conversation between the two of us. To say that I was moved is an understatement. He spoke with such clarity and conviction. Sol has his own unique story. Each survivor does. He has been sharing his story with people for almost two decades. He lost his father and mother, brother and sisters to the holocaust. He and his brother Michael were eventually separated, both managing to survive the war. After the war, Sol and his new wife were sent to Italy and lived in a displacement camp until he got a job in London. From the beginning, he knew that he wanted to come to America. Finally able to get a visa for himself and his family, they immigrated to the United States, settling in Los Angeles. If you would like to read more about Sol Berger and his amazing story of survival during the German occupation of Poland, I have provided a link to an LA Times story published in 2009. Regardless of the horrid memories that Sol and his wife carry with them, they went on to find meaningful work, raise a family, and live a life of substance. All of their children are educated and are either attorneys, teachers, or professors. Sol went back to school, something he had always wanted to do, after his last child graduated from college. I received many words of hope and good will from my private talk with Sol and his presentation that followed.

Some of the youngest holocaust survivors are now in their 80s. Time will soon take the last of these courageous people from us. Their surviving stories will hopefully remain.

http://findingthegypsyinme.com/travel/los-angeles-museum-of-the-holocaust/

The Holocaust can feel like an abstract concept, something that happened to people from a distant land in an alternative universe. No museum or exhibit brings home the banality of evil and the overpowering enormity of what the Nazis wrought like the L.A. Museum of the Holocaust's engrossing video art piece, Tree of Testimony. Visitors toggle among the 70 screens splayed across a curved wall, each showing an endless loop of 52,000 survivor testimonies from USC Shoah Foundation Institute. Little old ladies in sweater sets calmly recount concentration camp horrors beside gnarled men with tears in their eyes. It feels like you're Skyping with the past. Sit down for 10 minutes and you'll stay at least an hour. 100 S. The Grove Drive, Fairfax District. (323) 651-3704, lamoth.org.

—Amanda Lewis

http://www.laweekly.com/bestof/2012/award/best-video-art-exhibit-1889799/

Time Out says

While Beverly Hills has the Museum of Tolerance, the Fairfax District is now home to the Museum of the Holocaust, which opened in Ovctober 2010. The subect matter is, naturally, dark, but the museum treats it in a sensitive manner, providing audio guides that lead visitors through a succession of rooms detailing the rise of Nazism through concentration camps, the Holocaust, and its aftermath. Guided tours and talks from survivors are also given on a regular basis, while temporary exhibitions round things out.

http://www.timeout.com/los-angeles/attractions/los-angeles-museum-of-the-holocaust

Lifestyle

September 12, 2012

Survivor: Regina Hirsch
By Jane Ulman


“Leave your possessions. We will bring them to you,” a Jewish commando greeted the trainload of Jews arriving at Auschwitz. He pointed to Regina Landowicz’s mother: “Too old.” And to her sister Lillie: “Too young.” Sally, another sister, took scissors from her rucksack and quickly trimmed their mother’s hair and lopped off Lillie’s braids as German soldiers shouted, “Raus, raus!” (Out, out!) On the platform, a German soldier tried to grab Lillie from their mother’s arms, but their mother clutched her tightly, even as he beat her. “Ma, ma,” Regina, Sally and another sister, Ruthie, screamed. A soldier whipped the girls, separating them from their mother and Lillie. “Where you’re going you don’t need a mother,” he told 16-year-old Regina.
 
Regina, Sally and Ruthie were processed and taken to Block 25, which housed 1,000 women. “We lay on the floor like animals,” Regina said. From the open door, they saw the entire sky glow red from fire and later learned their mother and Lillie had been gassed and cremated.
 
Regina was born on June 29, 1928, in Lodz, Poland, to Ajzyk and Esther Landowicz, the third-to-last child in an observant family of eight girls and one boy. Only Regina and three sisters survived the Holocaust.
 
Regina’s father had been a wealthy businessman. The family lived in a large apartment and spent summers in the country. Regina remembers that every Shabbat her father brought an oyrech — an impoverished guest — to dinner. In the early 1930s, Regina’s father lost his money and opened a small grocery store.

On Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, occupying Lodz seven days later. The Germans immediately cut off food supplies to the city’s approximately 230,000 Jews, instituted curfews and confiscated property. Jewish men were carted off to labor camps. In December, all Jews were ordered to wear yellow stars. Regina’s five older siblings fled to Warsaw and points east. (Of those five, only Judy, who escaped to Siberia, survived.)

“Everybody was scared,” Regina said. She and Ruthie often stood in line all night in the snow and cold for a loaf of bread. One time, in the early morning darkness, a German soldier approached Regina and yelled, “Jude, raus” (Jew, out). He beat her up. Ruthie later returned home with bread.

As rumors of a ghetto began circulating, Regina’s parents, with $50 from an American uncle, purchased a room from a Polish family. Regina and Ruthie dragged a sled carrying household items, including a wooden bathtub and their father’s Hebrew books, there, making several trips. By February 1940, all Jews were ordered into the ghetto.

On April 1, Regina, who had contracted typhoid, was taken to a small ghetto hospital. She awoke the next morning semi-conscious in a bathtub of ice. “You’re the luckiest kid in the world,” a woman told her.  The previous day the Gestapo had rounded up all the doctors, nurses and patients and shot them.

In spring 1940, the Jews began working in exchange for food. Regina wove shawls by hand on a loom. Later she made boots out of straw for the German soldiers. “My hands were full of pus from that work,” Regina said. Her last job was making wooden cribs. Regina stopped working toward the end of 1943, as deportations to Auschwitz increased.

One day, Regina and her family hid in the attic of a burned-out factory. German soldiers with dogs later searched the building but didn’t discover them.

Another time, in June 1944, their mother took Regina and Lillie (Sally and Ruthie were still working) to a field, where they hid in a tepee-shaped bundle of hay. They lay there all day, until Regina lost a boot and her mother decided to leave. German soldiers later machine-gunned everyone hiding there.

“Miracles. Unbelievable miracles. I myself don’t believe them,” Regina said.

For the next two months, Regina and her family spent their days hiding in the large Jewish cemetery and their nights in a nearby shack. One day they heard gunfire ring out for hours. The next day Regina, her three sisters and her mother were captured and shipped to Auschwitz. Regina never learned her father’s fate.

After two months in Auschwitz’s Block 25, 250 girls from the Lodz ghetto, including Regina, Sally and Ruthie, were transferred to A Lager. During the night, German soldiers burst in and took out 50 girls. Regina and her sisters lay huddled on a top bunk, hearing the others’ screams.

“If I live to be 100 years, I cannot describe Auschwitz. Unbelievable. Hell on earth,” she said.

From Auschwitz, the girls were taken to a munitions factory in Oederan, Saxony. Upon arrival, they were led into a dining room, where bowls of soup awaited them. “A spoon. They gave us a spoon,” Regina recalled. Subsequent meals were less lavish, but they had food, slept five to a bunk and were given hot water every week to wash up.

In the factory, Regina worked 12 hours a day drilling holes, one at a time, into German bullets. “I tried to make the hole on the side, but the foreman was measuring constantly,” she said.  

In late April 1945, the girls were sent to Theresienstadt. There, with “unbelievable hunger and not a drop of water,” Regina said, they lived outdoors.

On May 8, Soviet troops liberated the camp.

After several months, Regina and her sisters found themselves at a DP camp in Landsberg am Lech, Germany, where Regina studied design and pattern making through ORT. More than four years later, in 1949, Sally and Ruthie were each married and had immigrated to the United States. Regina followed, arriving in Los Angeles in August 1949.

In early 1950, Regina met Phillip Hirsch, a landsman from Lodz and a Bergen-Belsen survivor. They married on March 11, 1951. Their son, Mark, was born on Jan. 4, 1952, and daughter, Laurene, on Sept. 28, 1956. Phillip died on June 1, 2008.
 
Today, Regina, now 84, lives in Westwood. She enjoys spending time with her family, including her son, daughter, son-in-law, two grandsons and sisters Ruthie and Sally.

Regina began speaking out about the Holocaust in 1949, a time when “nobody wanted to listen,” she said. She was one of the first speakers at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust and continues to speak there every Thursday. She also talks to college students and the U.S. military.

“While we’re here, we have to talk, we have to teach. What else is there to do?” she said.

 A version of this article appeared in print.

http://www.jewishjournal.com/lifestyle/article/survivor_regina_hirsch

Survivor: Edith Frankie

By Jane Ulman

“Hey, you Jew. Open up the door.” It was 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning, just before Passover 1944, when two gendarmes in the village of Chiesd, Transylvania, banged on the door where 12-year-old Edith Izsak lived with her parents, three siblings and two young cousins. “Take all the food you can carry,” said the men, who just the previous evening had been guests of the Izsaks, enjoying their food, wine and classical music. They loaded the Izsaks and the village’s three other Jewish families into horse-drawn wagons.

A short drive later, they arrived at a building with dark, heavy doors on the outskirts of Szilágysomlyó, where more than 6,000 Jews from neighboring communities were crammed together into an open, muddy brickyard that served as a ghetto.

Born Edith Izsak on Dec. 6, 1931, to Ernest and Sara Izsak, Edith was the second of four children. Her father was a successful farmer who raised crops and livestock and also operated a winery. On Friday evenings, families from neighboring villages came to their home for Shabbat services.

“We had a very good life. We weren’t spoiled at all,” Edith said.

Hungary occupied Transylvania in 1940, but life continued smoothly for Edith’s family until March 19, 1944, when Germany invaded Hungary. The next day, Jews were ordered to wear yellow stars, and at Edith’s school, “all the dear friends who were playing with us were now hitting us and calling us ‘dirty Jew,’ ” she said.

On May 31, 1944, Edith and her family were marched to the train station and loaded onto a cattle car with 150 people and little ventilation. “People were praying, people were moaning. And that smell,” Edith recalled.

The next day, as soon as the train arrived at Auschwitz, Edith’s brother and father were sent to one side, while Edith, her mother, sisters and the two young cousins were sent to the other. “I never saw my father and brother again. I never said goodbye,” Edith said.

The women and children faced a second selection. Edith was first in line, holding her 2-year-old cousin’s hand. “There’s enough fat on you. You go over there,” an SS officer ordered, while her sister Eva was directed straight ahead with the young cousins. Edith’s mother grabbed the cousins’ hands and sent Eva after Edith.

After registration, an all-day ordeal with no water and no bathroom breaks, Edith, Eva and the other young women were herded into a big room where they were ordered to undress, shower with “disinfectant-smelling” water and have their body hair shorn. The German soldiers then paraded the pretty girls up and down the room. “You feel so humiliated. You feel you’re just dreaming.” Edith said. Afterward, they were issued gray dresses and work boots. 

They were taken to another room and seated in rows of five. Finally, after 36 hours of sitting, with only a sip of water and one trip to the latrine, they were marched out and again loaded onto cattle cars.

They were sent to a labor camp in Riga, Latvia. Edith, part of a group of 50 girls, was assigned to dig up tombstones in the Jewish cemetery, carry them to the main square and smash them with sledgehammers. Meanwhile, civilians threw moldy apples at them, shouting, “Dirty Jews, we are giving you food not fit for our pigs.”

Five days later the group was taken to a forest to dig out tree roots. “We were beaten because we weren’t digging fast enough,” Edith said. Then, in August 1944, they were marched to the Baltic Sea, put on a boat and taken to Stutthof Concentration Camp, near Gdansk, Poland.

There, 500 Transylvanian women, including Edith and Eva, were selected to travel by regular train to a small labor camp where they worked 12-hour days digging foxholes and building brick bunkers. Looking back, Edith believes they were recruited by someone like Oskar Schindler as they were given their own bunk beds, toothbrush, toothpaste and blanket. “He was very decent,” she said. 

One day, however, the girls returned from work to find their bunk beds replaced by slabs covered with one inch of straw for six people, and SS women in charge.

At the end of March 1945, with artillery planes flying overhead, the 500 girls were taken on a forced march. In early May, after stops in Bergen-Belsen and Ravensbruck, they arrived at Malchow, where they promptly fell asleep. The next morning they heard people shouting, “The gates are open. The SS are gone.” Edith was 13.

Edith and her sister, as well as 19 other girls and young women who knew each other from the Szilágysomlyó ghetto, decided to stick together. Afraid to go anywhere, and especially wary of the Russian soldiers, they remained for several months at a nearby camp that had formerly housed American POWs.

In September, before the High Holy Days, they took a transport to Budapest. Edith and Eva, the only survivors in their immediate family, then made their way to Chiesd, where some “good people,” Edith said, had saved family photographs and memorabilia.

Edith and her sister traveled to Szamosújvár, where their uncle, who had returned from Canada, helped them procure a visa and move to Paris. There they studied English and French at ORT while waiting to leave.

Finally, in spring 1947, Edith and Eva arrived in Port Hope, Canada, where their uncle operated a bakery. But wanting a larger city, they soon moved to Toronto.

In November 1950, Edith met George Frankie, a Hungarian labor camp survivor.  They married on March 25, 1951, and their son Richard Andrew Frankie was born March 9, 1956. In 1961 they moved to Los Angeles.

Edith worked as a hairdresser and hair salon manager until retiring after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. She became a volunteer and later a speaker at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Over the years, she has also talked to students at Burbank and Los Angeles public schools and through the organization Facing History Ourselves. A treadmill fall in May 2010, however, has curtailed her activities.

Today, Edith and George live in Studio City. She does aqua-aerobics three mornings a week, enjoys spending time with her son and daughter-in-law and serves on the board of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

Edith still occasionally speaks publicly, and she always tells students: “Remember one thing. Don’t ever hate anybody, because you are just hating yourself.”

A version of this article appeared in print.

http://www.jewishjournal.com/lifestyle/article/survivor_edith_frankie_20120829/

The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust hosted a moment of silence at the Munich Athlete Memorial in Pan Pacific Park. The ceremony took place next to a plaque memorializing victims of the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attack on Israeli athletes. The moment of silence took place at 3pm on Sunday, August 12th, 2012, at approximately the time when the closing ceremonies of the 2012 games in London hit their mid-point.

Participants included:

Councilman Eric Garcetti

Councilman Tom LaBonge

Dr. Bernd Fischer, German Consul General

Carolyn Ben Natan, Director of Public Affairs, Israel Consulate

David Frank, Board of Jewish National Fund

Here is a video from the event:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNYYGSnbJL0

Last week, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH), the city's only free museum dedicated exclusively to the history of the Holocaust, celebrated the grand opening of its new exhibit, "Tree of Testimiony: USC Shoah Foundation Institute Interviews."

The exhibit consists of 70 video screens displaying the more than 51,000 interviews maintained in the USC Shoah Foundation Institute's archives.

The video sculpture, supported in part by a grant from the Wilf Family Foundation, occupies an entire wall of the museum.  Screens of varying sizes display individual interviews.  Visitors can hear the interviews through the museum's award-winning audio-guide system, which is distributed free to guests.  It will take an entire year for all of the thousands of interviews to be played, emphasizing the enormity of the tragedy.

The video wall is the brain child of Museum Board President E. Randol Schoenberg, who conceived the installation after seeing similar exhibits at museums around the country.

"I realized that if we found a way to show visitors the thousands of interviews recorded and maintained by the institute; we'd create something extraordinary.  Not only would the sheer breadth of the archives and its exhibition portray the Holocaust's scope; we'd help visitors connect directly to survivors through their testimony and create a lasting monument to them as well," Schoenberg said.

Stand-alone computers in the Tepper Family room on the museum's exhibit floor and in the librarey will allow visitors to search for particular testimonies or areas of interest.

LAMOTH is at 100 S. The Grove Dr. For more information, call 323-651-3704 or visit www.lamoth.org.

• Moment of Silence

LAMOTH will hold a moment of silence in memory of the 11 Israeli athletes murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics at 3p.m., Sunday, Aug. 12, at approximately the time when the closing ceremonies of the 2012 games in London will hit their mid-point.

LAMOTH Executive Director Mark A. Rothman will lead the moment of silence at the Jewish National Fund plaque in Pan Pacific Park.  THe plaque is surrounded by a copse of trees planted in the victims' honor.

It is across the park from LAMOTH itself, and it lists the name of each of the Israeli athletes killed after Black September terrorists took them hostage in their dormitory rooms in the Munich Olympic village. 

"Our moment of silence will throw light on the shadow the International Olympic Committee cast on the London games" by not officially remembering the tragedy of 1972, said Rothman.

"Otherwise, the glory of gold medals-no matter how earnestly earned-cannot brighten that shadow."

CSULB holds training workshop on teaching the Holocaust

By Kelly Puente Staff Writerpresstelegram.com

Posted: 08/09/2012 06:32:27 PM PDT

August 10, 2012 4:20 AM GMTUpdated: 08/09/2012 09:17:52 PM PDT

LONG BEACH - Educating children about a sensitive subject like the Holocaust can be a difficult task for teachers, said high school history teacher Kerrin Conroy.

"You want to get the kids interested and teach it in a way that makes it real for them, but you don't always get the time to delve deep into these subjects," said Conroy, a 10th- and 11th-grade history teacher at St. Matthias High School in Downey.

On Thursday, Conroy was one of about two dozen teachers hoping to deepen their knowledge of the Holocaust in a special teacher workshop at Cal State Long Beach.

Holocaust education is a state standard that is usually taught in the 10th and 11th grades.

The annual workshop, now in its third year, was designed by Cal State Long Beach professor Jeff Blutinger to help K-12 teachers gain a better understanding of the Holocaust and improve the way they teach the Nazi genocide to students.

The workshop is a free, weeklong intensive-training course that features talks from Holocaust survivors, lectures and a visit to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Teachers receive a $100 stipend and up to two units of service credit.

Blutinger said the idea for the workshop came from local Holocaust survivor Gerda Seifer, who approached the CSULB Jewish Studies Program in 2009 with the initial donation.

Each year, the workshop features a different theme, such as "Children in the Holocaust," and "Art and the Holocaust."

This year's theme, "Human Responses to the Holocaust: Victims, Perpetrators, Bystanders and Deniers," focused on the experiences of those affected by the genocide. The workshop looked at not only the victims, but also the thoughts and feelings of the bystanders who watched as millions were marched off to death camps.

Blutinger, a history professor, noted that the majority of people in Europe neither helped nor hindered the Nazis.

"It's hard for me to understand the indifference," he said.

Conroy, the Downey teacher, said the workshop gave him a deeper understanding of the people whose lives were changed by the Holocaust. This school year, he plans give his Holocaust lessons a more personal touch by focusing on the victims and survivors.

"I think it will help students connect on a more personal level," he said.

kelly.puente@presstelegram.com, 562-714-2181, http://twitter.com/kellypuentept

http://www.presstelegram.com/breakingnews/ci_21279060/csulb-holds-training-workshop-teaching-holocaust

LAMOTH has been featured on the website www.digplanet.com as one of Los Angeles' must-see museums.

http://www.digplanet.com/wiki/List_of_museums_in_Los_Angeles

'Tree of Testimony’ showcases redemption, hope

by Rebekah Blume

A black lattice of metal piping spreads in front of a dark, curved wall holding a large cluster of television screens. About 20 people stand or sit transfixed beneath this Tree of Testimony, watching the faces of about 70 Holocaust survivors as they laugh, cry, gesticulate and often just sit solemnly while speaking to the camera.

“These people have … shown through their stories what it means to be human,” said Stephen Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, describing the videos. “These are stories about overcoming and living in spite of the evil that lives in the world.”

The Aug. 2 dedication of the “Tree of Testimony: USC Shoah Foundation Institute Survivor Interviews” at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH), also marks what organizers are calling the end of construction for the museum, which moved into its current facility in Pan Pacific Park in October 2010.

“Our final idea is that this is not only an informational and aesthetic experience, but also a memorial,” said E. Randol Schoenberg, the museum’s president, referring to its newest permanent exhibition.

The Tree of Testimony, a collaboration between LAMOTH and the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, was completed in April, just before Yom HaShoah, after about two years of planning, according to Mark Rothman, the museum’s executive director. Architect Hagy Belzberg, who designed the museum building, also created the $1-million Tree of Testimony. Funding for the project came primarily from the Wilf Family Foundation.

The museum, which is dedicated to using evidence of the Holocaust to educate the public, is organized into a series of rooms that roughly echo the chronology of the Shoah. The rooms contain exhibitions on Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust, through Kristallnacht, the concentration camps, and the response to the Holocaust and World War II. The Tree of Testimony now marks the end of the museum’s tour.

Visitors use headphones and an iPod Touch instead of ambient audio, which is intended to provide a more personalized experience. At the Tree of Testimony, visitors can listen to a particular interview by typing in a screen’s number.

Schoenberg said his inspirations for this project included the video art of Nam June Paik as well as exhibitions at other Holocaust museums.

“Many museums use survivors’ testimony for this [final] space, but one of the principles of this museum is showing the enormity of the Holocaust, and it is hard to show large numbers of things to people in a way that is intelligible,” Schoenberg said. “So instead of selecting one or two videos to represent it, we come up with a way of showing them … the entire universe of survivor videos.”

The 51,000 interviews, which were originally archived by the Shoah Foundation, are in 32 languages, but do not include English subtitles, and were recorded in 56 different countries. About half of the interviews are in English. It takes an entire year for all the interviews to be played on the 70 screens, and it would take 12 years for a single person to watch all the videos if they were played nonstop.

Many of the people attending the dedication ceremony had participated in the filming of the interviews as either survivors or helpers for the Shoah Foundation.

Survivor Jona Goldrich happened to see his own interview playing on one of the screens and felt compelled to speak.

Standing in front of the Tree, facing other survivors, their families and supporters, Goldrich reminded those present of the importance of facing the truth of who the Nazis were and what they did. The people who perpetrated such crimes against humanity, he said, were considered the most educated and sophisticated of their time.

“When I was 10, they said God would never let these people do the things they said they were going to do,” he said.

Goldrich said he sometimes still cannot believe that he ran away from the Nazis at the age of 14, and that all of his friends from school and his family were killed.

Dana Schwartz, a survivor who has worked extensively for both the Shoah Foundation and LAMOTH, told one of the stories she had heard from a survivor interview. The interviewee was a doctor who had hidden with his wife and two other couples in the narrow space between two walls. When asked by the interviewer whether he and the others had ever quarreled during their two years in such stressful conditions, the doctor said, “Only about millimeters.”

During the dedication ceremony, Schwartz said her “heart trembled” when listening to these stories, but she emphasized hope for the survivors and for the future generations who would visit the museum.

“They [the survivors] became scientists who changed the world, teachers, builders, writers and healers,” she told the audience. “Will you send people here? Will you tell people about this place?”

A version of this article appeared in print.

http://www.jewishjournal.com/los_angeles/article/tree_of_testimony_showcases_redemption_hope_20120808/

“Where are the dollars?” two plainclothes Gestapo officers demanded as they appeared without warning on both sides of Sol Berger. Sol denied any knowledge, even though the daughter of a local currency dealer was hovering nearby at the train station in Tarnow, Poland, holding the dollars he desperately needed to immigrate to Palestine. The officers led him to Gestapo headquarters where, in a small second-floor room, they interrogated him, repeatedly beating him with a rubber stick and boxing both ears simultaneously. Finally, after two hours, one said, “He’s had enough for today,” and they left the room. Bruised and barely able to move, Sol spied a small, iron-barred window in the corner. He managed to squeeze his thin body through an opening and slide down a gutter. He reached the ground and ran. It was spring 1940, and Sol was 20 years old.

Solomon Berger was born on Oct. 28, 1919, to Jacob and Rose Fabian Berger in Krosno, Poland. He was the eighth of nine children. His father’s tailor shop occupied one room in the house, the same room where the observant family celebrated Shabbat dinner on Friday nights.

On Sept. 1, 1939, Sol was awakened at 5 a.m. as the German air force dropped bombs on Krosno’s airport and factories, causing the entire city to erupt in flames. Sol and his younger brother, Michael, were drafted into the Polish army, returning home 10 days later.

In early 1940, the Gestapo required all Jews to wear white armbands with blue stars and all young men to perform slave labor. It was during this time that Sol, who had participated in Zionist activities, hoped to flee to Palestine.

After his escape in Tarnow, Sol hid with a Jewish family there for three weeks, disguising himself by wearing a wig and women’s clothes.

Back in Krosno, he was recaptured by the Gestapo and jailed with 10 political prisoners, including a Roman Catholic priest who said Mass daily and tutored Sol on Christianity, later enabling him to pass as a non-Jewish Pole. After six months, he was released.

During this time, Sol’s father worked as a tailor for the Germans, and the family was allowed to remain in their house. This ended on Aug. 9, 1942, when all Jews were ordered to report the next day to register for new permits.

That morning, before 9 a.m., Sol, his parents, three brothers, and one married sister and her family huddled together in the old marketplace. Trucks surrounded the area, along with Gestapo, SS and police. A selection began. Sol’s father was ordered to board one of the trucks, but first he put his arms around his four sons and said, “Boys, try to survive any way you can.” The trucks pulled away, accompanied by vehicles with machine guns mounted atop.

Two hours later, the trucks returned empty. (It wasn’t until 1978 that Sol discovered that the 500 elderly Jews had been executed in a nearby forest.) This time, the Nazis selected 600 young people, including Sol and his three brothers, for slave labor. They were taken to the ghetto and crammed 20 to a room. “We had to sleep sitting up,” Sol said.

Meanwhile, after standing all day in the hot sun with no food or water, the 1,400 Jews remaining in the marketplace — including Sol’s mother, sister, sister’s husband and their two children — were loaded into cattle cars and, Sol later learned, transported to Belzec, where they were all murdered.

The next morning, Sol and his brothers were assigned to work in the tailor shop. Two weeks later, his brothers Moses and Michael were sent to work as tailors at a Ukrainian SS training camp.

On Dec. 3, 1942, marching back to the ghetto after work, Sol and his brother Joshua saw Gestapo surrounding the area. They decided to split up, escape and meet in Czortkow, where Tadeusz Duchowski, the husband of a Polish family friend, supervised a construction crew.

That night, Sol slipped out through a secret passageway. He made his way to the house of Maria Duchowski, Tadeusz’s wife, who hid him for three days. Then, traveling as Jan Jerzowski, he took the train to Czortkow. Joshua never arrived.

In Czortkow, Tadeusz registered Sol as a Polish worker and put him to work building a bridge over the River Dniester. After three months, the project was completed.

Sol and about 100 Polish workers then escaped to the forest, joining the partisans and blowing up railroad tracks and highways. The group kept moving, sleeping in caves at night. “That was the hardest time of my life, surviving for 14 months,” Sol said. He had to bathe in private to avoid being recognized as a Jew, listen to partisans’ anti-Semitic insults and drink a lot of “stinking vodka.”

In March 1944, after the Russians moved into Poland, the partisans were inducted into the Soviet army. Sol, who became Ivan Marianowicz Jerzowski, secured a job as a translator in the interrogation department, avoiding fighting in the front lines.

In April 1945, Sol took a leave from the Soviet army. In Krakow, he met Gusta Friedman, who had survived disguised as a Christian, and together they decided to escape from Poland.

Sol and Gusta traveled to Cluj, Romania, where they were married on May 18, 1945. They then went to Santa Maria di Bagni (later referred to as Santa Maria al Bagno), a DP camp in Southern Italy, where Sol contacted his three surviving sisters, who were living in the United States. He also learned his brother Michael had survived Auschwitz.

But Sol and Gusta remained another three years in the DP camp, where Sol worked as an ORT instructor and where their son Jack was born on Aug. 24, 1946. They then lived in London for two years.

The family finally arrived in Los Angeles in early July 1950, and their daughter, Marlene, was born on July 21, 1951. Sol worked as a machine operator in a clothing factory, as a liquor store co-owner with his brother Michael and as a Realtor in Beverly Hills, retiring in 1992.

Sol has been married to Gusta — now Gertrude — for 67 years. They have four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Sol began telling his story publicly in 1992, after promising his brother to do so when Michael was dying of lung cancer. For the last 20 years, Sol has been speaking three times a week at The Museum of Tolerance and the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust as well as to student, military and police groups.

“I realized I must tell my story, as much as it hurts,” Sol said.

A version of this article appeared in print.

 

http://www.jewishjournal.com/lifestyle/article/survivor_sol_berger_20120801/

MUSEUM TO HOST MOMENT OF SILENCE AT

MUNICH ATHLETE MEMORIAL IN PAN PACIFIC PARK

• Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust to host Moment of Silence at 3:00 p.m. on Sunday, August 12 – mid-point of 2012 London Olympics closing ceremonies
• Mayor Villaraigosa, entire city council and Board of supervisors, state and Federal officials invited
• Ceremony to take place at plaque memorializing victims of 1972 Munich Olympics  terrorist attack on Israeli athletes in Pan Pacific Park (near exercise equipment)
• Jewish National Fund placed the plaque amongst a copse of 11 trees in 1984, just prior to the start of the Los Angeles Olympic games

LOS ANGELES, CA – August 3, 2012 – Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH) announced today it invited city, state and Federal elected officials and administrators and the general public to participate in a moment of silence in memory of the 11 Israeli athletes murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The moment of silence will take place at 3:00 p.m. on Sunday, August 12, at approximately the time when the closing ceremonies of the 2012 games in London will hit their mid-point.

LAMOTH Executive Director Mark A. Rothman will lead the moment of silence at the Jewish National Fund plaque in Pan Pacific Park.  The plaque is surrounded by a copse of trees planted in the victims’ honor. It is across the park from the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust itself, and it lists the name of each of the Israeli athletes killed after Black September terrorists took them hostage in their dormitory rooms in the Munich Olympic village.

“Our moment of silence will throw light on the shadow the International Olympic Committee cast on the London games” by not officially remembering the tragedy of 1972, according to Mark Rothman, Executive Director of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. “Otherwise, the glory of gold medals – no matter how earnestly earned – can brighten that shadow.”

LAMOTH invited the Mayor, the city council members, our Supervisors, our state and Federal representatives, as well as key administrators and the general public, to attend the impromptu event.

In 1984 the Jewish National Fund installed the plaque in Pan Pacific Park on June 24, 1984, just before the start of the Los Angeles Olympic games. Former member of the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors Edmund D. Edelman participated in the dedication ceremony.

About Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

Holocaust survivors founded the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in the early 1960s as a permanent repository for their personal artifacts from the Holocaust and the world the Nazis destroyed.   Today the Museum hosts docent-led school tours, survivor lectures, exhibitions on the Holocaust, and numerous special events. Museum admission is always free.  Visit the Museum online at www.lamoth.org on the Web.

The Gregg family has visited the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust twice, most recently to "...hear a lecture on the proliferation of memorials to the Holocaust being dedicated in Germany." 

http://familygregg.blogspot.com/2012/08/los-angeles-museum-of-holocaust.html

Castilenti, a remote Italian mountain village, will be pulling out all the stops to welcome Gertrude (Gerti) Goetz and confer an honorary citizenship on the Los Angeles resident on Saturday evening, July 28.

The first time Gerti saw Castilenti was back in 1940. She was 9 years old and had fled her native Vienna with her parents after Hitler’s takeover of Austria.

Although Italy was allied with Germany, the villagers, who were barely eking out an existence and had never before seen a Jew, received the refugees with warmth and kindness.

Castilenti, in the east-central Abruzzo region of Italy, had a mayor, but the real power rested with the fascist secretary, Luigi Savini. The man, whom Goetz respectfully refers to as Don Luigi, was instrumental in saving the family by warning it of an upcoming SS roundup of Jews and deportation to a concentration camp.

Twelve years ago, Goetz wrote a book, “Memory of Kindness: Growing Up in War Torn Europe.” It started out on a familiar note, with her father, a World War I veteran, and mother, both solid Austrian citizens, suddenly uprooted and stateless after German troops marched in in 1938.

But unlike most autobiographies of the Holocaust years, the author also celebrates the human decency and moral courage of the people of Castilenti.

So, on July 28, the mayor, the president of the cultural association, Holocaust scholars, regional dignitaries, a good part of the 1,600 inhabitants and the national media will gather in the Piazza Umberto I, the central square, “to transmit our history and remembrances from the old to the new generations,” in the words of Gianni Cilli, the event organizer.

The people of Castilenti were not the only Italians to display kindness and courage during the war, and Jews were not the only beneficiaries. Historian Antonio Bini, who will speak during the celebration, noted “There were many people who paid with their lives for the help extended Jews and Allied prisoners during those terrible years.”

Another speaker will be Giorgio Savini, the son of the now-deceased fascist secretary, whom Goetz credits with saving the family’s lives.

Gerti and her husband, Dr. Sam Goetz, will present to the mayor a plaque from the Pacific Southwest Region of the Anti-Defamation League as well as a letter from the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, expressing the gratitude of American Jews for the villagers’ fortitude during the war.

The Goetz couple have petitioned Yad Vashem to add the name of the elder Savini to the ranks of the Righteous Gentiles who risked, or paid with, their lives to aid Jews during the Holocaust.

Earlier, Gerti had asked that the entire village be so honored, but she was told that Yad Vashem could recognize only individuals, not entire communities.

“Memory of Kindness,” recently published in an Italian edition, is one of a million stories of the Holocaust years, but with a difference.

It is told from the emotional perspective of a bright and intelligent girl, two years younger than Anne Frank. Gerti was 9 when the family, then penniless, fled Vienna in 1939, and 13 when British forces liberated the family in 1944.

In one of the many oddities of the era, in mid-1939 the fascist government of Benito Mussolini allowed some 4,000 German and Austrian Jews to enter Italy — though only for a six-month stay en route, supposedly, to another country. Fortunately, the time limit was never enforced.

Gerti and her parents first settled in Milan, where the local Jewish community provided one room for the family, and a meal each day. As tough as times were, they got worse when Italy entered the war in June 1940, on the side of Axis partner Germany.

Gerti’s father, Alfred Kopfstein, who had been held in the Dachau concentration camp under the Nazis, now found himself in an Italian prison as a Jewish alien.

In early 1942, Gerti and her mother were sent for wartime internment to Castilenti, later joined by the father, under a strict set of rules: No family member was allowed to leave the village, to seek work or to attend school, and they had to report each day to the fascist secretary, Don Savini.

Unlike the typical Nazi bureaucrat, Savini interpreted the rules quite leniently. Mother and daughter were allowed to roam the surrounding countryside to pick berries and beg for slices of bread from tenant farmers.

Best of all from Gerti’s view, she was allowed to attend school, where she learned to speak Italian with the distinctive local dialect. She became fast friends with her classmates, who nevertheless wondered, without animosity, why her people had killed Christ.

Life was very difficult for the family, but still bearable. That changed when Italy signed an armistice with the Allies and German troops immediately occupied northern and central Italy, while American and British invasion forces were slowly moving up from the south.

Savini now allowed the family to leave the village for a nearby farm, but a few weeks later he called in Gerti’s parents with ominous news.

He had received orders from the region’s SS commander to round up all Jews, including the Kopfstein family, for “relocation” to Poland in three days. At the risk of his career, and probably his life, Savini gave the family a three-day head start to find refuge.

The family hastily packed the two suitcases containing all their possessions, disappeared into the surrounding forest and found shelter with an impoverished peasant, who put them up in a former pigpen.

There the family lived for nine months, until British troops pushed the Germans out of the Abruzzo region. Finally free, the family moved on to the first of three displaced persons camps in southern Italy, where they were to spend the next five years.

One camp, in Santa Maria, came with a beach bordering the Mediterranean. There one day in the summer of 1945, the 13-year-old Gerti, wearing her very first swimsuit, met a fellow camp inmate, Sam Goetz.

He was born near Krakow in Poland and had just turned 17 after surviving three years in Mauthausen and other concentration camps. The two became friends. Then, in early 1949, Gerti and her mother finally received the long-awaited entry permit for the United States and settled in Los Angeles.

Four months later, Sam was also admitted to the United States, staying with relatives in New York. But he could not forget the girl from the displaced persons camp and splurged $55 for a Greyhound bus ticket to Los Angeles.

Sam and Gerti married in 1950, and despite struggles, both went on to earn doctorate degrees — he in ophthalmology and she in Germanic languages and library science.

Gerti, now 80, worked for many years as a librarian, including at the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at USC, and Sam still sees patients in his office. He has also become a leading figure in the Jewish and survivor communities and was instrumental in establishing the 1939 Club Chair in Holocaust Studies at UCLA. The couple has two children and nine grandchildren.

In 1976, Sam and Gerti Goetz traveled to Castilenti to thank Savini, the former fascist secretary, in person for his wartime help. They arrived to find that he had died five days earlier, and his death notice was plastered across the village market place.

Now few are left in Castilenti to remember the little Jewish refugee girl, but her story — and the story of a village that retained its humanity in the midst of hatred, persecution and death — will be passed on to another generation.

A version of this article appeared in print.

http://www.jewishjournal.com/world/article/how_one_italian_village_helped_raise_a_child_20120719/

Museum Vistior,  & Blogger Infinity-x-Infinity uses Instagram, a photography enhancement application, to share their take on LAMOTH. 

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/holocaust?before=1340675084

• LAMOTH invites “Ted” director Seth MacFarlane for Private Tour 
• MacFarlane quoted in “New York Times” interview, saying making a Holocaust drama would alienate his audience
• Museum asks MacFarlane to see real Holocaust drama
• MacFarlane created “Family Guy,” “American Dad” and “The Cleveland Show”
• Museum admission always free to the public
• Only museum in Los Angeles dedicated exclusively to the Holocaust

LOS ANGELES, CA – June 20, 2012 – LAMOTH Executive Director Mark Rothman today invited “Ted” director, writer and actor Seth MacFarlane for a private tour of the Museum’s exhibits chronicling the events comprising the Holocaust, its precursors and its aftermath.

Rothman issued this special invitation in response to MacFarlane’s comments in a New York Times interview published today promoting “Ted,” which opens June 29. The Times quoted MacFarlane as saying, “You want to do something that’s fresh, and at the same time, you don’t want to completely alienate your audience by doing a Holocaust drama.”

In his letter of invitation, Rothman wrote, “I am not writing to say I am offended by the reference. It adequately made your point. I am writing to invite you to the Museum, where you can engage with the actual, tragic drama of the Holocaust. The Museum was founded by survivors over 50 years ago as a way to commemorate their lost loved ones and to educate visitors about the difficult years between 1933 and 1945.”

During a visit to the Museum, MacFarlane would view the Museum’s award-winning exhibits detailing the history of the Holocaust chronologically. Award-winning iPod touches allow visitors to listen to over 27 hours of audio material highlighting specific exhibits. In the interactive and also award-winning World That Was table visitors view and discover the stories behind thousands of photographs of Holocaust victims, taken before World War II, documenting the richness of their lives. Individual touch screen computers located further on in the Museum communicate the range and severity of 18 concentration camps.

Also on permanent exhibit is a preview of Tree of Testimony: The USC Shoah Foundation Institute Interview Wall, at LAMOTH.  The exhibit consists of 70 video screens displaying to Museum visitors the more than 52,000 interviews maintained in the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s archives.  This exhibit’s grand opening will take place on August 2, 2012.

About LAMOTH

Holocaust survivors founded the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in the early 1960s as a permanent repository for their personal artifacts from the Holocaust and the world the Nazis destroyed.   Today the Museum hosts docent-led school tours, survivor lectures, exhibitions on the Holocaust, and numerous special events. Museum admission is always free.  Visit us online at www.lamoth.org on the Web.

June 20, 2012

Mr. Seth MacFarlane

c/o Joy Fehily

Prime

9696 Culver Blvd., Suite 102

Culver City, CA 90232

Dear Mr. MacFarlane,

Congratulations on the imminent opening of Ted as well as the tremendous success of your three television shows.

It’s obvious that in support of your movie’s opening you’ve spent a lot of time with the press. This weekend I finished reading your profile in The New Yorker, and this morning I read your interview in The New York Times.

Not surprisingly, as the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, your reference in the Times about producing a Holocaust drama hit me, hard. (If this were a Family Guy episode, cut to me, sitting at my desk, as I am struck in the head with a rolled up copy of the newspaper. Close up on the newspaper and we see it’s rolled around a steel pipe.)

I am not writing to say I am offended by the reference. It adequately made your point.

I am writing to invite you to the Museum, where you can engage with the actual, tragic drama of the Holocaust. The Museum was founded by survivors over 50 years ago as a way to commemorate their lost loved ones and to educate visitors about the difficult years between 1933 and 1945. I would be more than happy to provide you a private tour, arranged at a mutually convenient time. Please be in touch with Jodi Shapiro at (323) 456-5077, who can schedule something.

Congratulations again, and best of luck with the opening.

Yours sincerely,

Mark Rothman

Executive Director

When Todd Samuel Presner was “drilling down” through the history of Los Angeles, he noticed something unusual in a 1939 map of the city’s eastern part.

In contrast to the surrounding areas, the entire Boyle Heights neighborhood was colored in red.

To real estate agents and mortgage lenders, the “redlined” area was a clear signal that this was no place for upstanding citizens to purchase a home or get an easy loan.

The warning signal came from the Home Owners’ Loan Corp., a federal agency established as a New Deal benefit and charged with assessing real estate values and rescuing imperiled mortgages.

It was the agency’s opinion that Boyle Heights was filled with “subversive racial elements” — meaning Eastern European Jews, Mexicans, Japanese, Greeks, Italians and Slavs — and, therefore, hardly a fit environment in which to raise a family.

The Boyle Heights project is part of a five-year study, “Mapping Jewish Los Angeles,” which combines old-fashioned archival research with advanced digital techniques.

Presner, the project head and the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, labels the construct alternatively as digital archaeology, information navigation, hypermedia and time-space documentation.

“We can now truly travel back in history through four-dimensional mapping techniques, which add “time” to the three dimensions of space,” he said during an interview in his small campus office, crammed with books and computer equipment.

Presner, 38, is a self-described “techie-humanist,” who, besides directing the center, is professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature, and also chairs UCLA’s Digital Humanities Program.

Working with teams of scholars and students, he has polished his techniques in the Hypermedia Berlin project, which dug into the city’s 800-year history and its interaction between Germans and Jews.

As in the Berlin study, the “Mapping Jewish Los Angeles” project, which started last fall, begins with a thorough research of available documents, photos, oral histories, archives, architectural drawings and maps of the city.

Akin to a stratified archeological grid, layers of maps from different time periods are superimposed on one another, allowing viewers to “drill down” and track changes in structures, roads and landmarks at a specific site.

In the Boyle Heights study, for example, the project team is using five maps, starting in 1884, one of the earliest years in which the name first appeared on a map as a distinct community.

The next map is dated 1939 and includes the distinctive redlined coloring, followed by 1946 (before freeways) and 1986 (after freeways), and, finally, present-day Boyle Heights, as viewed through satellite imaging.

When the mapping is complete, “We will be able to mix and match the past and the present by superimposing, for example, the original Canter’s Deli on Brooklyn Avenue (now Cesar Chavez Avenue) in Boyle Heights on the current site and compare it to the one now on Fairfax Avenue,” Presner said.

In future months, the project team will travel back to 1850, marking the arrival of Jacob Frankfort, a tailor and the first known Jew to settle in the rough frontier town, who was soon joined by seven other Jewish bachelors, six of them from Germany.

Subsequent explorations will focus on the lives and habitats of Jewish residents in the Fairfax, Pico-Robertson and Westwood areas.

A full-scale exhibition on “Mapping Jewish L.A.” is scheduled for May 2013 at the Autry National Center of the American West.

Playing key roles in the mapping project are Mary Enid Pinkerson, community affairs coordinator for the UCLA Jewish Studies Center; Kahn Research Fellow Karen Wilson, who is also the guest curator for the Autry exhibit; and David Wu, program and digital projects coordinator.

Further down the road, Presner hopes to expand his hypercity models to New York, Chicago and San Francisco, and probably to Jaffa and Tel Aviv. Jerusalem, with its almost infinite layers of history, might represent the ultimate drilling-down challenge.

Funds from the estate of Sady and Ludwig Kahn, who came as penniless Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and made good in Los Angeles, provided the startup moneys for the mapping project and earlier endowed the directorship of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies.

Most recently, Presner and fellow researchers set their sights on catching history in the making by collecting Twitter feeds transmitted during the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Libya, and by Japanese citizens during the devastating tsunami in March 2011.

Egyptians sent 400,000 tweets during the uprising, of which nearly 10,000 came during the hour in which President Hosni Mubarak announced his resignation. The archive of tweets and more information about the “Mapping Jewish L.A.” project can be found online.

The UCLA Center for Jewish Studies was launched in 1994, with professor Arnold Band as the founding director, and has grown steadily under succeeding directors David N. Myers, Kenneth Reinhard and now Presner.

“One of our key goals is to apply Jewish studies to the important questions of the day. We seek to make community engagement and service, linked to a sense of social justice, defining elements of the center,” Presner said.

Currently, the center offers about 60 undergraduate and graduate Jewish Studies courses, with 1,875 students enrolled during the 2010-11 academic year.

Presner’s winter-quarter course “Between Memory and History: Interviewing Holocaust Survivors in the Digital Age” is another of the program’s innovative projects. For it, some 20 undergraduate students of varying ethnic backgrounds meet and interview survivors, then they create audio tours and digital maps of their life journeys for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

Students Patrick Tran and Andy Trang teamed up with survivors Richard and Engelina Billauer to create digital cultural maps pinpointing the major stations along each of the Billauers’ paths.

Richard was taken from his native Warsaw to a forced labor camp in Siberia, while Engelina started in Berlin and was sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

After the war, the two met in a displaced persons camp in northern Germany, then immigrated to Los Angeles.

The course relies on close cooperation with UCLA Hillel’s long-standing “Bearing Witness” initiative, as well as with Jewish Family Service and The 1939 Club.

One of the center’s most popular courses, “The Holocaust in Film and Literature,” is taught by Presner and has an enrollment of 351 undergraduates.

Presner estimates that more than half of the students taking the class are not Jewish, but, he believes, want to learn more about the Holocaust as a universal message addressing concepts of human rights and the struggles of minority groups.

Other courses focus on language and literature studies in Hebrew, Yiddish and German; history of Judaism; comparative and interfaith approaches to Jewish studies; Jews and cinema; and Italian Jewish history.

For the campus and general communities, the center each year organizes some 70 lectures, conferences and symposia with noted American and international scholars.

The archive of tweets can be accessed online at: http://egypt.hypercities.com. More information about the “Mapping Jewish L.A.” project can be found at: http://cjs.ucla.edu.

A version of this article appeared in print.

Source: Jewish Journal (http://s.tt/1ffPE)

LOS ANGELES—The Getty Foundation is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its heralded Multicultural Undergraduate Internship program this summer as it welcomes the 115 new interns of 2012.

Launched in the wake of Los Angeles’ civil unrest in 1992, the Multicultural Undergraduate Internship program seeks to increase diversity within the staffs of museums and visual arts organizations by offering paid internships to outstanding students of diverse backgrounds who either live or attend college in Los Angeles County. Over the past 20 years, the Getty has provided over 2,700 internships to 150 local arts organizations.

“Our intention in creating the internship program was to introduce students from under-represented communities to potential careers in the visual arts,” said Deborah Marrow, director of the Getty Foundation. “Two decades into this effort a number of program alumni have assumed leadership positions in museums and other cultural organizations, and in fact some are now mentoring the next generation of interns.”

“My summer at Visual Communications in 1993 as part of the first Getty intern class provided pivotal moments for me and my career,” said Leslie Ito, who subsequently rose to the level of executive director at her host organization before moving on to her present role as program officer in the arts at the California Community Foundation. “I look back on that experience and remember to always encourage the next generation of leaders.”

Another alumnus is Edgar Garcia, who served as an intern for the Los Angeles Conservancy in 1999 and now works as a preservation planner in the City of Los Angeles’ Office of Historic Resources where he supervises interns.

"Participation in the Getty's program has been the single most influential experience in shaping my career in historic preservation and arts management," says Garcia. 

Ito and Garcia are among many alumni from the program have gone on to find permanent work in the arts, and the majority of them credit the Getty’s program with providing that critical first step.

More recently, encouraged by her experience as a Getty intern at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) last summer, Luisa Aguilar Solis applied for a job with the organization.

“Three months after my Getty internship was over I was hired by the museum as an image coordinator.  I feel like without the actual internship experience it would not have been as easy to take on the tasks I have to do daily,” said Aguilar Solis.

The students are not the only ones who benefit from the program.  For many of the arts organizations, the interns provide much-needed staffing each summer, as well as access to some valuable perspectives.

“The interns know a lot.  They understand social networking and what’s going on with other young people,” said Jeanne Hoel, Senior Education Program Manager at MOCA. “Having them here is a very positive experience for everyone involved.”

In its 20th year, the Multicultural Undergraduate Internship Program continues to achieve remarkable milestones—it is one of the few long-term programs of its kind, and it has had a tangible impact in helping people of diverse backgrounds delve into careers in the arts. The program‘s success also inspired a public private partnership when the Los Angeles County Arts Commission joined the Getty by creating an undergraduate intern program focused on the performing and literary arts in 2000.

In addition to 12 positions offered at the Getty, this summer’s Multicultural Undergraduate Interns will be hosted by the following non-profit institutions:

A+D Architecture and Design Museum, Los Angeles
American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona
Angels Gate Cultural Center, Inc., San Pedro
Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center Inc., Los Angeles
Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena
Art Center College of Design, Pasadena
Arts and Services for Disabled, Inc., Long Beach
Association for the Advancement of Filipino American Arts & Culture, Los Angeles
Autry National Center of the American West, Los Angeles
California African-American Museum, Los Angeles
California State Parks, Will Rogers State Historic Park
California Institute of the Arts, Valencia
Catalina Island Museum, Avalon
Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Los Angeles
Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA
Chinese American Museum, Los Angeles
Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles
Department of Cultural Affairs, Public Arts Division of the City of Los Angeles
18th Street Arts Complex, Santa Monica
El Pueblo Park Association, Los Angeles
Fowler Museum, UCLA
Friends of Banning Park Corporation, Banning Residence Museum, Wilmington
HeArt Project, Los Angeles
Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino
Historic Italian Hall Foundation, Los Angeles
Immaculate Heart Community, Corita Art Center, Los Angeles
Inner-City Arts, Los Angeles
Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, Los Angeles
Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles
LA Freewaves, Los Angeles
LAXART, Los Angeles
Library Foundation of Los Angeles
Long Beach Museum of Art Foundation
Los Angeles Conservancy
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Inc.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Los Angeles Harbor Department Historical Archives, City of Los Angeles
Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery Associates
Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
Machine Project, Los Angeles
MAK Center for Art and Architecture, West Hollywood
Millard Sheets Gallery, Pomona
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Culver City
Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach
Office of Historic Resources, City of Los Angeles
Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles
P.S. Arts, Los Angeles
Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena
Pasadena Heritage
Pasadena Museum of California Art
Plaza de la Raza, Incorporated, Los Angeles
Pomona College Museum of Art
Public Corporation for the Arts of the City of Long Beach
Rancho Los Cerritos Foundation, Inc., Long Beach
Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, Claremont
Ryman Carroll Foundation, Los Angeles
St. Elmo Village, Los Angeles
Santa Monica Museum of Art
Scripps College, Claremont
Self-Help Graphics, Los Angeles
Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles
Social and Public Art Resource Center, Venice
Tierra del Sol Center for the Handicapped Foundation, Claremont
Torrance Art Museum of the City of Torrance
University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach
Velaslavasay Panorama, Los Angeles
Venice Arts: In Neighborhoods
Vincent Price Art Gallery Foundation, Monterey Park
Visual Communications, Los Angeles
Wende Museum, Culver City
William S. Hart Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History Foundation

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The J. Paul Getty Trust is an international cultural and philanthropic institution devoted to the visual arts that includes the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Research Institute, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Foundation. The J. Paul Getty Trust and Getty programs serve a varied audience from two locations:  the Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Getty Villa in Malibu.

The Getty Foundation fulfills the philanthropic mission of the Getty Trust by supporting individuals and institutions committed to advancing the understanding and preservation of the visual arts locally and throughout the world. Through strategic grants and programs, the Foundation strengthens art history as a global discipline, promotes the interdisciplinary practice of conservation, increases access to museum and archival collections, and develops current and future leaders in the visual arts. The Foundation carries out its work in collaboration with the Getty Museum, Research Institute, and Conservation Institute to ensure the Getty programs achieve maximum impact.  Additional information is available at www.getty.edu/foundation.

Additional information is available at www.getty.edu.

The Museum is happy to finally present to you a video describing the story of the Swiss Consulate's efforts to sponsor a tree in our Garden of the Righteous. It's a great story of upstanding when it would have been easier to do nothing — exactly the kind of action that we hope people take when responding to the Holocaust.

Watch the video here:

http://youtu.be/vDReyiQPtfk

West LA: Where Über Culture Meets Urban Chic

West Los Angeles, which stretches from the Miracle Mile to Brentwood, is an oasis of culture paired with chic, urban perks. A wealth of amenities, including world-class museums, chic shopping areas and chef-driven restaurants, are in store.

The Miracle Mile is home to several of LA’s top museums, all within walking distance of one another. Among them is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), one of nation’s top art institutions. Since it opened in 1965, the museum has grown into a 20-acre campus that exhibits 100,000 objects dating from ancient times to the present. Seven buildings house rotating exhibits and a permanent collection that includes works of all media from Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. The campus is in the midst of a 10-year expansion known as the Transformation, designed by celebrated architect Renzo Piano. Already open are the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, featuring post-war works, and the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion, with a rotating selection of major exhibitions.

Adjacent to LACMA is the Page Museum/La Brea Tar Pits, a working laboratory where paleontologists uncover the remains of Ice-Age mammals like mastodons and saber-toothed cats from actual tar pits, where these creatures met their ends 11,000 years ago. Inside the Page Museum, you can watch as they clean, reconstruct and examine the fossils.

Across Wilshire Boulevard, the Petersen Automotive Museum is unmistakable, with decorative elements on its façade that resemble giant fins from a classic car. The museum’s lifelike dioramas feature more than 150 vehicles, including rare and classic cars, racecars, concept cars, celebrity and movie cars, trucks, and motorcycles. It also features the history of the automobile, as well as auto design and technology.

The nearby Craft and Folk Art Museum was founded by the late Edith R. Wylie, who was self-described as “a chronic enthusiast of indigenous art.” The art tells stories via original exhibitions, workshops, lectures and community events. Works have included photographs of contemporary Iran, solar ovens, and L.A.’s Asian-Latin fusion.

After a day of museum-stomping, it’s time to relax in one the more than 92,000 hotel and motel rooms throughout LA. The boutique Hotel Wilshire houses 74 of these rooms and is located in the heart of the Miracle Mile district. The hotel has a rooftop pool, restaurant and bar, featuring stunning city views, as well as modern amenities.

And for dining, you can head back to LACMA, where Ray’s and Stark Bar opened in the expansive, central BP Pavilion last year. Esquire magazine named this Mediterranean restaurant, with its adjacent, al fresco bar, “one of the best new restaurants of 2011.” Or drive north just a few miles and dine at an LA institution, Campanile. This 20-year-old restaurant in a rustic setting serves California fare with a menu that changes daily. Adjacent is the original La Brea Bakery, specializing in artisan breads.

The Original Farmers Market/The Grove

There are many farmers’ markets throughout LA, but The Original Farmers Market is at Third and Fairfax, walking distance from the Miracle Mile. It all started in 1934, when18 local farmers gathered at that intersection and sold produce from the backs of their trucks. Today, it boasts more than 100 boutiques, specialty food shops, produce stands, butchers and restaurants, including a few retail outlets and eateries in the newer North Market. Stroll through the stalls and shops in the open-air market and treat yourself to a scoop of freshly made cabernet sauvignon sorbet or pumpkin ice cream from Bennett’s Ice Cream; buy a decorative, non-leaded candle at By Candlelight; or savor a glass of wine and artisan cheese at Monsieur Marcel wine bar and gourmet market.

In 2002, The Grove, an open-air shopping, dining and entertainment mecca, opened next door to the Farmers Market. Built to resemble a Tuscan village, The Grove is anchored by Nordstrom and an art-deco multiplex cinema and features dozens of shops, from Abercrombie & Fitch to UGG Australia. Attracting more than 18 million visitors a year from around the world, The Grove has become a tourist haven because of its central fountain, which dances to music, and a vintage-style, double-decker trolley that runs between The Grove and Farmers Market. On weekdays, the entertainment news show “Extra!” with Mario Lopez is filmed live on The Grove’s cobblestone streets. And if you want to savor the cuisine, as well as the scene, there are several restaurants offering indoor and al fresco dining, like The Farm of Beverly Hills, which offers its own spin on American comfort food with items like Dill Pickle Fried Chicken and Truffle Mac & Cheese.

Just north of The Grove, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the nation’s oldest Holocaust museum, exhibits artifacts from survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Its interactive audio and video exhibits depict the Holocaust era and the worldwide effort by non-Jews to save Jewish lives.

If you’re looking for a unique place to stay, The Farmer’s Daughter Hotel across the street from The Grove offers a country cool retreat in the middle of LA’s urban scene, with 66 rooms and Tart restaurant.

West 3rd Street/Beverly Center

Go west on 3rd Street from Farmers Market, and you’ll find an area that attracts LA hipsters, young families and the arts crowd. The street is lined with one-of-a-kind boutiques, like Polkadots and Moonbeams, selling vintage clothing and accessories; Kristin Londgren, specializing in cocktail-length, bias-cut dresses with soft draping; and Milk, featuring fashionable clothing for the family.

Bordering the west side of West 3rd Street is the Beverly Center. This indoor shopping emporium includes 160 specialty boutiques and restaurants reflecting the diverse styles and tastes of Los Angeles, including those of celebrities, who often shop there, sometimes unnoticed. Anchored by Bloomingdale’s and two Macy’s stores, the Center also offers brand-name stores like Louis Vuitton, Gucci and True Religion Brand Jeans.

Along the way, you’ll find some of the City’s hippest hotels. For example, The Orlando, a European-style boutique hotel, recently completed a $6 million facelift. In 2006, the Sofitel Los Angeles completed a $35 million transformation mixing European sophistication with the energetic pulse of Hollywood by the award-winning design team of George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg. The hotel now features Simon LA restaurant by Chef Kerry Simon, offering a Hollywood take on American comfort food. And the SLS Hotel at Beverly Hills, a Luxury Collection Hotel adjacent to Beverly Hills, is the first of that brand to open. SLS stands for style, luxury and service, and this hotel has it all. Its sixth-floor pool deck has two pools, private cabanas and a pool concierge; and its onsite restaurant, The Bazaar by James Beard Award-winning Chef Jose Andres features innovative delicacies.

But West Third is a walking street, and you might want to try some of its standalone eateries. For example, you can get breakfast all day at Toast Bakery and Café. At Joan’s on Third, you can dine in a deli type atmosphere and buy tapenades, fancy deli meats, hard-to-find cheeses, breads and pastries at the restaurant’s Gourmet Marketplace. And The Little Next Door offers healthful organic indulgences using local ingredients.

Century City

Once a backlot for 20th Century Fox (now Fox Studios, which is still in operation nearby), Century City is a 176-acre “city within a city” with high-rise office towers, residential properties and an upscale, open-air shopping mall.

Tucked among these urban structures is the Annenberg Space for Photography, located on the former site of the Shubert Theatre. The intimate museum, which offers free admission and features an interior design influenced by the workings of a camera, is dedicated to the exhibition of print and digital photography with rotating exhibits by renowned masters.

Century City’s two main hotels are the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza and the InterContinental Los Angeles Century City, both located on Avenue of the Stars. The Hyatt, with its distinctive curved main structure, originally opened in the 1960s and hosted many celebrities and dignitaries. Its award-winning Breeze Restaurant serves locally sourced California cuisine and also offers a sushi bar and vegan selections. The InterContinental Los Angeles Century City is a newer luxury hotel with 361 rooms, a spa with Zen-inspired villas, and the casually elegant Park Grill, serving globally inspired California cuisine.

Some of the best shopping in the City is at the Westfield Century City, an outdoor plaza with 111 stores, including designer stores like Armani Exchange, Coach and Kenneth Cole. Anchored by Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, it also features a multiplex cinema. Dining includes upscale casual restaurants, such as RockSugar Pan Asian Kitchen, featuring cuisines from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and India. Other options include a dining terrace and specialty food shops.

Westwood

Westwood is best known as home to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and the adjacent Westwood Village. UCLA is one of the country’s top educational institutions, but it goes way beyond that, with museums, a sculpture garden and landmark architecture in and around the campus. For example, its Royce Hall performance venue features a façade inspired by a Milan basilica. It is the main venue for UCLA Live, one of LA’s most varied programs of dance, music, spoken word and experimental theater. UCLA’s five -acre Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden is among the finest in the country, with more than 70 major works by famous sculptors, including Matisse, Moore and Noguchi. The campus’ seven-acre Mildred Mathias Botanical Garden is home to more than 5,000 species of tropical and subtropical plants from around the world. The Fowler Museum features works from Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific.

Adjacent to the south end of the campus lies Westwood Village, with dozens of restaurants, bars, coffeehouses, shops and movie theaters, all within a few blocks of one another in a quaint yet urban village setting. The UCLA Hammer Museum features a permanent collection with works by such noted artists as Rembrandt, Cézanne and Gauguin. For live theater, the Geffen Playhouse features classic plays, new works and musicals, and world and West Coast premieres.

Westwood has two hotels: Hotel Palomar, a chic hotel with 264 guestrooms, celebrates art in motion pictures with glamorous decor. It’s a Kimpton hotel, and its chef-driven BLVD 16 restaurant serves farm-to-table California cuisine by Chef Richard Hodge. The W Los Angeles-Westwood, located on a quiet, residential street, features 258 modern rooms. It features a pool lined with lavish cabanas, Bliss Spa, Whisky Blue by bar magnate Rande Gerber, and NineThirty restaurant, serving California cuisine in a cozy environment.

Restaurants abound in Westwood Village and beyond. One of the oldest is Matteo’s Restaurant, which opened in 1963. This Italian favorite was once frequented by Frank Sinatra and the other members of the Rat Pack. Other eateries include Yamato, serving Japanese pub food, and Palomino, with a rustic, European menu. South of Wilshire Boulevard, the area known as Little Persia features restaurants serving authentic ethnic food.

Bel Air/Brentwood

The Bel Air and Brentwood neighborhoods are home to some of LA’s wealthiest residents and grandest mansions. But the grandest structure, which sits atop a hill overlooking the City, is the Getty Center. The Center is an art mecca with galleries, a garden, a café and research facilities. The collection includes paintings by masters such as van Gogh, Cézanne and Monet, as well as photographs, decorative arts, drawings, sculptures and other works of art.

Nearby is one of the world’s most dynamic Jewish cultural institutions, the Skirball Cultural Center, which traces the experiences and accomplishments of the Jewish people for more than 4,000 years with multimedia installations, rare artifacts, photographs, interactive computer stations and sound recordings.

Among the hotels in this area is the 103-room Hotel Bel-Air, A Dorchester Collection Hotel, which reopened in 2011 after a major transformation. Set in a luxury residential area in the hills of Bel Air, the award-winning hotel originally opened in 1946 and became a hideaway for the rich and famous. Among the new amenities is a Wolfgang Puck restaurant serving farm-to-table, California cuisine. Tucked into lower lying hills to the west is the 160-room Luxe Sunset Boulevard Hotel, an urban retreat on seven acres at the intersection on Brentwood and Bel Air. On Sunset @ Luxe Sunset Boulevard Hotel restaurant features seasonal California fare with a French accent. And the Hotel Angeleno, a Joie de Vivre hotel, offers 208 rooms in a cylindrical tower. Each room has a private balcony and views. There’s also a heated, outdoor pool with a fireplace and West Restaurant and Lounge, which offers 200-degree views of LA.

High-end shopping and upscale casual dining can be found in Brentwood Village, with dozens of independently owned and operated stores and restaurants, as well as major chains. You can also find services like nail salons, yoga studios and pet grooming there.

About The Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board

Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board is a private, nonprofit business association whose primary mission is to market and promote Los Angeles as the premier site for leisure travel, meetings and conventions. Though not part of City government, Los Angeles Tourism is recognized as the City’s official tourism marketing organization.

For more information, visit the official visitor information website of Los Angeles at www.discoverLosAngeles.com

Facebook page

facebook.com/LosAngelesFan or follow us on Twitter @discover_LA.

Los Angeles International Pow Wow is supported by the following Premiere Partners: Brand USA, Los Angeles World Airports, and Visit California. The Premiere Event sponsors are Cirque du Soleil, Hollywood & Highland and Universal Studios Hollywood. The Platinum sponsors are The GRAMMY Museum, LA Waterfront, Metro, and Wolfgang Puck Catering.

The Gold sponsors are Beverly Hills Conference & Visitors Bureau, CityPASS, Coach America, DFS, Downtown Business Improvement District, The Grove, Hollywood Entertainment District, Merlin Entertainments Group, Miles Marketing Destinations, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Original Farmers Market, Palm Springs Desert Resort Communities CVA, Pasadena Convention & Visitors Bureau, Santa Barbara Conference & Visitors Bureau and Film Commission, Santa Monica Convention & Visitors Bureau, Starline Tours & Tour Coach Charters, Temecula Convention & Visitors Bureau, and the West Hollywood Marketing & Visitors Bureau. The Silver sponsors are Beverly Center, The Capital Grille, Citadel Outlets, City of Santa Clarita, Joie de Vivre Hospitality, Malibu Family Wines, Premium Outlets, and Visit Mendocino County. The Bronze sponsors are da Vinci Villa, El Monte RV, Integrated Transportation Services, and Japanese Assistance Network.

Original article can be found here: http://www.travelvideo.tv/news/united-states-west/05-08-2012/west-la-where-uber-culture-meets-urban-chic

Watch coverage of Yom HaShoah 2012 by CNC World, beginning at 9:15 in the following video:

http://www.cncworld.tv/Lifestyles/v_show/23892_5.shtml

Visit the USC news page for a mention of the Museum's new Tree of Testimony exhibit:

http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/usc_in_the_news/inthenews.php?id=2445

By: Jonah Lowenfeld

“How does one commemorate 5.7 million dead?” Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer asked the audience gathered in Pan Pacific Park for Los Angeles’ annual community Yom HaShoah commemoration on April 22. “You can’t, really. How does one avoid the clichés, in saying things that everybody expects you to say?”

With a slight hunch in his shoulders and a faint British accent to his English, Bauer spoke to a crowd of 600, a much smaller number than in previous years, in a tent erected near the year-old home of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH), which for the first time acted as the event’s sponsor and organizer. Born in Prague in 1926, Bauer moved to Israel with his family in 1939 and is a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1998, he won the Israel Prize, the country’s highest honor, for his work on Jewish history and the history of the Holocaust.

His speech came near the end of the 90-minute event, before Theodore Bikel sang a short song, a cappella, but after Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa quoted Elie Wiesel and Anne Frank. More than one speaker referred to the Shoah as the “greatest crime in the history of the world.”

A few speakers drew links between the Holocaust and current events. David Siegel, the Consul General of Israel in Los Angeles, mentioned in his remarks that Iran’s leaders “openly deny and mock the Holocaust.” Mark Rothman, LAMOTH’s director, suggested that the recent killings of two unarmed African-American teenagers — Trayvon Martin in Florida and Kendrec McDade in Pasadena — made him realize that parents of young black men in America today must often feel their children are being hunted, “just as Jews in Europe felt every day between 1933 and 1945.”

The challenge of how to recount the history of the Holocaust is ever-present, and more than a few speakers remarked that in just a few years no survivors will be alive to tell the story from the first-person point of view.

Many of their stories have already been recorded in various formats, and last Sunday, visitors to LAMOTH got an early look at a brand-new way of presenting them. The “Tree of Testimony” is an installation of 70 video screens sharing survivors’ testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s archive. More than 52,000 individual testimonies will run at the museum in a continuous loop; the cycle will take a full year to complete its run.

“I wanted something in the museum that was more of an aesthetic experience,” E. Randol Schoenberg, LAMOTH’s board president, said. While some might simply stand back and watch the silently streaming testimonies, visitors can, using the museum’s iPod-based guide system, key in the number of a screen and listen to one individual tell his or her story.

But on Sunday, it was Bauer’s stories of two Polish Jewish boys who survived the Holocaust that evoked the strongest emotional responses.

One of the boys, nicknamed Machek, was raised by a Polish woman, who after the war gave him up for adoption to a Jewish orphanage. The orphanage moved him and the other children to Israel, and later, just before she died, the Polish woman wrote him a letter telling him that if he wanted to know his true identity, he should visit a particular lawyer in Jerusalem. The boy, who had grown up to become a truck driver, went to the lawyer’s office, introduced himself and asked the man to kindly tell him what he knew.

The lawyer yelled at him. “You want my money!” Bauer said. “You want to blackmail me. Get out or I’ll call the police!”

“Machek, to this day, doesn’t know who he is,” Bauer said, “Is that typical of Holocaust survivors? No. But is anything typical of Holocaust survivors?”

Bauer’s second story was about a boy named Yankele who worked as a carpenter’s apprentice during the war, building coffins for German soldiers. He went on to become a Jewish partisan, and when one of his compatriots, a Polish partisan named Ivan, died, Yankele built a coffin for him and conducted a ceremony, reading, in Russian, from the New Testament.

Every Holocaust story is unique, Bauer said.

“They are all the same, and they are all totally different one from another,” Bauer said in conclusion. “They are a story of a people, and they are the story of our people, and I hope I haven’t said a single cliché.”

A version of this article appeared in print.

Original Source: http://www.jewishjournal.com/los_angeles/article/each_holocaust_story_unique_yet_the_same_20120425/

By: Amanda Lewis

Last week was Yom HaShoah, the official day of Holocaust remembrance, a commemoration with good intentions that nonetheless brings up feelings of ambivalence in many Jews I know.

One friend remarked, "Every day is Holocaust remembrance day at my house," indicating she does not share her parents' passion for the subject. Another friend claimed it had been discussed at her Jewish middle school so often that she didn't engage with the subject or talk about it for nearly ten years afterwards. Though we want to remember the Holocaust, sometimes you can't help feeling desensitized if you talk about it too often.

But no matter how frequently you'd like to deeply consider the Holocaust, a particularly meaningful way to do it is by visiting the L.A. Museum of the Holocaust's new Tree of Testimony exhibit, which opened this past weekend.

I've been to at least ten Holocaust-related museums on one field trip or another, and thus can't help but compare. Naturally, I recall perusing an insufficient collection of photographs in two or three musty, carpeted rooms somewhere in an office building in Canada with less enthusiasm than I do gliding through Yad Vashem, Moishe Safdie's gorgeous and solemn mountain prism in Jerusalem, where the constricted path you take through the exhibits primes you for the discomfort of the content.

A lot of Holocaust museums make the mistake of awkwardly try to recreate the experience, allowing you to explore a facsimile of Auschwitz' gas chambers (Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles) or an actual rail car used to transport cramped and starving Jews (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C). Somehow confronting these empty, nightmarish symbols increases my sense of dissociation. What's missing is the people. Thanks to the USC Shoah Foundation Institute's extensive collection of survivor testimonies, the human beings who experienced the horror of the Holocaust become the central focus of the Tree of Testimony.

Inspired by Nam June Paik's video art and Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin's data visualization sculpture in the lobby of the New York Times building, the Tree of Testimony consists of 70 television screens of various shapes and sizes piping interviews with Holocaust survivors into the headphones of museum-goers. Thick black tubes squiggle on the wall behind the TVs, and keywords like "ghetto cultural activities" "sisters" and "wartime photographs" pop up on the screens to help you decide whose private miseries to experience, meaning which testimony's code to enter into your free iPod Touch audio guide.

Conceived by museum board president Randy Schoenberg and executed by architect Hagey Belzberg, the Tree of Testimony represents the first attempt to display the 52,000 Shoah Foundation testimonies outside of standalone screens. (Over the course of a year, the exhibit will shuffle through the entire collection.)

"A lot of people use the [Shoah] archives, but it's hard to imagine how large [the collection] is, sitting at a terminal," Schoenberg says.

About half of the testimonies aren't in English, but Schoenberg and Executive Director Mark Rothman insist international visitors and cosmopolitan, multilingual Angelenos will appreciate hearing stories told in their native languages. Regardless of whether you can understand the content of each individual screen, to sit at the Tree of Testimony is to participate in a concert of conversations, engaging with history on a personal level surrounded by other people silently doing the same.

Here are three reasons why LA MOTH's new exhibit is worth checking out:

1. You feel the vastness.

Trying to sit still and watch one individual testimony was incredibly distracting at first. While you attempt to concentrate on one person's tale, 69 other survivors clamor for your attention and occupy your visual space, reminding you of the context; this is just one of tens of millions of stories.

2. You feel the randomness.

Even after ruling out testimonies you can't understand due to language barriers, the process of choosing which person to listen to, which life to reflect on, can be an overwhelming burden. This forced act of random choosing parallels the choices made about who was chosen to die, who was chosen to work, who managed to survive. By choosing who to listen to, you choose to a certain extent who gets to live on in your own memory and who doesn't, condemning fifty even while preserving the memories of five.

3. You feel the banality.

Staring at photographs of charred bodies in a ditch is not the same as listening to an interview with an old lady in a sweater set who lives in Florida. The scariest part of these testimonies, especially when experienced one after another in a series, is how seamlessly the survivors alternate between the horrifying and the mundane. Confining your remembrance to the atrocities makes the Holocaust feel surreal and removes you from its reality; listening to an actual person tell his or her entire story in fits and starts, full of digressions and personal tragedies, brings you much closer than any shocking exhibit ever could.

The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in Pan Pacific Park is free to the public and open Mon-Thurs and Sat-Sun 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Friday 10 a.m.-2 p.m.

Follow me on Twitter at @adelaidelaments, and for more arts news follow us at @LAWeeklyArts and like us on Facebook.

Original source: http://blogs.laweekly.com/arts/2012/04/holocaust_museum_shoah_testimo.php

CONTACT:

(323)651-3704

info@lamoth.org

LOS ANGELES MUSEUM OF THE HOLOCAUST

COMMEMORATES HOLOCAUST

IN DAY-LONG EVENT SUNDAY, APRIL 22

• Innovative Programs Help City Residents Remember and Learn About Events of the Holocaust
• Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Renowned Holocaust Scholar Yehuda Bauer, and Special Guest Theodore Bikel to Highlight Ceremony of Commemoration at 2:00 p.m.
• Survivors Will Narrate Unprecedented Family Event, “Walk of Remembrance,” Through Pan Pacific Park Beginning at 9.30 a.m.
• Musicians, Singers and Other Artists Will Perform in Ampitheatre Throughout the Day
• Multi-Faceted Family Activity “Courage+Inspiration=Hero” Will Engage Children of All Ages
• Museum of the Holocaust Open for Tours 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., Including Newest Exhibit, Tree of Testimony: USC Shoah Foundation Institute Interview Wall at Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
• All Events Entirely Free to the Public

LOS ANGELES, CA – April 29 2012 –On Sunday, April 22 Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust will host “Yom HaShoah,” A Day of Commemoration of the Holocaust, featuring innovative programs completely free to the public in Pan Pacific Park.

At 2 p.m. a Ceremony of Commemoration will begin under the main tent to be erected in the center of Pan Pacific Park. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, renowned Holocaust Scholar Yehuda Bauer, winner of the Israel Prize, and actor and musical legend Theodore Bikel will highlight the program. The Shalhevet High School Choir will also perform at the ceremony, which will conclude with traditional memorial prayers to be sung by Cantor Steven Walfish. Among other speakers, Temple Beth Am Senior Rabbi Adam Kligfield will perform the invocation.

At 9:30 a.m. Holocaust Survivors will lead participants – especially families of all ages – on a guided walk through Pan Pacific Park. Various signposts in the park will indicate a significant moment in Holocaust history, and as the survivors and their participants approach each signpost a survivor will recall briefly his or her memories of those events. The walk will culminate at the Martyrs Memorial Monument next to the Museum commemorating the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Participants will be able to light candles at the Monument throughout the day.

At 10:00 a.m. the Museum will open for docent-lead and self-guided tours until 5:00 p.m. Singers, musicians and other artists will also begin performing at the Pan Pacific Park ampitheatre and will also continue until 5:00 p.m. The Museum’s newest exhibit, the Tree of Testimony: USC Shoah Foundation Institute Interview Wall at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, will present survivor interviews across a wall of 65 screens. This unprecedented exhibit, using iPod touch technology to stream the audio to visitors, will play the entire USC Shoah Foundation collection of 52,000 testimonies over the course of a year.

Throughout the day educators will be on hand in the Goldrich Children’s Memorial to guide families and children through the engaging and multi-faceted activity, “Courage+Inspiration= Hero.” During this activity participants will learn about acts of courage and resistance during the Holocaust. Visitors will be given postcards profiling 5 prominent resistance figures and their acts of courage. Participants will be invited to address and mail the cards to their friends, after adding a brief comment about their own responses to the acts of courage. In addition, visitors will be able to write about someone in their community or family or who is well-known that they consider to be an inspiration. These comments will be posted on bulletin boards throughout the Children’s Memorial.

Survivors will also be recounting their personal stories at 10:30 AM and 1:00 PM inside the museum.

Performers in the amphitheater will include composer and opera singer Julia Adophe, the Michelle Willner Choir, singer Emiliano Preciado, Third Wheel Musical group, and dancer Alexandra Shilling. More information about specific performance times can be found at the Museum website:  http://www.lamoth.org/news--events/events/.

The Yom HaShoah event is one of the largest gatherings of Holocaust survivors in Los Angeles. Along with survivors and museum staff, international dignitaries and Los Angeles officials, will attending.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is completing his second of two terms as Los Angeles Mayor, and he will chair the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Professor Yehuda Bauer is Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1998, he was awarded the Israel Prize for "History of the Jewish People." Special musical guest Theodore Bikel has enjoyed an unparalleled career as the Broadway actor who originated the role of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, earned an L.A. Emmy in 1998, is a well-known Hollywood star, and has song and performed throughout the world.

Sponsorship opportunities are available. Tickets are not required for this event. Free and open to the public. Due to security issues, no backpacks or large bags are allowed. There is limited parking at the museum, overflow parking spaces are available at the nearby CBS parking lot.

About Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

Holocaust survivors founded the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in the early 1960s as a permanent repository for their personal artifacts from the Holocaust and the world the Nazis destroyed.   Today the Museum hosts docent-led school tours, survivor lectures, exhibitions on the Holocaust, and numerous special events. Museum admission is always free.  Visit us on-line at www.lamoth.org on the Web.

Check out the ABC News report on the annual Yom HaShoah event, featuring Walk of Remebrance speaker Regina Hirsch:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?v=4017153671746

By: Jspace Staff

Yad Vashem

Perhaps the most famous Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem was established in 1953. Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, the museum is the second most visited tourist site in Israel after the Western Wall. The Mount Herzl site not only hosts the historical museum, but also provides WWII education, victim documentation, and honors non-Jews with Righteous Among the Nations.

Jewish Museum Berlin

Covering two millennium of German Jewish history, the new Jewish Museum in Berlin opened in 2001, after Nazis closed the original in 1938. Though financial problems plagued the reconstruction, the finished buildings are a stunning representation of the now fractured Jewish community.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

In the Unites States, the official Holocaust museum is in Washington DC. Dedicated in 1993, USHMM has dedicated itself to helping the people of the world confront hatred and prevent genocide from happening ever again. Amazingly, more than 90 percent of the museum’s 30 million visitors are not Jewish.

Museum of Tolerance

Originally opening in 1993 in Los Angeles, the Museum of Tolerance uses multi-media to examine racism and prejudice in the United States and the world. A third of the 350,000 annual visitors are school-aged children, and the museum was featured in the 2007 film “Freedom Writers.”

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

The oldest Holocaust museum in America, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust was founded after a group of survivors realized the need for a home for their artifacts from the War. Over the decades, the museum has made groundbreaking strides in outreach, dialogue, teacher training, and traveling exibits. LAMOTH, which is always free and open to the public, opened at its new permanent home in Pan Pacific Park in 2010.

Museum of Jewish Heritage

The Museum of Jewish Heritage, located on the banks of the Hudson in New York City, honors the victims of the Holocaust by celebrating their lives. First opened in 1997, the museum bills itself as a living memorial to the Holocaust. Two biblical quotes define the museum’s mission and describe its perspective on recent Jewish history: “Remember, Never Forget” and “There Is Hope For Your Future.”

Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center

The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is the main memorial and education center dedicated to the Holocaust in the Midwestern United States. Beginning as a small storefront operation in 1981, the museum has grown into a new campus co-designed by Yitzchak Mais, the former director of Yad Vashem.

Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage

Founded in 2005, Ohio’s Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage is simply devoted to building tolerance and sharing Jewish heritage with a concentration on the American experience. Their permanent collection “An American Story” features interactive exhibits about the horrors of the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel.

Original source: http://www.jspace.com/news/articles/jspace-tours-the-world-s-holocaust-museums-for-yom-hashoah/8613

More than 80 educators learned tools for teaching about the Holocaust during ADL's newly formulated Los Angeles Holocaust Education Institute.

The program launched in the fall with an all-day workshop, A Multimedia Approach to Teaching the Holocaust, in collaboration with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education and was attended by teachers from throughout the region.

Participants received training to use ADL's Echoes and Reflections – A Multimedia Curriculum on the Holocaust. A special feature of the day was instruction on IWitness, the new resource from USC Shoah Foundation Institute with more than 1,000 video testimonies and tools for educators and students to develop multimedia projects. Teachers came away from the training with a complete curriculum on the Holocaust as well as tips on how to incorporate visual history testimony into a wide variety of classroom instruction and student projects.

Additional workshops throughout to 2011-12 school year included The History of the Holocaust, The History of Anti-Semitism (with special emphasis on Catholic-Jewish relations), Teaching the Holocaust through Art, and Making the Connection from Past to Present.

The Institute brings together the finest resources to teach about the Holocaust from the Anti-Defamation League; The Center for Excellence on the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights and Tolerance; the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust; the Museum of Tolerance; and the USC Shoah Foundation Institute.

For information on the Holocaust Education Institute for 2012-13, please contact mfriedman@adl.org or call 310-446-4231.

Original source: http://regions.adl.org/pacific-southwest/news/new-holocaust-education.html

CONTACT

Mark Rothman

323-651-3322

mark@lamoth.org

LOS ANGELES MUSEUM OF THE HOLOCAUST TO OFFER

“SNEAK PREVIEW” OF INNOVATIVE NEW EXHIBIT

• Beginning Sunday, April 22, Tree Of Testimony: USC Shoah Foundation Institute Interview Wall at Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust becomes available to the public
• Seventy video screens displaying 52,000 interviews from USC Shoah Foundation Institute Archive to be accessed using award-winning iPod touch technology
• Stand-alone computers will allow users focused searches of the entire database
• Grand opening scheduled for late summer 2012
• Exhibit and Museum admission are free to the public
• The Museum is sponsoring Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), a day-long commemoration event on April 22

LOS ANGELES, CA – April 12, 2012 – Beginning Sunday, April 22 the city’s only free museum dedicated exclusively to the history of the Holocaust will offer a sneak preview of an unprecedented and stunning exhibit, Tree of Testimony: The USC Shoah Foundation Institute Interview Wall, at Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.  The exhibit consists of 70 video screens displaying to Museum visitors the more than 52,000 interviews maintained in the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s archives.  The grand opening will take place in late summer 2012.

The Museum will sponsor Yom Hashoah: Day of Commemoration, an all-day event that will take place at the Museum on April 22 from 9:30 AM – 5:00 PM.  The day will feature tours of the Museum, artistic performances in the Pan Pacific Amphitheater, children’s art activities, and a Ceremony of Commemoration featuring Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, renown Holocaust Scholar Yehudah Bauer, and a musical performance by entertainment legend Theodore Bikel.

The video sculpture, unparalleled in scope and supported in large part by a generous grant from the Wilf Family Foundation, will occupy an entire wall of the Museum and stand as a stirring climax to the visitor experience.  Screens of varying sizes will display individual interviews. Visitors can hear the interviews on any of the screens through the Museum’s award-winning audio guide system, which are distributed free to each guest. It will take an entire year for the 52,000 interviews to be played, emphasizing the enormity of the tragedy.

Key words, culled from the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s extensive cataloguing of each interview, will appear on each screen while an interview is playing. These data will alert visitors to the information contained in each interview. Once a visitor chooses a particular interview, that screen will become highlighted and the key words will disappear, allowing the visitor to focus directly on the subject.

Stand-alone computers in the Tepper Family room on the Museum’s exhibit floor and in the library will allow visitors to search for particular testimonies or areas of interest.

The video wall is the brain child of Museum Board President E. Randol Schoenberg, who conceived the installation after seeing video exhibits and art at other museums around the country. “I realized that if we found a way to show visitors the 52,000 interviews recorded and maintained by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, we’d create something extraordinary. Not only would the sheer breadth of the archives and its exhibition portray the Holocaust’s scope. We’d help visitors connect directly to survivors through their testimony, and create a lasting monument to them as well,” Mr. Schoenberg stated.

Stephen Smith, Ph.D., MBE, Executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, said, “This collaboration with the Museum allows us to offer the archives to the public in an expanded and extremely meaningful way. The Museum welcomes tens of thousands of visitors each year who will now be able to engage with this critical material.”

The USC Shoah Foundation’s interviews were conducted with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust, including liberators, rescuers, and aid providers.  They were recorded in many languages and in locations all over the world.

About Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

Holocaust survivors founded the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in the early 1960s as a permanent repository for their personal artifacts from the Holocaust and the world the Nazis destroyed.   Today the Museum hosts docent-led school tours, survivor lectures, exhibitions on the Holocaust, and numerous special events. Museum admission is always free.  Visit us online at www.lamoth.org on the Web.

CONTACT:

(323)651-3704

info@lamoth.org

LOS ANGELES MUSEUM OF THE HOLOCAUST

LAUNCHES SPANISH AUDIO GUIDE TOUR

• Nation’s Only Free Spanish Audio Guide Tour in a Holocaust-related Institution
• Hispanic Leaders Including Congressman Xavier Becerra, City Council Members Ed Reyes and Jose Huizar and LAUSD President Monica Garcia Featured
• 40 Spanish Recordings Totalling 2 Hours and Guiding Visitors through the Core of the Museum’s Exhibition
• Entire Audio Guide Text of Over 500 Prompts Available in Transcript Form in Spanish

LOS ANGELES, CA – April 1, 2012 – Today the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust launched a comprehensive audio guide tour in Spanish. The foreign language version of 40 recordings, totaling over 2 hours of material, allows access to the history of the Holocaust to the vast numbers of our visitors who are Spanish speaking. Over 500 translated transcripts will also appear for Spanish speakers to read in depth.

Many of the Spanish prompts were recorded by significant Hispanic leaders from the Los Angeles area. Among the voices to be heard are State Senator Alex Padilla reading about African American soldiers who liberated concentration camps, Congressman Xavier Becerra talking about Raoul Wallenberg, LAUSD President Monica Garcia discussing Kristallnacht, Federal Appeals Judge Jose Cabranes introducing The World That Was, and L.A. City Councilman Jose Huizar narrating the German teen resistance movement The White Rose.

All visitors to the Museum receive an iPod touch  audio guide free of  charge.  The device allows access to individual recordings about specific items on exhibit. It also allows visitors to listen to synchronized audio on any of the many video screens in the Museum.

The guide established Los Angeles Museum of the Holocuast as a leader in multi-media learning when it premiered in October, 2010. It won a 2011 Gold MUSE award from the American Association of Museums for its creators, Potion Design and Variate Labs. One of the most important features of the audio guide system is its ability to include foreign languages. The Museum hopes to add other languages such as Korean, Russian and Chinese to ensure all visitors have a meaningful experience.

Other Holocaust museums provide some level of adaptation for Spanish speaking visitors. But only the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust provides a free, high quality inter-active Spanish experience.

Other Spanish-speaking leaders who recorded prompts for the guide are: L.A. City Councilman Ed Reyes, Congresswomen Loretta Sanchez, and Assemblymember Felipe Fuentes.

About Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

Holocaust survivors founded the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in the early 1960s as a permanent repository for their personal artifacts from the Holocaust and the world the Nazis destroyed.   Today the Museum hosts docent-led school tours, survivor lectures, exhibitions on the Holocaust, and numerous special events. Museum admission is always free.  Visit us on-line at www.lamoth.org on the Web.

On February 29th, 2012 Zamira Skalkottas took her Sophomore English class to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in order to gain background knowledge prior to reading the core curriculum book Night by Ellie Wiesel.

On this fieldtrip students were given the opportunity to gain a better contextual understanding of the book Night. At the museum students were able to appreciate the harsh reality of the book and the events of the Holocaust.

“This book is really well written,” Skalkottas said. “I want the students to gain more perspective and knowledge about the topic of Night.”

When the students arrived at the museum, they were divided into several tour groups led by tour guides. At the museum there were many rooms that displayed various types of memorabilia that depicted what the holocaust was really like for those who endured it.

“Much of what the students saw and learned about will be in the book,” Skalkottas said. “They will be able to better visualize what they are reading about.”

One exhibit that was viewed was the Goldrich Family Foundation Children’s Memorial which payed respects to the children who died in the holocaust. Students were given a piece of paper to write a message to the children who were honored.

“We wrote words of comfort and wishes to the children and then left our messages at the memorial,” sophomore Vivian Nguyen said.

The first room in the museum explained how the Jewish people were targeted for persecution. There is a large touchscreen that displays pictures of families who were in the holocaust and gave a brief description of their situations. This exhibit helped to demonstrate similar scenarios in the book.

“This room was really inspiring,” sophomore Luke Dam said. “It really brought the holocaust to life because there actual pictures of actual people who experienced it.”

Students were also able to look at exhibits that displayed Nazism and a history of Hitler’s rise to power. They also learned about the atrocities of living in concentration camps.

“I learned that people went through a lot in the holocaust,” Nguyen said. “It was really intense to learn about the harsh lives at the concentration camps.”

Students then listened to Holocaust survivor Gabriella speak about her personal experience and what her life was like. She explained how surviving the holocaust was pure luck.

“Going to the museum was really interesting,” sophomore Amy Fitzgerald said. “I had the honor to meet an actual holocaust survivor. I am really glad I went.”

There was an automated tour that some of the students listened to as they looked at different pieces of memorabilia. As they walked from room to room, they were able to learn about various events that happened.

“It was a culturally enriching experience that revealed the harsh reality of the time period,” sophomore Andrew Geroch said. “I think this fieldtrip will help me better understand and appreciate the book.”

Emily Lockwood, Staff Writer for La Vista

Original article can be found here: http://www.lavistamchs.com/2012/03/23/skalk-museum/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=skalk-museum

BERKELEY - An art history major, sophomore outside hitter Adrienne Gehan had the opportunity to take her classroom knowledge into the real world with a unique internship. For two weeks over winter break, Gehan lived in Los Angeles doing an "externship" with the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Sponsored by Cal, the externship program allows current students to observe the day-to-day activities of a Cal alumni sponsor and obtain hands-on experience in a variety of career fields. CalBears.com enjoyed the chance to talk to Gehan about her experience.

CalBears.com: How did you hear about the internship? Did you have to interview?

Adrienne Gehan: Elly Barrett's mom emailed all of the sophomores' moms with information about Cal's externship program, and my mom forwarded me the email. I looked at the details and the different options and decided that it would be a good opportunity for me to gain experience and knowledge about my intended career path. The externship was great because it is only two weeks during Christmas break so it worked with my volleyball and school schedule.

CalBears.com: What kind of work did you do? What did your day-to-day look like?

AG: For most of the internship I worked on a project called "Mapping Auschwitz" in observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is Jan 27. The museum mapped 15 square miles around the museum, representing the size of Auschwitz, a concentration camp in Poland. At noon on Jan. 27, supporters came onto the streets included within the map holding multiple signs depicting the insignia used by the Nazis to classify Jews, Homosexuals, and Immigrants. The "flash event" raises the question: What are we going to fill our borders with?

I researched businesses, churches, synagogues and schools around the area. Then the other two Cal students and I called all the organizations and tried to gain their support in the event. We also put together flyers and handed them out around L.A. and helped do small tasks around the museum.

CalBears.com: Had you done an internship like this before?

AG: I've never done anything like this, so it was very exciting.

CalBears.com: Where did you stay? What was it like being in L.A. for two weeks?

AG: I stayed with family friends. It was really fun getting to know some parts of the city and getting to know the family I stayed with better.

CalBears.com: What was your favorite part of the internship?

AG: My favorite part of the internship was getting to see the day-to-day activities within a museum. It was good to see all the behind-the-scenes tasks needed to run a museum. I loved being able to help plan the Mapping Auschwitz event.

CalBears.com: What did you most take away from your experience?

AG: I realized I loved being in a museum on a daily basis. I also learned a lot of World War II history and loved being able to hear survivors tell their own experiences. I also got a lot better at working with Excel and driving on highways, which still isn't my specialty.

CalBears.com: How did the L.A. museum compare to the Holocaust museum in D.C. that we went to in September?

AG: The Los Angeles museum is smaller than the one in D.C., and in my opinion, more historically focused. The Holocaust museum in D.C. was incredible and really created an experience for the viewer. The Los Angeles Museum offered daily survivor talks, allowing you to hear the experience of an actual survivor.

Article reproduced from: http://www.calbears.com/sports/w-volley/spec-rel/032012aaa.html

Educators attended the fourth session of the LA Holocaust Education Institute, held February 16 at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

"Teaching the Holocaust through Art" featured presentations by Professor Holli Levitsky from Loyola Marymount University, Ilaria Benzoni-Clark and Daniella Gold of the LA Museum of the Holocaust, and ADL Associate Director Matthew Friedman. Participants examined various works of art created by survivors of the Holocaust, including artwork from the museum’s Erich Lichtblau-Leskly Collection and Echoes and Reflections – A Multimedia Curriculum on the Holocaust.

To date, the Institute has reached over 80 educators from public, private and parochial schools throughout the Los Angeles region.

For more information on the Institute, please visit online.

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 17, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust has elected Dr. R. Scott Colglazier, Senior Minister to Los Angeles' oldest Protestant congregation, to its Board of Directors, making him the first Christian clergyperson in the museum's fifty year history to serve in this way.

"We're thrilled to have Dr. Colglazier join our board," says Mark Rothman, Executive Director of the oldest Holocaust museum in the United States. "As I've gotten to know him I've grown to admire his role as a strong community leader. He brings us wisdom borne of the wealth of his management experience. His deep work in post-Holocaust studies gives him broad knowledge that can only inform our pursuit of the Museum's dual mission of education and commemoration. Finally, it would be remiss of me not to talk about the extremely valuable and fresh perspective he will bring as a non-Jewish Board member. Combine all that with his warm, engaging and caring personality, and I can only predict great things we will accomplish together."

With a proven dedication to bringing people together, Dr. Colglazier has been an influential leader in the area of interfaith dialogue here in Los Angeles, having recently created a noted Jewish/Christian/Muslim event at FCCLA when he invited both a Rabbi and an Imam for open dialogue about the commonalities and difference that exist for each of these religions. In addition, he introduced a Yom Hashoah service at FCCLA that was positively embraced by both the Christian and Jewish community.

Throughout his career, Dr. Colglazier has served some of the great churches in America, including University Christian Church in Fort Worth, Texas, the Riverside Church in New York City, and now First Congregational Church of Los Angeles (FCCLA), and he has always been an outspoken advocate for human and civil rights. While in Fort Worth, he was instrumental in brokering a peaceful agreement for that school system during a highly-charged period of racial protest. As part of the Gates of Chai Lecture Series held at Texas Christian University, he was honored to offer a Christian response to a major speech given by Nobel Prize recipient Elie Wiesel.

"I am honored to serve on the Holocaust museum board," Dr. Colglazier recently commented. "I am convinced that the horrors of the Holocaust should never be forgotten, and I think Christians have a special burden to carry in this matter, given that centuries of anti-Jewish theology was perpetuated by the Church, and tragically, paved the way for many of the atrocities that took place under Hitler."

Dr. Colglazier earned his Master of Divinity and Doctor of Ministry degrees at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis. Throughout his career he has served on a variety of nonprofit Boards, including Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University, National City Christian Church in Washington, D.C., and Planned Parenthood, and Christian Theological Seminary to name a few. He has become a national pulpit voice with a positive message, and has been featured on, among others, The Today Show and CBS's The Early Show. Author of numerous books, his latest, A Dictionary of Faith: For Open-Hearted, Open-Minded People is set for wide release in February of this year. His is also the founder of a popular spirituality blog titled Take a Breath, and can be heard from the pulpit of FCCLA most every Sunday.

For more information, contact Curtis Rhodes, Director of Communications of First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, 213-355-5235 or crhodes@fccla.org.

Watch Excecutive Director Mark Rothman's remarks to the conference commemorating the 67th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, hosted in Krakow, Poland by Krakow Medical Society, Jagiellonian University Medical College, Centre for Holocaust Studies and Aushwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=2993653600895

Also, read his remarks here:

http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/article/when_the_world_was_upside_down_20120125/

In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, LAHM worked with the Italian Consulate of Los Angeles to read the 8,000 names of Jewish victims. The names were also read simultaneously at Milken Community High School and USC Hillel.

Watch the moving video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vEU2CPSxMQ&context=C3bcdbe6ADOEgsToPDskJHbgyMqbu41G9RebbEepU5

Visit Women Hold Up Half the Sky, now on view at the Skirball Cultural Center. Show your Museum membership card at the Skirball admissions desk to receive free admission February 18-26, 2012. Please visit www.skirball.org for more information, including museum hours and directions or call the Skirball Membership office at (310) 440 4599. Limit: Four people per Membership. Admission to Noah's Ark at the Skirball is available based on walk-up availability only.

Not an LAMH member?  Join today to enjoy this great benefit.

Discover the Arts, the longest running and largest arts campaign in the City, launches the fourth-year of its campaign later this month. Discover the Arts is held in conjunction with the City’s annual Los Angeles Arts Month celebration. Created in partnership with Wells Fargo and approximately 50 cultural institutions as well as media and community partners, the campaign, which runs from January 16 to April 30, 2012, offers myriad of cultural attractions to locals and tourists alike with up to 50 percent off admissions, gift items, and more.
“Los Angeles is where the world creates and innovates," said Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. "I am thrilled to join LA INC. and all the participating institutions in celebrating LA's contribution to the visual and performing arts. The City’s unparalleled diversity and rich range of cultural institutions offer a dynamic arts scene."
The home to nearly 3,000 professional arts organizations and institutions, Los Angeles is a world-class arts capital, ranking second in the nation in volume for overseas cultural and heritage visitors according to the US Department of Commerce. Fully one-half of Los Angeles’ 26.9 million annual visitors get their information of why to come to LA, when to visit and what to see and do when they’re here from friends and family who live here.
 

 “In partnership with Wells Fargo, our three-month Discover the Arts program is a great way to inform and extend the influence of arts-goers throughout the region to drive additional visitation to LA,” said Mark Liberman, president and CEO of LA INC. “This initiative defines the arts broadly to include museums that present everything from art and automobiles, to gardens and even dinosaurs. Once people experience a play at a small neighborhood theater, a grand opera or symphony performance, or an engaging art exhibition, we're confident they'll return throughout the year and bring their family and friends."
From art aficionados to families, Discover the Arts encourages everyone to explore their favorite arts institutions while discovering museums and other arts institutions they have never visited before.
“This is Wells Fargo’s fourth year partnering with LA INC. to present the Discover the Arts campaign to make the arts accessible to all,” said John Sotoodeh, Wells Fargo L.A. Metro/Orange County Regional Banking president. “The goal of Discover the Arts is to create greater awareness, appreciation and demand for arts and culture experiences among LA residents and visitors alike.”
Institutions participating in Discover the Arts include the following: Annenberg Space for Photography, the Aquarium of the Pacific, Autry National Center, California African American Museum, California Science Center, Center Theater Group, Chinese American Museum, Colburn School, Craft and Folk Art Museum, Fowler Museum at UCLA, Geffen Playhouse, Getty Center, Getty Villa, The GRAMMY Museum® at L.A. LIVE, Hammer Museum, Heritage Square Museum, Hollywood Museum, Huntington Library, Art Collections & Botanical Gardens, IRIS, a Journey Through the World of Cinema™ from Cirque du Soleil®, Japanese American National Museum, LA Stage Alliance, LACMA, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Los Angeles Conservancy, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Los Angeles Philharmonic, LA Opera, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Latin American Art, Los Angeles Museum of The Holocaust, Museum of Tolerance, Music Center, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, NOHO Arts District, Pacific Asia Museum, Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits, The Paley Center for Media, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Petersen Automotive Museum, REDCAT, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Skirball Cultural Center, The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library, USC Fisher Museum of Art, Valley Performing Arts Center, Wells Fargo History Museum, Wende Museum & Archive of the Cold War, Zimmer Children’s Museum.

By Corey Bridwell with Paige Osburn

In 1939, the Nazis took over a 15-square mile area in southwestern Poland for the purpose of building the infamous prison camp Auschwitz. Fast forward nearly 75 years, and Angelenos gathered Friday to mark an area of the same size around Los Angeles with a flash mob.

From 12 p.m. to 12:10 p.m. on Friday, participants stood and held up signs to represent groups the Nazis persecuted — including Jews, homosexuals and political prisoners. Cars honked and passersby stopped to stare.

The remembrance, sponsored by the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, was a part of International Holocaust Remembrance Day — and the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

At least 30 people showed at the corner of Pico and Robertson, including a Holocaust studies class from Bishop Conaty-Loretto High School. Mark Rothman, the event's organizer, said he predicted hundreds showed at the other boundary checkpoints.

At least two Holocaust survivors were present to speak to participants, including Elisabeth Mann, who was sent to Auschwitz when she was 18 and lost her whole family there.

Mann described one of her last days in Auschwitz, when the S.S. took she and other prisoners outside to begin hustling them out of the camp in the wake of approaching American troops.

"We were lined up and the machine gun was behind our backs, ready to shoot us," said Mann. "But I was so overwhelmed by the spring day — the sky was blue and the grass green. I was so happy that my girlfriend who was standing next to me and many others told me, 'No — they'll really kill us.' I didn't believe it."

Sure enough, Mann said that several months later she and others were escorted out of cattle cars in Sweden.

"They didn't want to shoot us," she explained, "because the Americans were coming. And the sound of the gunshots would have brought them straight to us."

"We're doing this to give people an understanding of the commitment the Nazis made to evil," organizer Rothman explained. "We know what we can do with a space of this size if we're not careful. What can we do with a space of this size and bigger to make sure we have a 21st century that's better than the 20th?"

Rothman wanted something that would "include as many different neighborhoods as possible." And the signs, emblazoned with labels like "JEW" and "HOMOSEXUAL," were regularly held by those who didn't claim that identity.

"Catholic girls held up the sign for Jews, for example," explained Rothman. "The bottom line being that when one group is persecuted, fundamentally, we are all persecuted."

Originally published here: http://www.scpr.org/news/2012/01/27/31003/angelenos-mark-holocaust-remembrance-day-flash-mob/

Hollywood, Calif. December 15, 2011

– Launch flix, a production and digital media company, today announced that the oldest Holocaust museum in the United States, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, has become their new fiscal sponsor for a special Holocaust film project. This relationship is timely as launch flix is gearing up to shoot a short film, Bashert, next month, from a book that they had optioned from Survivor, Henry Oertelt. Oertelt’s grand daughter, Dr. Corey Samuels will act as associate producer on the short.

Launch flix, CEO, Stephanie Houser has been a volunteer docent since the museum opened their new location in October, 2010. This year the museum is celebrating their fiftieth anniversary.

“We couldn’t think of a better way to end the year. What made this especially attractive was that we could help an important project move forward while working with Stephanie, who has distinguished herself through her volunteer work with us,” said Mark Rothman, Executive Director of the museum. “It was an easy yes.”

Bashert, which means “meant to be” in Yiddish, is about a story that happened after Henry Oertelt immigrated to Minnesota from Berlin. In the 1950’s he attended a party where he met an American soldier who had been in the exact place, at the same time of his liberation from a three-day death march. This exchange is documented in Oertelt’s life story.

Oertelt’s award-winning book is called An Unbroken Chain, My Journey through the Nazi Holocaust. Born in Berlin Germany, of Jewish faith, Heinz (Henry) Oertelt was twelve years old when Hitler came to power in 1933. Oertelt died earlier this year at age ninety on January 27, the International Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust, and the anniversary of the day Auschwitz was liberated. One year later, January 27, 2012, the museum is also planning an elaborate community event called the “Mapping Auschwitz Project.”

Launch flix is partnering with the museum so people can make tax-deductible donations for the film project. Visit http://www.lamoth.org/support-the-museum/ and click on the blue button the right that says “Donate Now.” Then choose “Bashert: A Short Film by Stephanie Houser” in the drop down menu for the “Designation” option half way down the page.

Henry Oertelt was liberated by General Patton’s Third Army during the Flossenburg Death March in April, 1943. He arrived in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1949 and spent 40 years speaking about his experiences and the importance of tolerance, political involvement, and confronting hatred. Oertelt was past chairman of the Jewish Community Relations Council and Holocaust education committee. He was recipient of the JCRC’s “Volunteer of the Year” award, as well as the distinguished “Eleven Who Care” honor from KARE 11 TV in Minnesota in May, 2006. Additionally, the city of St. Paul, Minnesota proclaimed “Henry A. Oertelt Day” on April 23, 2006. Oertelt participated in Stephen Spielberg’s University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education in Los Angeles, California. In 2005 Stephen Spielberg’s Shoah Visual History Foundation made Henry’s story one of five selected survivor testimonials featured on their Web exhibit from among over 55,000 collected stories.

Additionally, Henry’s half brother, ninety-six year old Maine resident, Kurt Messerschmidt, is currently featured in the first chapter of a new teacher’s curriculum called Echoes and Reflections that was recently put out by the Anti Defamation League, USC Shoah Foundation and Yad VaShem. You can learn more about the brothers and their story at http://6mfor6m.org

Launch flix has been fundraising and developing a feature film with a $6 million total budget based on the life story of Holocaust survivor and author Henry A. Oertelt. Since they were raising $6 million dollars, the filmmakers created a grassroots campaign called $6M for 6M. The concept was that even if they received a dollar per person, they could reach six million people with their story and raise awareness for Holocaust education at the same time.

About the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMH) has a two-fold mission that has remained constant since its inception in 1961: commemoration and education. http://www.lamoth.org/

About launch flix
launch flix is an award-winning production company in Los Angeles. Launch flix creates and produces original content like films, shorts, and Web videos that inform, entertain and educate diverse audiences. They focus on “green” production, Internet marketing, and profitability to give partners the highest return on their investment. For more information on launch flix or the movie, An Unbroken Chain, visit http://launchflix.com.

To learn more, click here.

Category: Bond

Honorable Mention

The new building for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust by local firm Belz­berg Architects is located within L.A.’s Pan Pacific Park, the site of the existing Los Angeles Holocaust Monument. The 32,000-square-foot, LEED Gold museum was designed as an educational institution, which anticipates 40,000 students each year. Much of the building is submerged to integrate it quietly into the park setting, with the landscape extending over the roof. “I think there’s an interesting concept here,” juror Joe Valerio said. “You descend into the earth, into the darkness of the Holocaust, and then you come back from that experience, which is poetic.” A supple shotcrete wall traces the museum’s footprint and announces its presence while minimally disrupting the park’s landscape. Existing park pathways are used as connective elements to integrate the site’s pedestrian flow with new circulation for museum visitors.



Project Credits

The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, Los Angeles
Client  Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust—Randy Schoenberg (president); Mark Rothman (director)
Design Architect  Belzberg Architects, Santa Monica, Calif.—Hagy Belzberg, FAIA (principal); Aaron Leppanen (project manager); Andrew Atwood, Barry Gartin, Brock DeSmit, Carina Bien-Wilner, Christopher Arntzen, Cory Taylor, Daniel Rentsch, David Cheung, Eric Stimmel,
Erik Sollom, Justin Brechtel, Philip Lee, Lauren Zuzack (project team)
Structural Consultant  William Koh & Associates
Mechanical Consultant  John Dorius & Associates
Electrical Consultant  A&F Consulting Engineers
Plumbing Consultant  Tom Nasrollahi & Associates
Soils Engineer  Irvine Geotechnical
Methane Engineer  Carlin Environmental
Environmental Engineer  Enviropro
General Contractor  Winters-Schram
Technology Consultant  Potion Design
Special Fabrication  Spectrum Oak Products; Swiss Woodworking
Size  32,000 square feet
Cost  $462 per square foot (includes interior displays and media)
Photograph  Hagy Belzberg

 

Learn more and see images of the building here

By Jspace Staff on 11/18/2011 at 4:29 PM

A collection of Holocaust-era stamps, letters, ID Cards, and other documents have been donated to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

The 2,000-some artifacts are valued at $260,000 and will be designated as the Edward Victor Philatelic Holocaust Collection.

Victor, a retired lawyer, accumulated the collection by over a 30-year period. He regularly attended auctions around the world.

“It is not just Jews who are interested in this field, but many Germans and other Europeans, and one of the largest collections is at the Cardinal Spellman Museum of Stamps and Postal History in Weston, Mass.,” he told the Jewish Journal.

In some cases, Victor’s documents trace a family’s path from the very beginning of Nazi rule in 1933 until its end in 1945.

For instance, the Lachmann family’s history is shown through the father’s birth certificate, his award of the Iron Cross for fighting for Germany in World War I, and then years later, letters begging for a visa to flee Germany for the United States.

Also in the collection are the prewritten postcards Nazis handed to the Jews arriving by cattle car at Auschwitz.

The postcards read, “Things are going well and we are enjoying ourselves.” The Jewish prisoners would then add their signatures to the cards and address them to their relatives still living in ghettos elsewhere.

The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust was first opened in 1961 by a group of survivors who donated their personal documents to stock its displays. Today, the museum has over 15,000 items.

By IAN LOVETT

Published: November 16, 2011

LOS ANGELES — Since Steven Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994, the organization has devoted itself exclusively to the memory of Holocaust survivors. Its archives house more than 50,000 video interviews, in 32 languages, with survivors from 56 countries — the largest such collection in the world.

But in a dramatic expansion of its mission, the foundation is now incorporating testimonies from mass atrocities other than the Holocaust into its archives. Five survivors of the Rwandan genocide are learning the organization’s archiving methods at the Shoah Foundation Institute here, part of an effort to add at least 1,000 interviews with Rwandans to the foundation’s archives. Ten testimonies from Rwanda have been recorded already, with at least 50 more expected next year. And the foundation will soon begin adding testimonies about other mass killings, including those of Armenians and Cambodians. “It’s important to be able to hear the voices of those who have experienced genocide in a variety of circumstances over the last hundred years,” said Stephen D. Smith, executive director of the Shoah Foundation.

With the broadened scope, however, the foundation has stepped into a contentious and continuing debate about the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust. Some historians are concerned that the voices of Holocaust survivors could be lost in a deluge of voices from survivors of all sorts of conflicts, its significance and singularity diminished. Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants who also teaches about law and genocide at Columbia Law School, said that one of the responsibilities descendants of survivors have is to maintain “the integrity of memory.”

“I think it is extremely important to record and preserve the first-person accounts of all genocides,” Mr. Rosensaft said. “My concern would be that we not blur the individual experiences of survivors of the Holocaust, or survivors of Rwanda, into one large blur. Every genocide is a separate act, and must be remembered and chronicled as such.”

The Shoah Foundation was born from Mr. Spielberg’s experience making “Schindler’s List,” his 1993 Academy Award-winning film about the Holocaust. Nearly 5o years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Mr. Spielberg felt an urgent need to preserve remembrances of the Holocaust before survivors died.

In 2000, after the lion’s share of the 50,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors had been conducted, the foundation’s leaders began to turn their attention toward teaching lessons from the Holocaust to younger generations. Members of the foundation’s board of councilors said the addition of testimonies about other genocides was a natural next step and something Mr. Spielberg had always intended, which his spokesman confirmed.

(Mr. Spielberg no longer runs the foundation, which became part of the University of Southern California in 2006 and is now called the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. But he still has an advisory role and is consulted for all major decisions by the foundation.)

“We want to maximize the impact of these testimonies,” Harry Robinson, a longtime member of the foundation’s board, said. “We want to make these Holocaust memories even more relevant than they are by comparing them against ongoing examples of genocide or intolerance.”

At the Shoah Foundation’s office last week, the five Rwandan survivors sat in a video-editing room. They watched an older Jewish man on screen talking about peeling potatoes in a concentration camp, as they practiced indexing and archiving the testimonies.

After their six weeks of training here, they will return to the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in Rwanda, where they will conduct video interviews with survivors — as well as with witnesses of the genocide, and even some perpetrators — which will be available digitally for scholars worldwide, like the other testimonies at the Shoah Foundation.

The first-person stories from Rwanda could prove especially useful to historians because there are fewer written accounts of those atrocities than there are of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

Yves Kamuronsi, one of the Rwandan survivors, said the testimonies not only helped piece together the events of the genocide in Rwanda, they also could help survivors recover from the trauma. But he said the Holocaust videos were sometimes difficult for him to watch.

“When I look at Holocaust survivors, I realize that they suffered before I was born,” he said. “I am listening to another generation of survivors as a survivor myself. I hope no other generation will have to listen to us as survivors.”

Rwanda is just the beginning of the Shoah Foundation’s expansion. Plans to add testimonies from survivors of the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey early in the last century (itself a heated topic of debate, as Turkey has vehemently rejected the label of genocide) are also in the works. And several interviews with survivors of the Cambodian genocide during the Khmer Rouge regime have already been recorded.

But even designating the atrocities in Rwanda or Cambodia as genocide can become a flashpoint in discussions about how the Holocaust should be remembered and commemorated.

Some historians argue that the Holocaust — in which the Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews, many in gas chambers designed specifically for that purpose — was the only genocide in history, the only systematic effort to wipe an entire race of people from the earth. In Rwanda, around 800,000 people were killed during a few bloody months in 1994, many of them with weapons like machetes. Steven T. Katz, a professor of Judaic studies at Boston University, calls the killings in Rwanda “mass murder,” not genocide.

And while Professor Katz, too, supports scholarly efforts to document all cases of mass atrocities, he said the drift toward studying the Holocaust primarily alongside these other mass murders risks misunderstanding the Nazis’ attempt to eradicate the Jews from Europe as just one case of mass murder among many.

“With certain kinds of events, one needs to be able to say, this is new, or singular, or unprecedented,” he said.

Still, the trend to contextualize the Holocaust has continued. Some institutions, like the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, now address other genocides, and the Washington museum has set up a commission devoted to stopping future genocides.

It is this goal — an invocation of the mantra “Never again” — that drives the expansion of the Shoah Foundation’s archives. Mr. Smith, the foundation’s executive director, said he would like to collect testimonies from survivors of the violence in Darfur, Sudan, in hopes of helping bring that conflict to an end.

“There are some very clear indicators on the track to genocide,” he said. “I would like to feel that, at some point, we would be collecting voices of those experiencing exclusionary and genocidal ideology in real-time, and using their voices to warn those who have the ability to intervene.”

See more at nytimes.com

Award-winning agency Fastspot receives multiple accolades in the 2011 competition

Fastspot is pleased to announce that we have won multiple accolades in the 2011 International Davey Awards.

Fastspot was honored with Gold Awards for our word game app, Jambalaya, and for the Wheaton College and HistoryMiami Websites. Fastspot also received Silver Awards for the Walters Art Museum's Works of Art site, as well as the Websites for Bay State College and the Chrysler Museum of Art.

This is the second year that Fastspot has been honored by the Davey Awards: The agency also received six Daveys in 2008.

The Davey Awards are international creative awards focused exclusively on honoring outstanding creative work from the best small firms. David defeated Goliath with a big idea and a small rock—just the sort of thing small firms do all the time. The annual Davey Awards herald the achievements of these "Creative Davids" that derive their strength from big ideas, rather than big budgets.

Fastspot is proud to be among the winners of this competition. Nearly 4,000 entries were submitted to the Daveys this year, from ad agencies, interactive agencies, production firms, in-house creative professionals, graphic designers, design firms, and public relations firms. The awards are judged and overseen by the International Academy of the Visual Arts (IAVA), an invitation-only member-based organization of leading professionals from various disciplines of the visual arts who are dedicated to embracing progress and the evolving nature of traditional and interactive media.

Please visit www.daveyawards.com for more on this year's Davey Awards winners.

About Fastspot
Fastspot, an award-winning interactive design agency headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, delivers strategic and sustainable online solutions for their clients. Their collaborative approach and creative problem-solving have garnered many of the industry’s top awards and recognition, and their content management system, BigTree, is powering many of today's leading educational and business institutions' Websites. Fastspot’s clients include Tufts University, Discovery Communications, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the American Beverage Association, Bucknell University, the Walters Art Museum, and Visit Baltimore.

November 15, 2011

LOS ANGELES (JTA) -- A rare collection of stamps, letters, ID cards and other documents of the Nazi era was donated to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

Valued at $260,000, the Edward Victor Philatelic Holocaust Collection was acquired and organized by Victor, a retired Los Angeles lawyer, over a 30-year period. In many cases the content tracks the fate of a given Jewish family from the beginning of the Nazi regime in 1933 to its demise in 1945.

After arriving by cattle car at Auschwitz, many Jews were handed postcards with a uniform message thoughtfully prepared by the Nazis.

“Things are going well and we are enjoying ourselves,” the postcard reads.

The Jews added their signatures and the addresses of relatives still in ghettos or labor camps, thus lulling them into the belief that they had nothing to fear when it was their turn for deportation to the east.

The Germans dubbed this deception “Operation Postcard," and some of the originals are included in the Victor Collection.

E. Randol Schoenberg, president of the L.A. Holocaust museum, said the Victor collection represents written and photo information on an “enormous swath” of hundreds of concentration and labor camps, sub-camps and ghettos throughout Europe, as well as refugee internment camps in Britain, Switzerland and Canada.

Victor got the stamp-collecting bug as a youngster, initially concentrating on stamps from Palestine during the Turkish and British administrations, and after 1948 from Israel. As he grew older, he started reading about the Holocaust, and “eventually I merged my philatelic and Holocaust interests,” he said.

Victor soon discovered that there were many people, particularly in Europe, who shared his combined interests.

“It is not just Jews who are interested in this field, but many Germans and other Europeans, and one of the largest collections is at the Cardinal Spellman Museum of Stamps and Postal History in Weston, Mass.,” he said.

Find out more at JTA.

Postcards From Hell: Nazi-era documents shed light on fate of families

By Tom Tugend

After arriving by cattle car at Auschwitz, many Jews were handed postcards, with the uniform message thoughtfully prepared by the Nazis.

“Things are going well and we are enjoying ourselves,” the prisoner wrote. They added their signatures and the addresses of relatives still in ghettos or labor camps, thus lulling the others into the belief that they had nothing to fear when their turn for deportation to the east arrived.

The Germans dubbed this diabolical deception “Operation Briefkarte” (Operation Postcard), and some of the original correspondence is included in a rare collection throwing new light on the paper trail of the Holocaust bureaucracy.

Designated as the Edward Victor Philatelic Holocaust Collection, consisting of some 2,000 stamps, letters, ID cards, visas, currency receipts and other assorted documents of the Nazi era, it was recently donated by Victor to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH).

Valued at $260,000, the collection was painstakingly acquired and organized by Victor, a retired Los Angeles lawyer, over a 30-year period. In many cases, the content tracks the fate of a given Jewish family from the very beginning of the Nazi regime in 1933 to its demise in 1945.

A prime example is the Lachmann family of Munich, comprising father Julius, mother Meta and son Hans.

Included, for instance, are the father’s birth certificate, his award of the Iron Cross while fighting for Germany in World War I, and documents certifying completion of Talmud Torah and cantorial studies, and release from Nazi imprisonment in 1939.

Later, there are pathetic letters begging for a job offer and visa to work in the United States, and finally a 1949 notice from the International Tracing Service, reporting that Julius and Meta Lachmann were deported to the Riga ghetto, where hardly anyone survived.

Their son Hans was able to get to America in 1939, taking along the family’s early documents and preserving the later correspondence.

Victor also pointed out that concentration camp inmates could correspond with outside relatives, though under precise restrictions, such as no more than two letters incoming and outgoing per month.

For instance, regulations at Dachau specified that letters by prisoners “must be legible … and there may only be 15 lines per side,” adding that “[R]elease requests from ‘protective custody’ to the camp management are useless.”

E. Randol Schoenberg, president of LAMOTH, commented that the Victor collection represents written and photo information on an “enormous swath” of hundreds of concentration and labor camps, subcamps and ghettos throughout Europe, as well as refugee internment camps in Britain, Switzerland and Canada.

In addition, Schoenberg said, the new material “fills holes and adds spice” to the museum’s existing exhibits and archives, while representing “the first non-monetary donation” since the opening of the new museum in October 2010.

Mark A. Rothman, the museum’s executive director, evaluated the new documentation as “drilling down to specific, minute details while framing how the events of the Holocaust happened. … I hope that after seeing the collection, visitors will have a better sense of everyone’s personal responsibility in preventing future Holocausts.”

Vladimir Melamed, director of archives and library, said that the current archives at LAMOTH are categorized both by themes and time lines. “About 99 percent of all our holdings are digitalized and accessible through on-site computers at the museum,” Melamed said.

Some material is available on home computers through the museum’s Web site.

Victor got the stamp-collecting bug as a youngster, initially concentrating on stamps from Palestine during the Turkish and British administrations, and after 1948 from Israel.

As he grew older, he started reading about the Holocaust, and “eventually I merged my philatelic and Holocaust interests,” he said.

Victor soon discovered that there were many people, particularly in Europe, who shared his combined interests, and he became a regular at auctions, including the largest one held in Switzerland five years ago.

“It is not just Jews who are interested in this field, but many Germans and other Europeans, and one of the largest collections is at the Cardinal Spellman Museum of Stamps and Postal History in Weston, Mass.,” he said.

LAMOTH’s roots go back to 1961, when a group of survivors pooled their personal mementos and artifacts to start the museum collection. “We were the first Holocaust museum, following Yad Vashem, “ Schoenberg noted.

In its new, modern facility in Pan Pacific Park, the museum welcomed some 30,000 visitors, including many public school students, in its first year, he said.

During a quick tour of the museum’s 15,000 items, Schoenberg pointed out collections of oral history interviews, Los Angeles newspaper headlines from 1933 on, a photo gallery of top Nazis, and videos of ghettos and concentration camps. There are also cartoons drawn by Theresienstadt inmates, photos of displaced persons camps, resistance and recue attempts, Holocaust music and musicians, and, domestically, the internment of Japanese-Americans.

Outdoor boards with 1.2 million holes, where visitors can place notes, commemorate the children murdered in the Holocaust.

“There are still so many aspects of the Holocaust which are practically unknown,” Schoenberg said. “Who has heard of the Maly Trostenets extermination camp near Minsk? Yet, 65,000 Jews were murdered there.”

A version of this article appeared in print.

Please visit JewishJournal.com for more on this article.

ADL successfully expands Holocaust education workshop

By Ryan Torok

For nearly 30 years, Los Angeles secondary-school educators have attended the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) annual Holocaust Education Workshop as part of their professional development. During the month-long series, L.A.-area teachers learned the history of anti-Semitism, listened to survivors’ firsthand stories and visited local Holocaust institutions, leaving them better equipped to teach the Holocaust to their students.

This year, the ADL has revamped its workshop to appeal to educators pressed for time as well as those who might feel that they might already know enough about the Holocaust. Renamed the Holocaust Education Institute, the workshop’s emphasis this year is on multimedia approaches to teaching the Shoah, increasing the convenience factor by stretching attendance over five months and allowing educators to attend as few or as many sessions as they like.

The overhaul of the program is exciting — and necessary, said Amanda Susskind, ADL Pacific Southwest regional director.

“There’s a certain point in any innovative program’s life where it’s like the same people who are interested in it have already gone to it one or maybe even two times, and you’re starting to really struggle for membership and attendance,” Susskind said.

“The four-night thing was starting to get hard to sell … [and] if no one is coming, I’d rather change it to get more people in the room,” she said.

Until 2009, the program included four weekly sessions, each lasting about four hours, and attendance for all sessions was mandatory. Last year, the ADL squeezed the four workshops into one week.

Starting this year, the ADL is stretching the program over five months.

Serving as the kickoff event for this year’s program, the ADL will hold a seven-hour seminar, “A Multimedia Framework for Teaching the Holocaust,” on Nov. 4 at USC, followed by four four-hour sessions at various sites.

Co-sponsors for the Holocaust Education Institute include the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education; the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance; the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust; and the Center for Excellence on the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights and Tolerance.

Experimenting with the content and structure seems to be paying off for the new Holocaust Education Institute. Alison Mayersohn, senior associate director of the ADL’s Pacific Southwest Region, said registration numbers are up. The Nov. 4 session is almost filled — nearly 60 people had signed up as of Oct. 28 — and Mayersohn said the attendance for the following sessions looks to be strong.

Katharine Guerrero, a teacher at Alverno High School in Sierra Madre, an all-girls Catholic college-preparatory school, has participated in several ADL Holocaust education programs for teachers in the past several years, including the organization’s Bearing Witness Institute, an overnight seminar that teaches the Holocaust to parochial schools. Guerrero said she plans to attend the Nov. 4 kickoff event.

“I like hearing this stuff over and over again for some reason,” said Guerrero, who has woven what’s she learned at these workshops into her classes — world religions and U.S history — at Alverno. She said the chair of her school’s theology department recommended that she get involved with the ADL workshops.

“I really took the [workshop] curriculum and I found a way to adapt it across the curriculum with my theology and world history course and my United States history,” she said.

During the Nov. 4 “Multimedia Framework for Teaching the Holocaust” at USC, an ADL staffer will introduce and give a sample lesson from “Echoes and Reflections,” an award-winning multimedia curriculum that features a DVD of survivor video testimony with accompanying maps, photographs and poetry. The curriculum is designed to be used by high-school teachers in various subject areas.

After the “Echoes” lesson, teachers will learn how to use iWitness, a new Web-based application for teachers and their students – developed by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute — that has 1,000 unedited survivor testimonies. Each video on iWitness has been indexed, making navigating the testimonies easier.

Dan Leshem, associate director for academic outreach and research at the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, also will lecture on “Holocaust Denial, Multimedia and the Internet.”

The four remaining sessions — offered from Nov. 17 to March 15, each beginning at 4:15 p.m. — closely resemble what the ADL has offered in previous years. These workshops are: “The History of the Holocaust,” during which attendees will tour the Museum of Tolerance and examine artifacts, including a four-page 1919 letter by Adolf Hitler that documents his anti-Semitic views; “The History of Anti-Semitism,” featuring a discussion on Catholic-Jewish relations; “Teaching the Holocaust Through Art,” highlighted by a tour of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, where teachers will view a picture diary of the Theresienstadt concentration camp; and “Making the Connection From Past to Present,” which will include discussions on genocides in Rwanda and Darfur.

This is also the first year that teachers can attend as many, or as few, workshops as they like. However, LAUSD educators and librarians must attend the four sessions after Nov. 4 in order to qualify for one unit of Article Six multicultural credit. A book review, a lesson plan and an overall reflection on the course are also required for the credit.

The kickoff session at USC is $20 per person, which includes meals, materials and parking. Individual sessions after Nov. 4 are $15 each, or $50 to attend all four.

For more information about the Holocaust Education Institute, visit this story at adl.org/lah olocaustinstitute. See more at JewishJournal.com.

See more on LAMOTH's part in the ADL Holocaust Institute for 2011 here!

Schoenberg buys Einstein letter for Holocaust museum

Posted by Tom Tugend

The “anonymous” buyer of a historic letter by Albert Einstein has identified himself as E. Randol “Randy” Schoenberg, president of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.
Schoenberg paid $13,936 for the one-page letter, signed by Einstein on his personal stationery and written on June 10, 1939 to New York businessman Hyman Zinn.
Einstein congratulated Zinn for aiding Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, adding “We [Jews] have no other means of self-defense than our solidarity and our knowledge that the cause for which we are suffering is a momentous and sacred cause.”
The letter had been put up for sale by the Nate D. Sanders auction house in West Los Angeles, and Schoenberg said he learned of its availability from a jewishjournal.com article, just a day before bids closed.
The highest bid at that time was $3,058, and Sanders himself estimated that the letter might go for between $5,000 to $7,000.
Schoenberg’s late entry spurred some lively bidding, until he finally clinched the deal with his offer of nearly $14,000.
Schoenberg, a Los Angeles-born lawyer and grandson of famed composer Arnold Schoenberg, is donating the letter to the museum, which opened its striking new building a year ago in the Pan Pacific Park.
He gained wide attention, and considerable wealth, by pursuing a seven-year legal battle forcing the Austrian government to return five paintings by the Viennese artist Gustav Klimt, valued at more than $325 million, to a descendant of the original Jewish owners.
Besides his policy and administrative duties at the museum, Schoenberg has been deeply involved in its financial support, the design of the building and in curating its contents.

View more at jewishjournal.com

Today on Radio Johnny, Adaptive Path’s Teresa Brazen talks with the Mark Rothman, Executive Director at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Mark discusses the creative process of designing this new building, including: how they chose to deliver this challenging content, their curatorial philosophy, and how visitors are engaging with the rich technology that drives their visit.

Listen to Executive Director, Mark Rothman's radio interview now!

LAMH was recently reviewed by Massimiliano Fukas in the Italian weekly magazine "L'Espresso"

Below is a translation of the article.

Light on the Shoah

The new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is located in Pan Pacific Park, a local park next to the Grove shopping mall. Pan Pacific Park, like many parks of the city, regularly sees crowds of children, men and women, attending to everyday activities such as walking their dogs and playing. It’s in this very conventional and non-descriptive location that the Jewish community decided to build a museum with the purpose of reminding us of the atrocities committed in the Nazi camps. There are 16 Holocaust museums in the United States, if I remember correctly. A few years ago, a group of survivors of the Shoah got together and founded a Museum in Los Angeles. It was at first housed on Wilshire Boulevard. For many years, these Survivors acted as educators, receptionists and tour guides. In the first months of 2011, a real public space was opened. The new Museum building is developed on one floor, with ramps. This fluid space houses displays and testimonies of one of the most horrific acts of cruelty ever perpetrated by humanity. The Museum’s roof is covered in green grass. And the inclines cover approximately 10.000 square meters. This project was completed by Hagy Belberg, the lead architect. He was able to do so by working mainly with reinforced concrete. The pillars, floors and roof are cement as well. The recorded sounds of the everyday tragedy of Auschwitz-Birkenau blend in with the laughter and joy of children playing in the park. The structure and its impact are very different from Peter Eisenman’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. Completed in 2004, the structure has 2711 pillars. In Eisenman’s work, the focus was placed on the outdoor metallic landscape. While at LAMOTH, we find ourselves in an indoor landscape. Alone and desperate, now more than ever, and immersed in a light that generously plays with the surrounding space.

Key Project Goals: The primary design strategy embeds the museum into the surrounding park landscape. This achieves a greater contextual integration while maintaining the openness of the site by continuing the usable green-space over the museum roof. An iconic structure, in this scenario, seamlessly inhabits rather than competes with the site, bridging the community formally and functionally with the building's intent. Creating a sustainable, LEED certified structure, employing innovative technology solutions in both the construction and day-to-day function of the museum, and establishing a processional narrative of experience were all achieved within the modest budget of $450/sq ft.

Energy Use: By submerging the museum below ground, both the earth and green roof furnish extensive thermal insulation. This combined with the constant moderate below grade temperature and natural light (fed by a centralized ramp) lowers the overall energy consumption for heating, cooling, and lighting. Specifically, these measures translate to a 40% savings in usage and costs via high efficiency light fixtures, glazing, and skylights as well as daylight/occupancy sensors, high SEER value mechanical equipment, programmable thermostats, and the high R-value roof structure. Exterior lighting uses innovative off-the-grid LED solar light poles that save as much as 75% in energy consumption.

Water Use: The museum sits atop a continually flowing perched ground water source. Perforated pipes lay below the mat slab foundation and concentrate ground water towards two cisterns (holding tanks) in the lower level. Pipes connecting the cisterns to the green roof irrigate the vegetation above avoiding the use of tap water altogether- a solution that lowers overall consumption and use by more than 51%. This percentage qualifies the museum for exemplary performance by LEED standards. All of the plumbing fixtures are low flow, including faucets with aerators, low flow toilets, and waterless urinals.

Materials: Over 20% of the material costs for the museum were spent on materials with recycled content. Many of the essential products used to obtain this percentage include high fly-ash content concrete, the steel rebar, and the mdf used for all interior display millwork. All imbedded rebar contains a minimum of 80% recycled content. In addition, over 20% of the material costs were spent on materials that were manufactured and extracted regionally from within a 500 mile radius. Lastly, a 15,000 sq. ft. site-integrated semi-intensive green roof provides heat island roof reduction and urban run-off mitigation.

Indoor Air Quality and Daylighting Initiatives: The museum provides over 75% of the building with natural daylight and views to the outdoors, allowing individual control of the lighting/thermal comfort and maximizing open space despite being underground. As what is essentially one large partitioned room, the lighting scheme capitalizes on the central ramp as a major natural lighting element. Additionally, this layout eases the VAV system and helps intake of near 100% fresh air with a large turnover rate. During construction, all contractors working on the museum were required to comply with an Indoor Air Quality Plan while onsite to ensure clean air quality.

Site Selection Considerations: The museum's location within a city park establishes special programmatic considerations such as maintaining open, usable green space and increases the need to service the local community as well as eliciting their direct involvement. Furthermore, the site inhabits a flood control channel and city-wide flood basin which presents daunting environmental challenges with respect to the design intent. Yet fortunately, the park location offers a major opportunity as a convergence zone for multiple pre-existing modes of alternative transportation.

Grants/Incentives Received: The construction of the museum owes its existence to a crucial incentive: the land, owned by the city of Los Angeles, was donated solely because of the subterranean design scheme. The choice to use sustainability as a fundamental conceptual element rather than a supplemental one allowed the site, building, and community to work in tandem and ultimately, made the project more effective in its mission as an educational and cultural institution.

Post-Occupancy Performance: We are currently conducting a Thermal Comfort Survey to assess the effectiveness and quality of the interior air and its impact on patrons and staff. Another interesting prospect includes tracking the maturity of the green roof from its initial planting in late 2010. Since the maturity of the roof could take a full year, a reference point exists in which one could fully determine a measurable effect on energy savings and water runoff mitigation vis-à-vis the LEED compliant elements. This process is longer term but a valuable opportunity nevertheless to build a case for future LEED-based design strategies.

Design Innovation: Major design innovations for the museum aren't merely formal. Programmatic innovation is a key element of success by incorporating interactive media technologies to provide patrons with a personalized educational experience. Basic linguistic barriers that minimize community reach are overcome through multi-lingual iTouch devices, ultimately allowing patrons to select desired languages for audio/video information. Touch-screen interfaces continue this strategy and enable viewers to create and customize their own learning experience through interaction with both others and the technology itself. Additionally, the use of shotcrete in the construction process in lieu of traditional concrete brings costs down and satisfies sustainability requirements.

Please visit Architype Review for pictures and the article.

In the August 2011 issue of the Chinese magazine La Vie, Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust was named among the Top Ten architectural structures in Los Angeles.

Below is a translation of the article:

2010 Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, Belzberg Architects

The new and impressive building for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust  is a 15 million dollar creation by local Belzberg Architects. This unique design was based on the vision and idea that the building would be half underground and lower than the horizon to perfectly blend into the surrounding area.

One of its most unique parts is the moving line idea with the marvelous fit of the spaces and rooms. The visitors to the Museum can see and feel the brightness in the beginning and as it gradually gets darker to symbolize the darkness of history. The Museum goes from bright to dark and finally back to bright to symbolize hope again. The architect believes that all humans can learn the lessons and teachings profoundly in their heart through experiencing the darkness to the brightness and feeling the change.

August 31, 2011

In Holocaust exhibition, objects give insight into survivors’ pasts

By Ryan Torok

In a photograph currently hanging in the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMH), Holocaust survivor Sophie Zeidman Hamburger drapes a garment she wore while escaping from a Nazi death march over her arms, one of which bears a number tattoo. In another, Toby Fainzylber Tambor holds her mother’s shawl and a handmade spoon, given to her by a friend tasked with caring for Tambor during the war should her mother die.

The photographs are part of “Café Europa: Portraits in Black and White,” a new exhibition at LAMH, featuring black-and-white photographs of 42 members of Café Europa, a social club for survivors run by Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles. The exhibition was recently extended to run through October.

Barbara Mack, a local photographer who has taken pictures of celebrities and politicians during events at American Jewish University, shot the photographs for the exhibition, and it was her idea to have the survivors pose with objects from their pasts.

“I had an idea that I would ask these people to bring something that was important to them,” said Mack, a retired psychologist. “It was very effective, those pictures with the objects.”

In other photographs, survivor John Gordon holds an etched-glass mug from a Hungarian spa where his mother vacationed before the war; Halina Schejnfinkiel Wolf, who crocheted for Germans in a ghetto, holds a doily; Vivian Sidranski Chakin holds a metal disc with an identification number on it, issued to her when she was forced to work in an assembly line in an airplane factory. Brief biographies of each survivor, written by Jane Jelenko, accompany the photographs in the exhibition.

“The interrelationship between their faces, the stark power of the black-and-white and these very powerful archival objects, it confronts the visitor with a number of dimensions where they can find ways into individual Holocaust stories,” said Mark Rothman, executive director of the museum.

The museum published the photographs in a book this past summer. Rothman said that the book has become a “bestseller at the museum,” which moved to its new location in Pan Pacific Park in late 2010.

The exhibition opened in June, culminating a three-year-long process that began when Susie Forer-Dehrey, chief operating officer of Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles, visited Mack’s studio and asked her to shoot portraits of Café Europa members. Although nobody at the time knew that the photographs would eventually wind up in an exhibition, Mack’s hunch was that the photos would go further than the plans Forer-Dehrey had for them, which was that they would be distributed to Café Europa members, Mack said.

“As soon as I started taking the pictures, I knew this had to be a book, and I knew it had to be a museum exhibit,” Mack said.

Café Europa has approximately 300 members, who meet weekly at the Westside Jewish Community Center and the Valley Store Front Senior Center in North Hollywood.

For the exhibition, Mack only photographed members who meet at the Westside JCC, but Forer-Dehrey said that after the High Holy Days, Mack plans to photograph Valley-based members, so that they, too, can be given professional-quality pictures of themselves.

“When the Valley people saw [Mack’s photographs], they said, ‘When is it our turn?’ ” Forer-Dehrey said.

Gordon, a survivor who has been involved with Café Europa for more than 10 years, spoke fondly of the experience of working with Mack.

“All of us who were photographed had a wonderful experience,” Gordon said. “She was very thoughtful, and I think the photographs reflect that.”


“CAFÉ EUROPA: Portraits in Black and White” runs through Oct. XXXX at the Los Angeles Museum of The Holocaust, 100 S. The Grove Dr. in Los Angeles. (323) 651-3704. lamoth.org.

Please see the article at jewishjournal.com

Buy the book on Amazon!

The Media & Technology Committee of the American Association of Museums awarded this year's Gold Muse award in the audio tour category to the Spatial Audio Guide employed at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.  The system replaces all text labels in the museum with interpretive audio information, including narrative descriptions of artifacts and soundtracks for all videos playing throughout the museum.  Created by Potion Design and Variate Labs, the guides can track user behavior, provide metrics, and make quick changes based on user-data. In the words of one AAM judge, "this device encourages and enables visitors to have a private and contemplative experience worthy of the subject matter."  Kudos to the museum for this award and for its use of the pace-setting technology.

Sign up for the CAJM Newsletter to read more!

The British 'Schindler' who saved Austrian Jews
By Mike Thomson

The controversial work of the Reverend Hugh Grimes - which began the day after Nazi Germany annexed Austria - is little recognised yet it led to what could be called Britain's own "Schindler's list".

It all began with the Anschluss (annexation), when Hitler made Austria part of the Third Reich just before the start of World War II.

Thousands of people lined the streets of Vienna to cheer the arrival of his troops, who came officially to unite all German-speaking peoples.

But this was the start of terrible times for the country's Jewish population, then one of the largest in Europe.

Many were beaten in the streets and forced to scrub Vienna's pavements. Hundreds of people are thought to have committed suicide.

Lucien Meysels, now 86, remembers those dark days well.

"As we walked back home, suddenly the mob was coming in - a howling mob, which I've never seen before. Smashing shop windows, just barbaric. That moment we knew we had to get out, and had to get out fast."

Baptism queues

The Reverend Hugh Grimes was chaplain of Christ Church in Vienna, a little piece of England in Austria.

Concerned about what he saw happening around him, he came up with a plan.

Before long, the trickle of baptisms at his church - which mainly catered for British embassy staff and other expatriates in the city - turned into a flood.

British artist Christopher Wentworth-Stanley, who lives in Vienna, has been researching this story for many years.

Much of this time has been spent poring over a collection of old blue ledgers belonging to the church.

These contain the many names of Jews baptised there in 1938. There is, he says, a discernable pattern in the timing of these services.

"You can actually fit the baptisms to the chronology of what was going on in Vienna. On the 23 July, the identity card was introduced with a "J" on it.

On the day after that, 129 people were baptised here. The following day there were 229. I mean, the church itself only sits 125 people."

Before long, baptism queues were forming down the street outside Christ Church.

The reason for all this appears to be the hope that baptism certificates would help the city's increasingly persecuted Jews escape the country.

Historian Giles MacDonogh has been researching how this could work.

"If you had a particularly stroppy border guard, he might have said 'You're a Jew and not an Anglican, and no, you can't leave the country'.

"But in many cases that didn't happen. Providing you had baptismal papers that showed you were not a Jew but a Christian, you could pass into any one of those countries which did not see at that stage - like many countries - that Judaism was not a racial thing but simply a religious matter."

As the numbers of Jews baptised at the Church grew, so did concern among senior members of the Church of England.

They had begun to view this sudden wave of baptisms in Vienna as little more than conversions of convenience, performed for political rather than religious reasons.

When the Reverend Grimes returned to England in the summer of 1938, he was told that he would not be returning to Vienna. But his replacement at Christ Church, the Reverend Fred Collard, continued to baptise hundreds more Austrian Jews.

'Unsung hero'

Little is known about what those in the Jewish religion thought about the controversial conversions back then.

But looking back, Jewish historian Professor David Cesarani of Royal Holloway, University of London, is appalled by what appears to him like a crass recruitment exercise of vulnerable people by a proselytising church.

"Any Christians who took advantage of the pressure on Jews to baptise them were doing just that. They were using leverage of the most terrible sort.

"There were many other ways that members of the Christian clergy could have helped Jews - offering hiding places, false papers and other kinds of assistance."

There is no evidence to suggest that the Reverend Hugh Grimes or his replacement Fred Collard were motivated by anything other than a desire to help Vienna's Jews flee the country.

As many as 1,800 Jews had been given baptism certificates before the conversions were finally stopped by an increasingly critical Church of England.

There has been little recognition of what happened since then.

This could be down to concerns about these controversial baptisms among members of both the Christian and Jewish faiths.

It might also be due to the fact that Austria's surviving Jews went to many different places and it is almost impossible to know how much of a role these baptism certificates played in aiding their escape.

But Randy Schoenberg - whose great uncle, Egon Zeisl, escaped from Austria in 1938 - has nothing but praise for the help Vienna's Jews were offered.

Randy, who lives in California, only discovered his uncle's baptism certificate a few weeks ago. He is very keen that what he calls Hugh Grimes' bravery be remembered.

"He was someone with an extremely good heart who saw desperate people in need and offered them at least a hope of escape from Austria. I think he really is an unsung hero of that terrible period."

Randy plans to display the certificate in the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum to help ensure that the deeds of the Reverend Hugh Grimes are never forgotten.

Listen to Mike Thomson's full report in Document on Monday 8 August 20:00 BST BBC Radio 4. Or catch up later on the BBC iPlayer.

Go to BBC News to see pictures and the entire article.

People look at me like I'm Hitler': Kanye West causes controversy with another bizarre rant

By Mike Larkin

He has a reputation for making outrageous statements.

And Kanye West has once again found himself at the centre of controversy after comparing himself to Adolf Hitler.

The rapper has drew the wrath of Holocaust awareness groups after likening himself to the notorious Nazi during a performance at the Big Chill festival in Hertfordshire in England.

He said: ‘I walk through the hotel and I walk down the street, and people look at me like I'm f**king insane, like I'm Hitler.

‘One day the light will shine through and one day people will understand everything I ever did.’

Some would suggest the rant betrays a streak of paranoia running through the singer, who is never far from controversy.

He has been criticised in the past for accusing then President George W Bush of being racist, storming onto the stage of the MTV Europe Music Awards after failing to win a gong in 2006, and rushing on again at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards to complain when Beyonce lost out to Taylor Swift.

Now he has compared himself to the German dictator, who started the Second World War and created extermination camps where almost three million people were murdered.

Mark Rothman Executive Director of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust said: 'Kanye West’s remarks at a recent concert in England, in which he claimed being so misunderstood people look at him as if he were Hitler, only suggests how little he understands.

'He certainly misunderstands the supreme unattractiveness of his 'poor me' self-pitying martyrdom act.

'He misunderstands the vast gulf between his actions, no matter how wrong they may be or how wrong people may think they are, and those of the single biggest mass murderer in history.

'And he misunderstands the great responsibility he holds in his hands together with his microphone.'

West  launched into his rant after one of his band members made a mistake during the performance of Monster.

The star also took to the stage 30 minutes late, and complained he had lost his voice.

He said: ‘This is my most important gig of the summer, but I'm really frustrated.

‘I only have half of my voice. I just want things to be right. This is the reason we started half an hour late.'

West then compared himself to legendary Chicago Bulls star basketball player Michael Jordan during a foul-mouthed rant.

He said: ‘Michael Jordan changed so much in basketball, he took his power to make a difference.

‘It's so much f**king going on in music right now and somebody has to make a f**king difference."

The Heartless rapper also defended the controversial video for Monster, which was banned because it featured cannibalism and girls hanging from their necks.

He said: 'Who saw the video before it got banned, before they took it down and before women's groups started saying that a person that lost the most important woman in his life is now against women in some way?'

The College Dropout star was  referring to the death of his mother Donda in 2007, which left him devastated.

However the 34-year-old did end the show on a positive note by paying tribute to Amy Winehouse, whom he described as 'beautiful' and 'amazing'.

He added: ‘Thank you for protecting your artists that are still here, this is for Alexander McQueen, for Amy, for Michael Jackson, and for all the media - can you lighten up on the artists that are still here?'

West was joined on stage by his three-man backing band and 20 dancers on a stage which also featured Roman-style statues and ballerinas.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk

Leon Weinstein survived the Warsaw Ghetto. But it is the story of the little girl that he wants to tell.

By Kurt Streeter, Los Angeles Times

August 5, 2011
She was Jewish, but to live she needed a Christian name.

She could not be Natalie Leya Weinstein, not in wartime Warsaw. Her father wrote her new name on a piece of paper.

Natalie Yazinska.

Her mother, Sima, sobbed.

"The little one must make it," Leon Weinstein told his wife. "We got no chance. But the little one, she is special. She must survive."

He fixed a metal crucifix to a necklace and hung it on their daughter. On the paper, he scrawled another fiction: "I am a war widow, and I have no way of taking care of her. I beg of you good people, please take care of her. In the name of Jesus Christ, he will take care of you for this."

A cold wind cut at the skin that December morning, so Leon Weinstein bundled Natalie, 18 months old, in heavy pants and a thick wool sweater. He headed for a nearby apartment, the home of a lawyer and his wife. The couple did not have a child. Weinstein hoped they wanted one.

He lay Natalie on their front step. Tears ran down his cheeks. You will make it, he thought. She had blond locks and blue eyes. They will think you are a Gentile, not one of us.

Walking away, he could hear her whimper, but forced himself not to look back until he crossed the street. Then he turned and saw a man step out of the apartment. The man read Weinstein's note. He puzzled over the baby.

Cradling Natalie in his arms, the man walked half a block to a police station and disappeared inside.

Weinstein was beside himself.

What if the Gestapo took her from the police?

What if they decided that she was a Jew?

Today, at his small Spanish-style home in Mid-City, Weinstein, 101, recalls in agonizing detail what it was like to give up his baby in 1941 amid the Nazi juggernaut. He is frail, but his wit and memory are keen. He remembers well what followed: killing Germans, dodging death, hunting for Natalie.

Holocaust scholars vouch for his account, calling him one of the last living fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, almost certainly the oldest.

For years, Weinstein kept his memories buried.

No more.

It is important to tell about Nazi horrors, he now says, so they are never forgotten. It is, he says, important to tell the story of his search for his little girl.

Weinstein was born in the Jewish village of Radzymin, Poland. As a child, he was independent, even stubborn. His family adhered to Orthodox Judaism, but he never fully believed. He defied his elders and grew into something of a tough. Eyes gleaming, he recalls those who called him a "dirty Jew."

"They'd meet my fists," he says. "Then they'd be picking their teeth from the ground."

By 15, he had run away from home and was living in Warsaw, where he worked as a tailor's assistant, then for a clothing company. In his 20s, he married Sima. After Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, they were forced to live in Radzymin with other Jews.

Natalie was born the next year. When she was a year old, Weinstein heard a Nazi guard say that German troops would soon send everyone in Radzymin to a death camp.

He prepared to flee and begged his extended family to leave too. They refused, saying Germans would never do such a thing.

But Weinstein had seen Nazi cruelty first-hand. So he slipped away, with his wife and daughter, into the nearby forest. It was far from a haven: anti-Semitic Polish thugs roamed there.

Using forged papers that identified him as a Christian, Weinstein and his family headed to Warsaw. They hoped that the sprawling capital would be a good hiding place. Sima had no papers; if the Nazis caught her, all three might be killed.

A Polish couple promised to hide Sima, but Weinstein and the baby would draw too much attention. They decided to leave Natalie on the lawyer's doorstep. Weinstein would head for the confines of the Warsaw Ghetto, where fellow Jews would give him shelter.

"This was a place completely unimaginable," Weinstein says. "A place worse even than the hell that Dante described."

The ghetto was surrounded by an 11-foot-high brick wall, barbed wire and guards. More than 400,000 Jews had been forced inside the 3.5-square-mile area. By early 1943, an estimated 300,000 of them had been shipped to Treblinka, a death camp in northeast Poland.

Nazis rationed food for those who remained and many died of starvation. Disease killed thousands more. Weinstein feared constantly for Natalie and Sima and was certain he would die.

He joined the ghetto resistance. "If we were going to die," Weinstein says, "we would do it on our own terms. We would die standing proud, on our feet, making a statement to the world. We would take as many of those bastards as we could kill."

He helped organize and train resistance fighters. On occasion, using his forged papers, he talked his way out of the ghetto and smuggled weapons back inside.

On April 19, 1943, the first night of Passover, the Nazis began their final push to wipe out the ghetto. When German tanks rolled forward, Jewish fighters appeared at windows, on rooftops, along street corners. They hurled grenades, Molotov cocktails, bricks and rocks. Weinstein ran along rooftops in a fury, strafing Nazis with a machine gun.

The resistance held, but only for a while.

"When could I have been killed?" Weinstein says. "Every five minutes." He says it again, pausing between each word. "Every…five…minutes."

One day he was crouched on the second floor of an abandoned building when he heard the footsteps of Nazi troops on the stairs.

It's over, he told himself.

He looked out a window. A solitary soldier stood guard below.

Weinstein leaped. His steel-toed boots slammed into the soldier's head. "He fell like a sack of stones," Weinstein says. "I could see his skull, his blood, brains. For killing a man who hunted me, I felt nothing but good — and I was so excited I felt no pain.

"I was alive at least for another day."

Weinstein hid in sewers that swarmed with rats and human waste. He eventually found a way out that seemed safe, but was too weak to lift the iron cover.

Was this how he would die?

He fell asleep and dreamed of his grandfather, a deeply religious man. " 'You must keep going,'" his grandfather told him. "'You must. Don't stop.'"

Weinstein awoke with new energy. He hunched his back against the manhole cover, gathered all of his strength and pushed. It opened.

In the early morning darkness, he hunted for someone who would shelter a fleeing Jew who stank of sewage and looked as though he might collapse and die.

A Warsaw couple he had known before the war took him in.

Weinstein asked after his relatives who had stayed behind in Radzymin. All were dead. He looked for Sima. He learned she was dead too.

By spring 1945, the war was over, and surviving Jews began to leave the country. Weinstein was not among them. He had to find Natalie.

His first stop was the street where he'd left his little girl. It was mostly rubble, but one building stood untouched — the police station.

He walked in. "Do you remember hearing about an abandoned girl who was taken here?"

One officer did. The girl had been taken to a nearby convent.

The nuns there remembered, too. The baby was among several they tried to shelter. Disease claimed some, but the baby named Natalie survived. When the fighting drew near, she was sent to a cloister in the countryside.

Over bombed-out roads, pedaling hard on his bicycle, Weinstein made his way there. But Natalie was gone, sent to another group of nuns. On he went, to convent after convent, sometimes sleeping in fields.

The story was the same. Natalie had been there, but nobody knew where she was now. Nobody knew if she was alive.

After six months, Weinstein returned to the city, exhausted.

Then, against all hope, he decided to visit a convent near the ghetto. He walked past a statue of the Virgin Mary, then into a hall where dozens of pale, thin orphans stood.

"Mister, mister." They grabbed at his tall, brown boots. "Mister, mister, take me, take me."

As he drew away, frustrated, a nun walked past, carrying a bony, blond girl, who looked about 4. He looked into the child's eyes. They were blue.

This, he said, was Natalie.

"She is yours?" the nun asked. "How can we know?"

"If she is," Weinstein said, "then she has a little brown birthmark, the size of a pencil eraser, just near her right hip."

The nun lifted the girl's dirty gray shirt and they looked.

He had found Natalie.

Weinstein and Natalie moved to France.

In time, he married Sophie, another Holocaust survivor and they had a son, Michael.

In 1952, the family took a ship to New York, then a train to L.A., where Weinstein became a successful clothing manufacturer. In 1993, Michael died in a car accident. Twelve years later, Sophie died of heart disease.

Weinstein remains full of life. He recites the Torah at Congregation Atzei Chaim, the Beverly Grove synagogue he has attended for seven decades.

He reads three newspapers and sips at least one glass of Chivas Regal, on the rocks, every day.

He rarely goes more than two waking hours without telephoning the woman who fusses over him, who tends to his every need. She is a psychologist known by her married name: Natalie Gold Lumer.

Every Friday night, father and daughter share a Shabbat meal. They gather with family and friends, light candles, hold hands, tell stories and offer lengthy prayers of thanks.

"It was terrible, what I went through," Weinstein said at a dinner not long ago. "But it was worth what I came away with: my beautiful daughter."

Natalie looked at him, shaking her head. There was a long silence.

"To have a father with such courage," she said, finally. "Well, I owe everything to him....I owe him my life."

kurt.streeter@latimes.com

See the video and more at latimes.com!

Holocaust Studies: CSULB workshop for teachers features talks by survivors, L.A. museum visit    By Kelly Puente, Staff Writer

LONG BEACH - When it comes to teaching sensitive subjects like the Holocaust, Cal State Long Beach professor Jeff Blutinger says it's important for teachers to have the right training.

"Most teachers have little to no training on how to teach the Holocaust. Their knowledge may be limited to whatever movies they've seen or whatever world history textbook they read at university," he said.

"It's important to teach it properly given the enormous campaign of misinformation out there. It's a subject that is of great interest to students."

For the second year in a row, Blutinger, an associate professor of history, is holding a free workshop at Cal State Long Beach with the goal of training local teachers in age-appropriate ways to teach students about the Nazi genocide. Holocaust education is a state standard that is usually taught in the 10th and 11th grades.

The weeklong intensive-training course, which begins Monday, features talks from Holocaust survivors, lectures and a visit to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Teachers receive a $100 stipend and up to two units of service credit.

While this year's class is full, Blutinger said he hopes to expand the program next year and is raising funds to make the workshops a permanent fixture on campus. He said the idea for the workshop came from local Holocaust survivor Gerda Seifer, who approached the CSULB Jewish Studies Program in 2009 with the initial donation.

Blutinger plans to have a different theme each year. Last year's theme was "Children in the Holocaust," and this year's workshop will focus on "Art and the Holocaust."

The first half of the course will explore how the Nazis used artwork as propaganda. Blutinger said he plans to show part of a film called "The Eternal Jew," an anti-Semitic film that was shown in movie theaters in Berlin and played for Nazi troops before they would carry out massacres.

"The film itself became part of the murder process, a piece of art actually used to help kill people," he explained.

The second half of the course will explore how artwork was used by prisoners in concentration camps as a way to renew hope and reveal the truth about horrors they were experiencing.

Blutinger said he has received positive feedback from teachers who say the class has given them a deeper knowledge of the subject. Studying the Holocaust is important not only for learning about our history, he said, but also for our present and future.

"Holocaust education gives teachers tools to grapple with the subject in its complexity and use it to illustrate a variety of issues beyond what the Nazis did in World War II," he said.

For information on the workshop, call Blutinger at 562- 985-2196.

See more at presstelegram.com

One of our newest docents describes the Museum and advises us all to take a tour soon!

As you may know, I’m a new docent at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. I recently gave my first medium size public tour. I was pretty nervous, but I think it went well. I had between ten and fifteen people.

The museum is divided into major sections and takes the visitor through the events in chronological order:
The World that Was
Rise to Nazism
The Beginning of the War and Ghettoization
Camps
Resistance
Liberation and Post War Issues including Holocaust and Music

It seems crazy to try to explain the Holocaust in less than an hour. I kept encouraging my group to return with our complementary audio guides so they could get more detailed information. No matter what I point out, afterwards I always feel I missed something important. However, after the tour, I also thought, wow, I really have picked up where my “adopted grandfather” and mentor, Holocaust Survivor, Henry Oertelt, left off. He taught the lessons of the Holocaust by sharing his life story with schools, groups and all kinds of organizations in the Minnesota area for about 40 years. I hope he would be pleased.

One question that caught me off guard was: Was Hitler’s grandmother really Jewish? The museum’s answer: there is no proof of that, it’s still just a rumor. I thought it might be interesting to start to share some of the questions and answers that come up in my tour from now on.

Our museum is the oldest Holocaust museum in the U.S., however, we just opened a new permanent building last October. Typically a Holocaust Survivor speaks every day around 11am. We are located right in Pan Pacific Park near the Grove. Plan a trip soon!

Find out more about 6Mfor6M and the book An Unbroken Chain.

See the Museum's Summer Tour Schedule!

•    Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust received unanimous approval from Los Angeles City Council to open doors on Saturday

•    Saturday hours will allow the Museum of the Holocaust to welcome hundreds of more visitors per week

•    City Council approval follows approvals from Arts, Parks, Health and Aging Committee and Board of Commissioners of Department of Recreation and Parks

LOS ANGELES, CA – July 8, 2011 –  Los Angeles – The City Council this week approved an amendment to the lease between the city and Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust that will allow the Museum to expand its visitor schedule to include Saturdays.
July 16 will be the Museum of the Holocaust’s first Saturday of operations.
In 2008 the Museum of the Holocaust signed a 50 year lease for city-owned land in Pan Pacific Park.. The Museum premiered a world-class, award winning permanent home for its exhibits on the history of the Holocaust last October. The Museum has been open every week day except Saturdays, due to a stipulation in the lease.  


The Council’s vote came in a unanimous consent motion that approved the Museum of the Holocaust’s lease amendment along with several other items before the Council. The lease amendment had previously passed unanimously out of the Arts, Parks, Health and Aging Committee, and the Board of Commissioners of the Department of Recreation and Parks also approved the amendment unanimously.

“Sunday is our most popular day for visitors,” according to Mark Rothman, Museum of the Holocaust Executive Director. “Our Board quickly realized if we really wanted to serve the city of Los Angeles as fully as possible, we needed to be open on Saturdays as well.”

The Museum of the Holocaust welcomes an average of 183 visitors on Sundays.

One of the reasons the Museum of the Holocaust had agreed to be closed on Saturdays was to respect the Jewish shabbat or day of rest, which begins Friday night at sundown and ends after sundown Saturday night.  There are several ways the Museum will continue to respect the Shabbat. First, as admission is always free, no one will have to transact business or handle money, activities that are prohibited to observant Jews on Shabbat. Jewish staff members and volunteers will not be scheduled to work on Saturdays. In addition, the actual experience of walking through the Museum’s would not necessarily violate the restrictions of Shabbat.


About Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

Holocaust survivors founded the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in the early 1960s as a permanent repository for their personal artifacts from the Holocaust and the world the Nazis destroyed.  
Today a nationally-renowned institution locating in a distinct building in Pan Pacific Park, the Museum hosts docent-led school tours, survivor lectures, exhibitions on the Holocaust, and numerous special events. Museum admission is always free.  Visit us on-line at www.lamoth.org.

Teacher Workshop at CSULB Will Focus on Age-Appropriate Ways to Teach the Holocaust

With the goal of training local teachers in ways to teach students about the Nazi genocide, the Teacher Workshop on the Holocaust will be held Aug. 8-12 at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) for the second consecutive year.

“This workshop will bring high school teachers on campus for curriculum development workshops that will enable them to teach students about the Holocaust in an age-appropriate way,” explained Jeffrey Blutinger, an associate professor of history and CSULB’s inaugural Barbara and Ray Alpert Endowed Chair for Jewish Studies.

“Holocaust education is a state standard usually taught in the 10th and 11th grades. Part of the instruction comes in history and part in language arts, but those who instruct the Holocaust may not have taken a class in the subject. Their knowledge may be limited to whatever movies they’ve seen or whatever world history textbook they read at university,” he explained. “What we are doing is providing them information about the subject including a general overview accompanied by binder material prepared by the Anti-Defamation League titled ‘Echoes and Reflections.’”

Teachers taking part in the workshop receive a $100 stipend to pay for food and parking and may receive up to two units of service credit.

Holocaust survivor Gerda Seifer and her husband, Harold, approached the CSULB Jewish Studies Program in 2009 with the seed gift that created the teacher workshop. “There’s nothing like it available in Southern California,” Blutinger noted. “It was a chance to fill a major need, and it gives Jewish studies at CSULB a chance to increase its visibility. We are currently raising endowment funds that will make the workshops a permanent fixture on campus.”

This year’s workshop will begin with a CSULB faculty-led review of the genocide and an introduction to the program’s theme, “Art and the Holocaust.” (The inaugural workshop’s 2010 theme was “Children and the Holocaust.”)

“This year, the topic will be explored in two perspectives,” Blutinger pointed out. “We will examine art as perpetrator of the Holocaust and art as resistance. We will study the theory of art and propaganda within a totalitarian system. We will look at film as a tool in the killing process and the creation of Nazi films that advocated genocide. Then, we will switch gears to look at art created by victims as a way of resisting Nazis.”

The workshop also will include a visit to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

On the final day, workshop participants will examine issues of memory and artistic representation through the classic illustrated texts “Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History” and “Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began” by Art Spiegelman.

The program tracks its workshop success through teacher feedback. “We ask participants during and at the conclusion of the conference for their response as well as contacting the first-year participants,” Blutinger said. “Teachers spoke of how helpful the course was in their instruction and how it enabled them to assist colleagues. It was very heartening to hear how well they responded.”

John Trovato of Torrance High School shared the material he received with his school’s History Department. “I have engaged the students in discussions on the definition of the Holocaust and what is genocide,” he said. “The conference has made me aware of how important it is to discuss the Holocaust and genocide in the world to students who are really so far removed from realities of history and their impact.”

Blutinger said he feels the workshop fits into the mission of Jewish studies at CSULB by moving the program more and more into the field of teacher preparation and education.

“This workshop works well with one of CSULB’s core missions—to prepare teachers,” he said. “The way for Jewish studies to distinguish itself from other Southern California programs is to specialize in a particular area. The area that works best for this campus is teacher training.”

Belzberg Architects
Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
Los Angeles, California

The museum emerges from the landscape as a single, curving concrete wall that splits and carves into the ground to form the entry.

The new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMH) is located within a public park, adjacent to the existing Los Angeles Holocaust Memorial.

The building is submerged into the ground allowing the park’s landscape to continue over the roof of the structure. Existing park pathways are used as connective elements to integrate the pedestrian flow of the park with the new circulation for museum visitors.

The pathways are morphed onto the building and appropriated as surface patterning. The patterning continues above the museum’s galleries, further connecting the park’s landscape and pedestrian paths.

The approach is pervaded by sounds and sights of people in the park. Because the building is partially submerged beneath the grassy, park landscape, entry to the building entails a gradual deterioration of this visual and auditory connection to the park while descending a long ramp.

Upon entering, visitors experience the culmination of their transition from a playful and unrestrained, public park atmosphere to a series of isolated spaces saturated with photographic archival imagery.

The experience of the building is largely dictated by the timeline of a visitor’s passage from point of arrival through to his/her ascension back to park level from the underground exhibit spaces.

Visitors exit the museum by ascending stairs to the level of the black stone pillars, regaining the visual and auditory connection with the park environs.

By maintaining the material pallet of the park and extending it onto the museum, the hues and textures of concrete and vegetation blend with the existing material palette of Pan Pacific Park. These simple moves create a distinctive facade for the museum while maintaining the parks topography and landscape.

Designed and constructed with sustainable systems and materials, the LAMOTH building is on track to receive a LEED Gold Certification from the US Green Building Council.

Total area: 27,000 square feet

Completeed: 2010

Please visit arcspace.com to see beautiful pictures of our building!

July 5, 2011
Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust Wins MUSE Media Awards

By Lauren Bottner

The new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMH) earned gold and silver MUSE awards in the annual competition of the American Association of Museums (AAM).

The international AAM Media and Technology Committee announced the 41 winners for the 22nd annual MUSE competition from more than 200 media submissions utilizing games, videos, audio tours and Web sites.

For the category of Audio Tours & Podcasts, LAMH won a gold for its Spatial Audio Guide, which consists of an iPod Touch that visitors carry throughout the museum, allowing them to “have a private and contemplative experience worthy of the subject matter” the MUSE judges wrote in their award description.

The museum also received a silver award for the “18 Camps” presentation within Multimedia Installations, chosen by MUSE judges for “the degree to which it accomplishes its overall objective: a simple, smart and powerful presentation that brings all elements together brilliantly.” The 18 waist-high touch screens each describe a different concentration camp and are arranged to surround visitors so that they “have to become responsible for their own experience rather than remaining passive,” the museum’s executive director, Mark Rothman, said.

“We know from our visitors’ feedback that all of our exhibits are winners, and it’s just great to get some external feedback,” Rothman added.

LAMH is pleased to announce the Museum has been honored with two design awards.

The Museum received a 2011 Green Good Design Award from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and the European Center for Architecture Art Design and Urban studies.

LAMH was also awarded a 2011 Design Excellence Merit Award form the American Institute of Architects California Council.

The 2011 GREEN GOOD DESIGN AWARDS FOR THE MOST SUSTAINABLE NEW ARCHITECTURE AND PRODUCT DESIGNS FROM 27 NATIONS

Chicago, Illinois, June 30, 2011…The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design unveil this year’s GREEN GOOD DESIGN™ Awards for new product designs, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning by some of the world’s most notable architecture and design practices and key global corporations and manufactures.

The GOOD DESIGN program was founded in Chicago in 1950 by a group of visionary designers and architects, lead by Eero Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames, as a way in which to market and promote modern design to a reluctant public not eager to embrace the clean lines of modernism or to turn away from traditional taste. The idea was revolutionary and became the opening gun for a new era of modern design and modernist design thinking and a start of mass manufacturing for a mass public.

After 60 years, GOOD DESIGN remains the world’s largest and oldest awards program for the best contemporary design.

In 2009, The Chicago Athenaeum and The European Centre added a new dimension to the historic annual GOOD DESIGN program by adding a separate edition to the annual awards to promote a greater understanding of the need to develop a global design that was not just “Good” but also “Green.”

“The Green GOOD DESIGN idea,” states Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine, President of The Chicago Athenaeum and chief curator of the GOOD DESIGN program, “is to challenge designers, architects, developers, contractors, corporations, and manufacturers to do a superior job in terms of protecting our environments, encouraging sustainability and recycling, using smart materials, conserving resources, and to better understand the social and political context for objects and buildings destined to be in our ever endangered living and working environments.”

Hence, both American and European institutions call for “Design a Better World Now.”
This year, over 120 new buildings and product designs from 27 nations were awarded for a new design direction for an even greater, more heightened awareness to protect the world’s natural resources and the manufacturing and end-user’s growing concerns for a healthy ecology and human environment. Conserve, reuse, retrofit, and recycle are prominent themes running across each awarded new product and building design.

Green GOOD DESIGN Awards went to architects, designers, manufacturers, developers, corporations, governments, foundations, communities, and individuals.

All 2011 Green GOOD DESIGN awards are posted on The European Centre’s website at www.europeanarch.eu.

In 2011, awarded buildings and products arrive from the following countries: Austria, Australia, Brazil, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Lebanon, Mayalasia, New Zealand, People’s Republic of China, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, The Netherlands, Turkey, Vietnam, and the United States.
Some of the world’s most respected industry leaders, manufacturers, and corporations are awarded for 2011: Hewlett-Packard Company, Oracle, Steelcase, Bodum AG., Alessi SpA., Sanford Corporation, Grohe AG., Tupperware Brands Corporation, Permasteelisa SpA., Sling Media, Inc., Coca Cola Co., Artemide SpA., Hansgrohe AG., Teknion, Indesit Company SpA., Electrolux SA., Hyundai Motor America, and Humanscale.

The 2011 awarded consumer products for Green GOOD DESIGN include: new appliances, bathrooms, mixers, lighting, sports equipment, tabletop, writing instruments, electronics, building materials, medical equipment, furniture, water purifiers, floor and wall covering, hardware, sun shades, web-designs, and cleaning and household products.

Efforts were made by the jury composed of The European Centre’s International Advisory Committee, to select materials and products having one or more “green” characteristics, minimized waste, energy reduction, appropriate materials, greater life-expectancy, low-toxic and biodegradable components, and the ability to recycle after consumer use.

Awarded product designs are by some renowned and respected visionary design-thinkers in Europe, Asia, and North and South America: Sir Norman Foster (Great Britain), Philippe Starck (France), Russ Lovegove (Great Britain), Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP. (USA), Fernando + Huberto Campana (Brazil), Metaphase Design Group (USA), Continuum (USA/Italy), NewDealDesign LLP. (USA), Karim Rashid (USA), Matteo Thun (Italy), Phoenix Design GmbH. (Germany), Pentagram Design (Great Britain), Makio Hasuike (Japan), and Alfredo Häberli (Switzerland).

In 2011, over 60 new buildings, and landscape architecture and urban planning projects were selected for Green GOOD DESIGN from almost every corner around the world.
Some of the world's leading architects and planners are awarded: Latz + Patner (Germany), Van Der Merwe Miszewski Architects (South Africa), EAA-Emre Arolat Architects (Turkey), Behnisch Architekten (Germany), Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (USA), Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP. (USA), P&T Consultants Pte. Ltd. (Singapre), Cannon Design (USA), Belzberg Architects (USA), ingenhoven architects (Germany), A&D Wejchert & Partners (Ireland), Cafer Bozkurt Architecture (Turkey), Mark Cavagnero Associates (USA), Edward Suzuki Associates (Japan), Gensler (USA), Raed Abillama Architects (Lebanon). HKS, Inc. (USA), Hassell Limited (Australia), aldayjover arquitectura y paisaje (Spain), WOHO (Singapore), Foreign Office Architects (Great Britain), Vo Trong Nghia Co. Ltd. (Vietnam), Tomás Llavador Arquitectos+Ingenieros (Spain), and Beijing Tsinghua Urban Planning and Design Institute (People’s Republic of China).

Judging criteria included a heightened awareness for new cities, new planning projects, and new buildings that use resources wisely, the selection of wood and materials from managed forests and from overconsumption, substituting engineered buildings products for alternative materials where appropriate, reusing existing materials, building with energy conservation in mind, and minimizing construction waste.

The awarded buildings and plans feature a new, bold direction for innovative designs for hotels, schools, corporate offices buildings, skyscrapers, bus shelters, museums, convention centers, banks, hospitals and healthcare centers, resorts, community centers, exposition pavilions, tourism centers, factories, airports, city centers, restorations, renovations, community planning, and adaptive-reuse projects.

Such immense, large-scale projects as Beijing Olympic Forest Park by Beijing Tsinghua Urban Planning and Design Institute and Sinpas Eco-Town by EAA-Emre Arolat Architects or SOM’s Chongqing River Tower and the new Saudi Arabian skyscraper, Aspire, demonstrate a greater common sense and empirical wisdom about how buildings, towns, cities, and urbanscapes can be designed and built and still reflect current standards for reduced maintenance, energy conservation, reduced toxic–effects, and low emissions, and greater environmental impact, greater resource efficiency, project-specific environmental goals, longevity, appearance, performance, quality, functionality, and value.

“In all, consumer products and architecture, from the ‘spoon to the city’,” continues Mr. Narkiewicz-Laine, “Green GOOD DESIGN 2011 is a banner year for new technological research expressed in sustainability, wise decision-making concerning materials and conservation, as well as innovation and combined here with intelligent designed elegance and great aesthetic impact.”

“This year’s 120 plus Green GOOD DESIGN awarded products and buildings represent the work of thousands of architects, designers, clients, corporate heads, developers, manufacturers, contractors, subcontractors, engineers, surveyors, consultants, factory workers, marketing executives, and laborers who have worked together as a newly formed and enlightened global community to produce a final end-product that meets today’s requirement for a truly new green environment and green age,” he adds.

“Through Green GOOD DESIGN, our cities and our lives,” he continues, “will be enhanced greatly and better served now and in the future.”

The deadline for Green GOOD DESIGN 2012 is September 1, 2011.

Submission information and on-line applications are available at The European Centre’s website at www.europeanarch.eu.

For more information, contact Mr. Lary Sommers at lary@chicagoathenaeum.org.

Video Sculpture of Survivor Testimony to Be Installed at L.A. Museum of the Holocaust

By Jonah Lowenfeld

The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, which opened its new building in Pan Pacific Park in October 2010, has announced plans to install a $1 million “video sculpture” using interview footage from the USC Shoah Foundation Institute.

Composed of 65 flat screens of various sizes, the sculpture will occupy one entire wall of the last gallery a typical visitor sees. Using the handheld audio guides that direct them through the rest of the museum, visitors will be able to listen to audio from any of the interviews being displayed at any given moment.

To make this possible, every one of the nearly 52,000 videotaped testimonies by survivors of and witnesses to the Holocaust in the archive of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute will be transferred to the museum. With the testimonies’ combined running time of about 105,000 hours, it is estimated that the 65 screens, running continuously every day the museum is open, will present the entirety of the institute’s video archive every 10 months.

Each visitor to the museum already receives a personal touch-screen audio guide, and the displays include many interactive elements. But just managing the data from the Shoah Foundation Institute — about 650 terabytes, nearly three times the data holdings of the Library of Congress — presented a remarkable technological challenge.

“The biggest trick is going to be delivering video on demand with streaming audio on demand, which is what the experience needs to be in the space,” Mark Rothman, the museum’s executive director, said.

The testimonies will be presented in their native languages, without subtitles. “That wall is going to be impressionistic,” Rothman said. “It will be an aesthetic and informational experience.” Computers placed elsewhere in the museum will be available for visitors interested in digging deeper into the institute’s archive, Rothman said.

For the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994, the survivor video wall will make the archive of video content available to a wider audience. “This is the first time ever that the entire archive will be displayed in public as a whole, and we are delighted to have it here, in Los Angeles,” Stephen D. Smith, the institute’s executive director, said in a statement.

The project, expected to be up and running by spring 2012, is being funded in large part by a donation from the New Jersey-based Wilf Family Foundation. The museum is working to raise additional funds to cover the rest.

Please read more at jewishjournal.com.

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust by Belzberg Architects
Writer: David Lindaya

There has always been a sombre link between the United States and memories of the Holocaust. Many Jewish people from Europe sought refuge in the USA while other Americans left to fight in Europe. The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust by Belzberg Architects pays reverence to the individuals, families and communities who were directly or indirectly affected by the horrors of the Holocaust. In the sprawl of LA’s architectural trends and fashions, Belzberg Architects have created a much-needed place of repose and a space of contemplative sanctuary.

In 1961 a group of Holocaust survivors in Los Angeles longed for a place to memorialise their lost loved ones and educate the world about what had happened in the bleak history of the Holocaust – and so the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust was founded. The museum’s collection found many homes but none of them were permanent, now that’s all changed thanks to Belzberg Architects’ design, the new face and home of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

The unknowing passer-by may very well not ‘see’ the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust itself. Belzberg Architects have buried the bulk of the building underground – an emotive gesture of descent from the sights and sounds of the world above into a commemorative space. In submerging most of the museum beneath the earth, much of the surrounding parkland is preserved and articulated.

The museum’s undulating landscaped roof features fractal geometric lines of concrete that divide its surface into a series of zigzagging pedestrian paths. An elongated, descending entry ramp slices through the museum’s volume, flanked either side by translucent glazing that admits streams of natural light into the museum’s inner spaces from above. Lighting is subtle and at times faint, adding to the architects’ emotive play on compression and darkness.

Movement through space is almost cinematic. The museum takes visitors through a narrative journey beginning first with tales of life before the Holocaust and ending with stories of the concentration camps. The sequence of these evocative collections is strongly accentuated by choreographed architecture – dark and cramped spaces match the images on display and at times make visitors feel uneasy, yet when stories of hope and liberation are detailed, a visitor may turn a corner to witness unexpected light.

The first room, entitled “The World That Was,” incorporates a large, single interactive table that mimics the social comfort of pre-war communities. The lighting then dims as visitors descend into a subsequent room containing exhibits depicting Kristallnacht and book burnings. After continual descent the space gets darker and visitors reach the room called “Concentration Camps.”

The interior of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is housed within a provocative concrete structure evocative of bones, creating a chilling dialogue with visitors. Structural columns are twisted and sculpted, creating organic shapes that relate to the surrounding parklands but also suggest a disordered world. Belzberg Architects have merged together building as container with an emotionally powerful story like the directors of a film.

The collection is enlivened with interactive digital media along with still images, videos and reports from local newspapers – the material and information is vast and varied both in content and form. Students who visit the museum start their journey by collecting earphones and iPods at reception, allowing them to hear, view and understand the histories and narratives of others while they construct their own narrative of the experience of their journey through the museum.

The exhibits and the architecture follow a structured, linear logic, which, at the end of its journey, opens out to a foyer where Holocaust survivor volunteers share recollections of their experiences. From here, steps lead out the memorial: an enclosure of concrete blocks pierced with holes to represent the 1.2 million Jewish children who died during the atrocities. Students are encouraged to write notes on scraps of paper and push them into the holes in a gesture similar to leaving prayer notes in the cracks of the Western Wall of Jerusalem.

For the most part, architecture makes people feel welcome, comfortable and ‘at ease.’ In order for a museum to recall the atrocities of the Holocaust, that very notion is turned completely on its head. The new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is a raw, emotionally charged space that resonates with a horrific period of history. Ultimately what Belzberg Architects have created is a new commemorative monument of permanence in a city so infamous for its love of the impermanent.

Please see more at specifier.com

FILM FESTIVAL PARTNERS WITH THE MUSEUM OF THE HOLOCAUST TO SHOWCASE GREEN FILMS WITH A HOLOCAUST OR WORLD WAR II THEME
2012 GOING GREEN FILM FESTIVAL @ MIRACLE MILE TO BE HELD AT THE PACIFIC THEATERS AT THE GROVE IN LOS ANGELES

06.21.2011– Los Angeles landmark, The Grove, to host Going Green Film Festival @ Miracle Mile at the Pacific Theaters April 18-20, 2012.

Los Angeles, CA – June 22, 2011 – The 2012 Going Green Film Festival at Miracle Mile today announced that the 2012 fest will be held at the Pacific Theaters located at the Grove in the historic Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles. The festival showcases green films—films produced with a minimal carbon imprint, films with alternative forms of transportation featured, or feature third-world issues or wildlife. This year’s festival submissions will include a focus on green films with a Holocaust or World War II theme.

The 2012 Going Green Film Festival at Miracle Mile will announce its feature film slate in February of 2012. The festival highlights films that use environmentally friendly production practices and materials, as well as producers, studios, and television networks who’ve recognized the need to consider the planet during every step of production. Green celebrities will also receive kudos.

“The entertainment industry as a whole is a very clean industry,” said Patrice Williams, Festival Director. “But we still can improve. When a studio head or a producer says, ‘Greening the production/set may take a little effort, but it’s the right thing to do’, we really have to applaud that and recognize them.”

The April 18, 2012 kickoff to the festival will be hosted by a celebrity MC with the screening of the legendary Italian classic film, “The Bicycle Thief” free to the public on the central green at The Grove.

April 19, 2012 is Yom HaShoah-Holocaust Remembrance Day and will be observed at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, located across the street from the Grove at Pan Pacific Park. (Yom HaShoah-Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorates the lives and heroism of Jewish people who died in the Holocaust between 1933 and 1945).

Mark A. Rothman, Executive Director of the LAMOTH comments, “Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is thrilled to be part of the Going Green Film Festival at Miracle Mile. As a candidate for Silver LEED certification, the Museum committed itself to making a significant contribution to reducing our environmental footprint. Our building itself nestles directly into Pan Pacific Park, and provides an extension of green space with a breathtaking, native-plant and drought-tolerant garden roof. Thus our ability to provide environmentally responsible content, through our partnership with the festival, furthers our commitment to improving our world.”
 
Other events that day include a panel Q&A discussing green filmmaking, film finance, plus a filmmaker reception.

April 20, 2012 is the third and final day of screenings. An awards ceremony and gala reception will also be held, honoring filmmakers whose films have been recognized at the festival, as well as those green celebrities and producers who have “greened” their productions significantly in the past year.

HISTORY: The Going Green Film Festival at Miracle Mile was formerly known as the Going Green Film Festival. The growing resurgence of the Miracle Mile area which serves as a home to top entertainment companies, is the home to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, has become a cultural hub of the city; thereby encouraging the name change for the festival.

Submissions of feature films, shorts, and documentaries for the festival are now open. Earlybird submission deadline is June 30, 2011. The final, extended deadline for submissions is December 1, 2011.

View this article and more at pitchengine.com

L.A. MUSEUM OF THE HOLOCAUST
TO CONTINUE LEADING MUSEUM INNOVATION
WITH SURVIVOR VIDEO SCULPTURE
USING USC SHOAH FOUNDATION INSTITUTE’S VISUAL HISTORY ARCHIVE

•    Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust to create 65-screen video sculpture presenting USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s archive of 52,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors and other witnesses

•    Survivor video wall to further award-winning, nationally-recognized Museum’s role as a leader in exhibit innovation  

•    105,000 hours of interviews – representing every survivor and witness video available in the Institute’s archive -- to be presented in the course of the year. LAMH is the first museum in the world to present the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s testimonies this way.

•    Interviews provided from the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive

LOS ANGELES, CA -- June 20, 2011 –  Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust executed an agreement last week with USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education that will enable the Museum to create a 65-screen video sculpture displaying all of the Institute’s nearly 52,000 video testimonies over the course of a single year. The video sculpture will further the Museum’s role as a leader in exhibit design and innovation.
 
The video sculpture, unparalleled in scope, will occupy an entire wall of the Museum, which opened in its new, award-winning and nationally-recognized facility in Pan Pacific Park in October, 2010. Screens of varying sizes will be arrayed seemingly randomly across the wall. Each screen will display an individual interview.

A splash screen will appear between interviews, providing the name and additional information about the interview that follows. Visitors will be able to listen to the synchronized audio of the interview through the Museum’s award-winning audio guides, distributed to each person touring the Museum complimentary with the already free admission.

The Museum is currently open approximately 2000 hours per year. Thus, the Museum plans to display all approximately 105,000 hours of USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s video testimonies within a 10 month period on the 65 screen wall. The interviews were conducted with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust, including liberators, rescuers, and aid providers.

The Museum will also present the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s entire Visual History Archive—the testimonies and the interface through which they can be searched and accessed—on stand-alone computer terminals.

The survivor video wall is the brain child of Museum Board President E. Randol Schoenberg, who conceived the installation after seeing video exhibits and art at other museums around the country.

“We are thrilled by our formal partnership with USC Shoah Foundation Institute. We can hardly wait to install the video sculpture, so all our visitors, from all over Los Angeles and Southern California, can have direct encounters with the powerful testimony of 52,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses,” said Mark Rothman, Executive Director, Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

“One of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s primary goals is to provide access to the testimonies to as broad an audience as possible,” said Stephen D. Smith, Executive Director, USC Shoah Foundation Institute. “This is the first time ever that the entire archive will be displayed in public as a whole, and we are delighted to have it here, in Los Angeles.”
The survivor video wall will be available in Spring, 2012.

In May the Association of American Museums recognized the Museum for its innovative use of technology. The Museum’s audio guide, which provides visitors with hundreds of 2-3 min. prompts narrating the Museum’s exhibits as well as synchronized audio for video displays, earned a gold Muse award at the Association’s 2011 convention. The 18 camps installation, displaying touch screen computers that provide visitors information about 18 individual concentration camps, earned a silver Muse award. The 18 camps installation already incorporates excerpts from USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s testimonies.

The video wall will include a small exhibit detailing the history of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. Established by Steven Spielberg in 1994, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute has recorded nearly 52,000 video interviews with Holocaust survivors and other witnesses. The Institute’s mission is to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry—and the suffering they cause—through the educational use of its visual history testimonies.

The survivor video sculpture presents stunning technological challenges. The Institute’s Visual History Archive, as it will be delivered to the Museum, requires approximately 650 terabytes of data. Audio will need to be streamed in synch with 65 individual video feeds. Untold miles of cables will be required to connect the screens to the audio-video storage system, and a complex network of servers will integrate the system.

The Museum expects to complete the design and construction of the survivor video sculpture with the team that created the existing exhibits and interactives: Santa Monica architecture firm Belzberg Architects as architect-designer; Winter-Schram Associates as contractor, New York’s Potion Design as software designer; and, The Tech Consultants of Woodland Hills as lead technology partner. Data Direct Networks will provide data storage hardware. Los Angeles’s Variate Labs, which provided significant design expertise to the Museum previously, may also consult on user-interface issues.

About Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
Holocaust survivors founded the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in the early 1960s as a permanent repository for their personal artifacts from the Holocaust and the world the Nazis destroyed.  

Today a nationally-renowned institution locating in a distinct building in Pan Pacific Park, the Museum hosts docent-led school tours, survivor lectures, exhibitions on the Holocaust, and numerous special events. Museum admission is always free.  Visit us on-line at www.lamoth.org.

About the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education

Established in 1994 by Steven Spielberg to collect and preserve the testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute maintains one of the largest video digital libraries in the world: nearly 52,000 video testimonies in 32 languages and from 56 countries. The Institute is part of the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California; its mission is to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry—and the suffering they cause—through the educational use of the Institute’s visual history testimonies.

The Institute works within the University and with partners around the world to advance scholarship and research, to provide resources and online tools for educators, and to disseminate the testimonies for educational purposes. In addition to preserving the testimonies in its archive, the Institute is working with partner organizations to help document the stories of survivors and other witnesses of other genocides.

For more information, visit the Institute’s website, www.dornsife.usc.edu/vhi.

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
Belzberg Architects

By Clifford A. Pearson

Your visit starts in an unremarkable city park adjacent to a generic shopping mall. Local kids are playing tag, while a man in short sleeves throws a stick for his dog and a family picnics on the grass. You follow a concrete path, which turns into a gently sloping ramp descending into the ground. On either side of you, concrete walls rise to meet an angled green roof, slowly blocking out the sounds of people enjoying the park. The laughter gets more faint, the excited chatter less distinct. As you enter the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH), you get a hint of what Jews and other persecuted people must have experienced on their way to Nazi concentration camps, gradually losing contact with the small pleasures of the everyday world. The architectural procession, as designed by Hagy Belzberg, confronts you with what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil,” a phrase that chills us still because it conflates the quotidian with the horrific.

Tucked into the side of Pan Pacific Park, behind a parking lot servicing a post office and a shopping center called the Grove, LAMOTH is easy to miss. Instead of aiming for the heroic or monumental, Belzberg used a “layered strategy combining the urban and the metaphorical,” he explains. By “urban” he means a design that fits into its park location and works with the residential neighborhood just beyond. And by “metaphorical” he means a building that alludes to the Holocaust without being literal or specific. Because the museum deals with other genocides in addition to the one perpetrated by the Nazis, Belzberg steered away from any Jewish iconography.

During his research for the job, Belzberg visited many of the 16 major Holocaust museums in the United States and related projects abroad. One that struck a responsive chord with him was Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which stands in the heart of Berlin and draws people who happen to be in the area as well as those intent on visiting the site. “Seeing and hearing people having their lunch or enjoying the outdoors actually added to the experience,” recalls the architect, because it reminds you that some people’s lives continued during the Holocaust while others’ came to a ghastly end.

He also appreciated that Eisenman’s design — 2,711 concrete blocks of varying heights — engages people and that its “symbolism is open” to interpretation.

Working with a small size (36,000 square feet) and a limited budget ($14 million, or $389 per square foot), Belzberg and his team created an intense experience by using a few simple devices — such as compressing space in certain areas, releasing it in others, and manipulating daylight everywhere. Soon after visitors move from the open park to the narrow entry ramp, they begin to feel the mood change. As they descend to the lobby, they find themselves enveloped by an exposed concrete skeleton that is both sensuous in its curves and a bit ominous in its form. To save money and time, the architects used shotcrete to create the fluid geometry of the vertical walls and poured concrete only for the roof and floors. (After spraying the shotcrete on steel reinforcing bars, workers troweled the walls to give them their curves and smooth finish.)

LAMOTH, which was founded in 1961 by Holocaust survivors and had a Wilshire Boulevard location for a number of years, still has more than 25 survivors working as docents. At the reception desk of the museum’s new home, each visitor gets an iPod, which provides sounds and images that help bring history to life. The first exhibition space, entitled “The World That Was,” features a large “community table” with a display that engages visitors as a group.

As people move through the museum and the topics become more grim (Kristallnacht, the Nazi concentration camps), the building’s sloping roof makes the rooms feel tighter and darker. At the same time, visitors experience the exhibits less as a group and increasingly as individuals engaging with a single screen or image. Daylight slips inside from above and around the edges of walls — a precious commodity brought in as if by stealth. One display looks at genocides in places such as Darfur and Rwanda. Underneath the entry ramp, artifacts from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland stand as silent witnesses.

But even as the rooms get more constricted, the architects offer views to the other side of the circulation loop where exhibits tell about the liberation of the camps and survivors making new lives in Los Angeles. Near the exit, a presentation room gives visitors the chance to hear a survivor talk about the Holocaust. Then as they leave, they return to the park and the sounds of people going about their lives. Just outside the building, an existing sculpture dedicated to the Holocaust leads visitors to an outdoor room that Belzberg designed in memory of the 1.2 million children killed during the Nazi era. Wrapping the walls around the space, glass-fiber-reinforced concrete tiles punched with 1.2 million holes of different sizes and depths make a visual and tactile reference to the young lives lost six decades ago.

The building earned a LEED Gold Certification by insulating interior spaces with a 2-foot-thick green roof, capturing rainwater and using it for irrigation, and including recycled fly ash in the concrete, among other strategies.

In deferring so thoroughly to its park setting, the museum lost a chance to project a stronger public profile. But its refusal to preach and its dramatic procession of increasingly intense spaces engage visitors in an architectural and philosophical dialogue not easily forgotten or ignored.

Please visit archrecord.construction.com to see photos of the Museum.

Multimedia Installations

Immersive installations that include text, audio, still images, video, and do not require interactivity.

Jury Chair: Ben Bailes
Manager, Interpretive Digital Media
The Morgan Library & Museum

Gold: Rio Tinto Volcanic 3D in AVIE by iCinema UNSW
Museum Victoria

We found Museum Victoria’s 360 degree 3D installation depicting undersea volcanoes a standout among this year’s submissions. The fully immersive 3D environment coupled with geologically accurate renderings provides an excellent means with which to engage visitors of all ages and backgrounds. By placing visitors in the undersea environment, the installation provides additional layers of context. Outfitted with this context, visitors are able to interact with the collection objects in the exhibition with heightened understanding. The behind the scenes technical work brought to bear in creating the installation is also quite impressive. Outstanding for overall user experience, educational content, innovative approach, and use of technology.

Silver: 18 Camps
Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
Potion
Variate Labs
Belzberg Architects

Potion developed an engaging, emotional installation that allows visitors to experience the exhibition both as individuals and as a group. This is achieved with beautiful interface design and visual unity across heterogeneous physical devices. The various elements of the presentation convey a large amount of information: statistics, geographical, personal, and historical information in an uncluttered, effective way. This submission was exceptional for the unity of the presentation of its content, its design, and the degree to which it accomplishes its overall objective: a simple, smart and powerful presentation that brings all elements together brilliantly. There is clearly a technical achievement in the execution, but is made to look simple and easy, a mark of expertise.

Bronze: Dreams of Freedom
National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia
Local Projects LLC

Amidst a category defined by large budgets and grandiose subject matter, this submission stood out by achieving great impact using modest means that were superbly suited to the subject matter. The installation uses sculpted wall panels that represent letters from which the narrative elements were drawn. These panels double as a
screen for projected video. The blending of form and content showed exceptional creativity and restraint. An elegant and novel way to engage the audience. Technology supports the presentation without overwhelming it or becoming the focus.

Honorable Mention: Life in Balance
Louisiana State Museum
A Côte Blanche Production

The Louisiana State Museum’s installation on the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans is notable for the power of the first person narrative, and the weaving together of disparate voices to present the visitor with a greater sense of the community’s response to the Katrina tragedy. The use of metaphorical elements (pieces taken from the storm wrought wreckage) in the installation allow for the telling of a dramatic event, while at the same time, leaving room for critical interpretation to the individual viewer.

See other categories and awards at mediaandtechnology.org

Audio Tours & Podcasts

Entries can range from audio tours on devices to video and audio podcasts that create links between on-line and/or on-site activities and programs, exhibits, and lectures, creating an augmented and extended experience to a global audience.

Jury Chair: Lynda Kelly
Manager Web and Audience Research
Australian Museum

Gold: Spatial Audio Guide
Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
Potion Design

Judges said: This was a highly innovative product that effectively enhanced the visitor experience. By integrateing technology to replace labels, this device encourages and enables visitors to have a private and contemplative experience worthy of the subject matter. This is especially relevant for the particular collection objects that relate to extremely difficult and potentially upsetting content. Another good feature is the ability to sync to videos already playing near-by. It is highly appropriate to the content, with ability to hear stories direct from witnesses. A major attraction is that content is completely updateable via the CMS which enables it to be remain current in a sustainable way. The ability to track user behaviour, provide metrics and easily make changes based on user-data is another outstanding feature.

Silver: Straight from the Horse’s Mouth Getty Collection
J. Paul Getty Museum

Judges said: This project was by far the best audio tour in terms of meeting a perceived audience need. This really encouraged children to engage directly with artworks. Clever questioning and well-narrated content encourages them to look deeply into the processes of developing artworks. The different approaches for each painting added interest and help keep their attention, while making the tour light-hearted with a sense of fun. A very good example of what a great audio tour should be when designed by a cross-disciplinary team for a specific audience.

Bronze: GuideCam™

Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation
Cortina Productions
The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation
Simon & Schuster Audio,
Random House Audio
Ronald Reagan Presidential Library

Judges said: This project deserves a mention as it brings to life complex subject matter. The ability for users to take photos and videos throughout their visit and then email to themselves later was also a strong feature. It truly deepened and broadened the visitor experience.

From Jewishjournal.com:

The best thing about last week’s conviction in Germany of Sobibor guard John Demjanjuk is that the case works from the bottom up. The low-level functionary was brought to justice. 

The worst thing is that for every major war criminal such as Rudolf Hess, Hermann Goering or Adolf Eichmann, there were many multiple Demjanjuks. The nearly 200 high Nazi officials and others tried at Nuremberg — the most famous war crimes trials — were literally only the tip of the iceberg of perpetrators and collaborators. The pursuit of criminal justice in countries including West Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the United States comprises an uneven patchwork of efforts mirroring the inconsistency of the pursuit of property restitution.

The network of concentration, work and death camps ran alphabetically from Arbeitsdorf to Zuffenhause and geographically from the south of France to Estonia. This network operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week and required an overwhelming number of guards, supervisors, commandants and others. Thus, Demjanjuk’s conviction may be too little, too late. There should have been tens of thousands of such trials running continuously for the last 65 years. 

Demjanjuk’s primary line of defense had been mistaken identity. It should have been selective prosecution. 

Nonetheless, the conviction should be seen as better late than never.

Demjanjuk also claimed that he himself was a victim. I don’t doubt that. He found himself subjected to a procession of post-World War I atrocities: Soviet repression, a vast famine imposed by Stalin in the Ukraine and forced conscription into the Soviet army. Nazi occupation completed this tragic parade.

I also don’t doubt that his victimization created a context for his crimes. Just recently, the Rev. Patrick Desbois, who has made a career out of detailing the mass murders of Jews throughout the Ukraine, met with the staff at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. He talked about the unctuous moral relativism created by the Ukraine’s tragic history.  His work suggests there is no immutable good in human nature; rather, as some snails change their bodies to fit different shells, man changes his moral shape to fit the confines around it. This is how neighbors came to not only betray neighbors, but to kill them. (And it is our newfound, deeper understanding of this shape-shifting that has kept some of us at the museum awake at night lately.) 

Yet, not all citizens rose to the level of direct perpetrator. Demjanjuk elected to work with the SS. He was not tried and convicted for his sufferings as a victim of some of the worst events in history. He was tried and convicted for what he did after those experiences. 

Demjanjuk’s conviction relied significantly on his identity card from the Trawniki SS training camp. It was there that Demjanjuk morphed from being a prisoner of war to being a full-fledged SS collaborator. In my first professional experience with the Holocaust, I worked on the Israeli Demjanjuk trial in 1987. Establishing the reliability of that document in that proceeding made up a significant part of the Israeli case. The courtroom work surrounding it remains one of my strongest memories of the trial and convinced me of the document’s veracity.

Recent revelations that the FBI questioned the document in its analysis of American evidence against Demjanjuk do not concern me. Law enforcement’s job is to question evidence and evaluate its potential effectiveness in a courtroom. The questioning by itself does not suggest the document is fake. The German court’s admission of the document, and the document’s ability to withstand defense challenges to its authenticity, are what matters. 

I am also not concerned that Israeli jurisprudence ultimately overthrew Demjanjuk’s death sentence conviction. In fact, I am thrilled by it. The Israeli Supreme Court stood as the mirror image to the crimes of which Demjanjuk was accused. Ivan the Terrible, who Demjanjuk was convicted of being, was ruled by only one law, his sadistic will, and under that law he murdered and tortured thousands. In the country committed to the preservation of the Jewish people, rather than wrongly execute a single innocent man — even one suspected of single-handedly annihilating Jews — the Israeli legal system adhered strictly to the rule of law that is the cornerstone of justice.

I am thrilled, as well, by Germany’s commitment to trying Demjanjuk for different crimes, and the resulting conviction. The rule of law flourishes in the very same land where it was once perverted to serve as an instrument of mass murder. If man’s ability to be good can be so affected by external forces, war crimes prosecutions not only right the wrongs of a nightmarish era, they also signify an important protection against the forces that lead to the Holocaust.

Mark A. Rothman is the executive director of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

The Museum helped support the Shalhevet High School Poland/Israel trip and facilitated several pre-departure educational meetings for the students at the Museum. This is one student’s reaction to his or her experience visiting Chelmno:


I don't know what to say right now. This is not right to intellectualize. How does someone dare intellectualize and make sense of something like this. I just saw three horrifying pits that take more than 5 minutes to walk up and down each. Three darn pits where hundreds of thousands of people were buried after being stuffed in a bus and being fed the carbon monoxide coming out of the exhaust pipe. How is one to respond to something like this? There are bones on the ground everywhere in one area. You see, the pits were not large enough for all the bodies. So the Nazis took to it to burn the bodies in the end and then bury their ashes in the pits to make room in these gargantuan pits. So now, picking up a handful of dirt, one finds countless bones. How is someone to react when finding several pieces of a 3 month old baby's skull on the ground? But why is that someone else? Why is it that I was not chosen to go through the Holocaust? How am I supposed to react to the fact that thousands of families were murdered here, hundreds of entire villages liquidated, but not mine? I am confused with emotions. Hopelessness, rage, sadness, grief, and guilt. Today was one of the most, if not the most, powerful day of my life. We proceeded to bury the shattered human bones we found on the floor. We buried them for their first time. We gave them the respect they so deserved. We were the first ones to recognize these souls that were lost at the hand of these vehemous animals. It was the first funeral I ever attended. It was beautiful, meaningful. The entire class came together at that time. The majority of people broke down at once. We were one, united, living group of Jewish people paying respect and honoring the murdered while wearing Israeli flags around our bodies. It was moving. But no vocabulary can accurately capture what we saw today. It's impossible. All I know is that it changed us, and that what I saw today will have an impact on me for the rest of my life.

Best from Warsaw, Poland,

Echoes of Truth: Holocaust Memorial Project 2011

As part of its annual holocaust remembrance ceremony the California State Assembly invited students from throughout the state to interview holocaust survivors and the resulting video was played during the Assembly's floor session on May 2, 2011. The eleven-and-a-half minute video is a compelling look at the holocaust through the eyes of those with a unique connection to this chapter of history that must never be forgotten. Among those featured are a battlefield medic who witnessed the aftermath of a mass execution, and the daughter of one of the chief prosecutors at the landmark Nuremberg Trials.

Please continue to the CA State Assembly's Holocaust Memorial Project 2011 website to view the video.

Please click on the links bellow to view videos of our amazing interactives at Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust - all designed by Potion.

World That Was Interactive Table

18 Camps Interactive Screens

Spatial Audio Guides

German Court Convicts Demjanjuk

Posted by Mark Rothman, Executive Director, Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

The best thing about the Demjanjuk conviction (read the L.A. Times Article) is that the case works from the bottom up. The low level functionary - Demjanjuk was only a guard at Sobibor—is brought to justice.

The worst thing is that for every Himmler or Eichman, there were many multiple Demjanjuks. Thus this conviction is too little, too late. There should have been hundreds, if not thousands, of such trials running continuously for the last 65 years.

Demjanjuk’s defense has been mistaken identity. It should have been selective prosecution.

Demjanuk also claims he himself was a victim of the war. I don’t doubt that. Just recently, Father Patrick Desbois, who has made a career out of detailing the mass murders of Jews throughout the Ukraine, met with the staff at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. In his discussion with us, he talked about the unctuous moral relativism that existed under the Nazi occupation. It is this relativism that allowed neighbors to not only betray neighbors, but to kill them. (And it is our deeper understanding of this relativism that has kept some of us up at night lately.)

Yet not all citizens rose to the level of direct perpetrator within the atmosphere of moral pollution and victimization imposed first by the Soviets, then by the Nazis. Demjanjuk, however, as was shown in Germany, elected to join the SS. He was not tried and convicted for his suffering during the Soviet-imposed famine that effectuated mass murder amongst the Ukrainians, or for his participation in the Soviet Army or for the inhumanities he experienced as a Soviet POW. He was tried and convicted for what he did after those experiences.

The L.A. Times article discusses the critical role the Trawnicki identity card played in convicting Demjanjuk. The year I lived in Jerusalem, I worked on the Demjanjuk trial conducted there. I became familiar with some of the testimony establishing the veracity of that document. I am therefore not troubled by the FBI’s questioning of that document, an internal FBI discussion that has recently been revealed. Law enforcement’s job is to question evidence and evaluate its potential effectiveness in a courtroom.

The questioning by itself does not suggest the document is fake. The German court’s admission of the document, and the document’s ability to withstand challenges to its authenticity so that it could help support a conviction, is what matters.

I am also not concerned that Israeli jurisprudence ultimately overthrew Demjanjuk’s death sentence conviction. In fact, I am thrilled by it. Just as I am thrilled by Germany’s commitment to trying Demjanjuk for different crimes. It shows the rule of law survives and flourishes. And the rule of law is one of the most important protections we have against the moral pollution that lead to the Holocaust.

Arts & Books
The Arts: A Modern Remembrance

By: Joan Tapper

Sitting quietly in its corner of a Los Angeles park, the new home of the Museum of the Holocaust is almost invisible from the street. From the sidewalk, you see only native grasses growing behind low white walls. Eventually, though, you notice a path slicing downward between translucent glass walls, bisecting the submerged building, and you realize that those grasses are, in fact, part of a “green” roof. They’re one facet of an architectural statement—designed by Hagy Belzberg and constructed for $15 million—that meshes environmentalism and forward-looking technology with a frank, emotionally moving inquiry into the past.

The October 2010 dedication marked the end of a six-year nomadic existence, says executive director Mark Rothman. An earthquake forced the museum, founded in 1961 by Holocaust survivors, to move out of its earlier quarters.

The museum’s mission has remained constant: to tell the history of the Holocaust from 1933 to 1945, its precursor and its aftermath. Now iPod Touch audio guides and other new technology enhance the drama of the photos, music and graphic displays, while the building itself intensifies the story’s impact. The interior walls are gray shotcrete (a form of concrete), and visitors proceed from a light-filled atrium lobby along a corridor that slopes downward and grows dimmer under lower and lower ceilings.


The galleries’ 9,000 square feet of exhibit space begins with “the world that was” and continue to, literally, the lowest and darkest space, devoted to deportation and extermination. Here interactive “camp stands” provide not only stark statistics and background but also names and photos of victims and survivors. Beyond this room the exhibits rise once more toward the light—to resistance, response, life after liberation and, outside on a small plaza, to the six granite stelae of the Holocaust Memorial erected in 1992.

Complementing the museum’s high-tech razzle-dazzle is the human touch: docents and Holocaust survivors who share their experiences. The “phenomenally creative staff had programming ready by the opening,” notes Rothman, and they expect 40,000 student visitors a year. To be sure, there are still audio guide explanations to be finished and rotating exhibits to be developed. But one set of objects is on permanent loan. “We’re only the second institution in the United States to have objects from Auschwitz-Birkenau,” he says. The items are ordinary—shoes, pressed-board suitcases, a potato peeler and a child’s cup, among others—but their resonance in tremendous.

“I picture a mother packing a suitcase for her family as a futile gesture toward a future that would never happen,” Rothman comments. “What is terrible is that there has to be a museum to tell that story. But what builds my faith in humanity is that this building was put up by people who understood its importance.”

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, 100 South The Grove Drive, Los Angeles, California, 323-651-3704, www.lamoth.org.

Please see the article at hadassahmagazine.org

Arquitectura

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, de Belzberg Architects

Ursicino Endaman Nse

Los edificios no son mudos: proporcionan un necesario telón de fondo y un ambiente que aumenta la experiencia espacial y refuerza el mensaje que lanza su contenido. Belzberg Architects se fundamentan en esta evidencia para diseñar el Museo del Holocausto en los Ángeles, en sus siglas en inglés, LAMOTH. Su estética y su integración casi espiritual con el solitario parque en el que se sitúa, ofrecen a los visitantes argumentos suficientes para introducirse en él. El simbolismo inherente al diseño intenta alejarse del estereotipo de los museos, y abre un mundo de posibilidades a la vez que muestra el potencial devastador de la crueldad humana.

Situado en un parque público, en el que se emplaza un memorial del Holocausto, la arquitectura del LAMOTH traspasa el límite entre la labor escultórica de una obra de arquitectura de estas características y su consciente labor cívica para la institución y público al que sirve. A través de una presentación potente y una experiencia espacial distinta, se mejora el contexto ambiental para que los visitantes puedan asimilar los mensajes lanzados a través de las distintas muestras. La intención última es transformar el encuentro de cada visitante con el edificio y sus alrededores en un evento memorable capaz de producir una impresión duradera del genocidio ocurrido.

La finalidad del diseño es contar alegóricamente y de forma cronológica la experiencia de las víctimas del Holocausto. La experiencia del edificio se convierte en una secuencia temporal desde la entrada hasta la ascensión de vuelta al nivel del parque. La procesión se inicia en una bajada adyacente al parque, desde el cual se impregna el visitante de los sonidos alegres de los usuarios del parque. A medida que se desciende por la larga rampa, se va perdiendo gradualmente la conexión visual con el exterior. La atención se desplaza hacia el monumento existente, con una visión estrecha de los pilares de piedra negra, cortada paulatinamente por el plano del techo del museo. Al entrar, el visitante experimenta la culminación de la transición de un ambiente lúdico a uno serio y aislado, saturado de imágenes del horror. Los visitantes salen del museo ascendiendo al nivel donde se encuentra el monumento, recuperando la conexión visual con la atmósfera del parque y consumando la experiencia museística con un sentimiento de alivio.

El conjunto de exposiciones, pantallas y componentes interactivos resalta el esfuerzo del museo por evitar información concentrada y desproporcionada, animando el contenido a través de una sucesión de exposiciones y galería ordenada de forma coherente. Debido a la amplitud del periodo histórico y del vasto volumen de archivos disponibles, el museo proporciona de primera mano una experiencia sensorial en cada visitante que refuerce su capacidad de asociar sentimientos al contenido gráfico, induciendo una conexión personal fácilmente asimilable.

La primera sala, llamada El mundo tal como era incorpora una única mesa interactiva que trata de mimetizar la comodidad social de las comunidades antes de la guerra. A medida que los visitantes caminan hacia la habitación contigua, se atenúa la iluminación en el interior del espacio. En ella se encuentran dos exposiciones separadas que representan La Noche de los Cristales Rotos y la Quema de Libros. Con esta disposición se busca dividir a la multitud que avanza por los recorridos, disminuyendo el calor producido por la cercanía de las personas. El suelo continúa descendiendo, guiando a los visitantes a la habitación Campos de Concentración, un espacio angosto y oscuro iluminado solo por los videomonitores, en los que se muestran imágenes de posiblemente uno de los momentos más oscuros de la historia de la humanidad. La ascensión final hasta el monumento del exterior del parque es liberadora. El visitante vuelve al contacto con el aire fresco y el calor del sol californiano.

Es este proceso de aprendizaje y la mezcla de experiencias mutuas lo que asegura la captación del mensaje, y su duración lejos de los muros del edificio. El LAMOTH, además, renueva de forma permanente su contenido de una manera atractiva para los usuarios, a través de la conexión con el museo y centro de estudios Yad Vashem en Jerusalén y su base de datos compartida de contenido digital, consiguiendo promover, de forma integral, un ideal de tolerancia que cale en los visitantes más jóvenes.  

Please view the entire article at www.experimenta.es

May 3, 2011
Holocaust Remembrance Day Draws Crowds to Pan Pacific

By Jonah Lowenfeld

An estimated 2,000 people gathered on May 1 for Los Angeles’ annual commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day in Pan Pacific Park. The crowd, which included octogenarians in wheelchairs, infants in strollers and people of all ages in between, listened to speeches from elected officials and community leaders who exhorted them to remember the murder of millions of innocent European Jews during World War II, which ended 66 years ago.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was among those who addressed the mostly Jewish crowd. “I believe I have a responsibility to bear witness, just as you do,” he said.

Many of the speakers referred to the ever-shrinking numbers of survivors in attendance, noting that in the coming decade, most of those who survived the attempted genocide of the Jews by the Nazis will be gone.

Ida Haberman, 87, said that as a survivor, she feels very strongly about the need for the annual event. “I’m happy that they’re still doing it, and I’m happy that they’re still coming, because we’re old people already,” she said.

The program, which has been held in various locations during its 30-year history, settled in its current location opposite the Los Angeles Holocaust Monument in Pan Pacific Park about 14 years ago. For the first time this year, attendees could walk directly from the commemoration ceremony to tour the new home of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, a 50-year-old museum whose first purpose-built building opened beside the monument in October 2010.

Among the hundreds who wandered through the subterranean halls of the museum was Ralph Hackman, 86, who survived for nearly three years in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. He stood beside a touch-screen display that told the history of another death camp, Treblinka, in words and illuminated photographs.

More than 870,000 Jews were killed at Treblinka, including Hackman’s mother and father.

“I was determined,” Hackman said, explaining how he managed to survive in Auschwitz-Birkenau. “I wanted to be a hero for my family. Unfortunately, I came back and I didn’t find anybody.”

This year’s commemoration marked the last time that Israeli Consul General Jacob Dayan, who wraps up his four-year stint in Los Angeles this summer, would address this gathering.

Protected from the afternoon sun by a large blue-and-white-striped tent, which was ringed by Israeli flags, Dayan said that upon his return to Israel, his 18-year-old daughter would be enlisting in the Israel Defense Forces. Her service, he said, will help to make Israel a haven for Jews around the world. “The Jewish State of Israel is the eternal insurance policy of the Jewish people,” Dayan said.

At one point during his speech, Dayan invited consular staff members from other countries in attendance to stand up. The crowd applauded as representatives of Austria, Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, Norway, the Philippines, Romania and Turkey stood.

“If you believe in human dignity, if you believe that people were born equal, if you believe that you should do your utmost to prevent another Holocaust from happening, you have to stand up against evil,” Dayan said.

Saying that they need to prevent “future Hitlers, and Ahmadinejad, from destroying people and other nations,” Dayan urged his fellow consular staff members to speak up. “Silence is not an option again,” he said.

Please visit jewishjournal.com for more.

More than 2,500 students commemorated Holocaust Remembrance Day during a ceremony at Pan Pacific Park’s Los Angeles Holocaust Monument, Tuesday, May 3, 2011.

Please visit the Los Angeles Daily News to view their picture slideshow of the youth event!

Survivors, Jews and non-Jews gather in Los Angeles to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day

Dozens of Holocaust survivors meet to observe Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah, an occasion to honor the 6 million or more who perished in Europe during World War II.

By Ari Bloomekatz, Los Angeles Times

May 2, 2011

Renee Firestone was just a young woman when she and her family were taken from their home in Czechoslovakia on a three-day trip in cattle cars to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.

There, Firestone's family was separated. Her father, mother, and sister were eventually killed.

The 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, who wears a gold tree of life necklace, has spent the past several decades of her life speaking about the atrocities she experienced firsthand, delivering this simple message: "Understand that there's only one race in this world, and that's the human race. And we should stop killing each other."

Firestone was among dozens of Holocaust survivors who were on hand Sunday at Pan Pacific Park in the Fairfax neighborhood of Los Angeles to observe Holocaust Remembrance Day, an occasion when Jews and non-Jews alike honor the 6 million Jews who perished in Europe during World War II.

Also known as Yom HaShoah, the commemoration in Los Angeles is in its 19th year and is billed as the largest in California. Hundreds of residents attended along with numerous state, county and city leaders.

"With each passing year, fewer and fewer survivors are here to tell their stories," said Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. "It is up to us to ensure their stories live on."

Although he is not Jewish, Villaraigosa told the crowd, "I have a responsibility to bear witness, just as you do."

Rabbi Stewart Vogel opened the ceremony by talking about how hatred and racism can lead to such atrocities. He spoke about the recent anti-Semitic vandalism at Calabasas High School, which included swastikas, a picture of Hitler, and words such as "gas chamber."

"On this Yom HaShoah, remember that indifference is not acceptable in this world," he said.

A choir sang several Jewish songs, including "Zog Nit Keyn Mol," the "Hymn of the Partisans," and candles were lighted in honor of those who died. Nearby were the newly opened Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust and the L.A. Holocaust Monument, which has six tall black pillars symbolic of the crematoriums where Jews and others were burned.

Inside the museum was a special exhibit titled "First Person Holocaust: Diaries and Memories" that includes personal chronicles, such as the memoir of Josef Brojde, which depicts life inside the Bialystock Ghetto, in Poland, during the war.

For some, like survivor Natan Gipsman, the day was an intensely painful experience because "it brings back bad memories; it reminds me of the suffering."

Jacob Dayan, consul general of Israel in Los Angeles, addressed the crowd by saying that Sunday was a day to "turn back to the dark, painful, and miserable pages of history" and to remind the world about the horrors.

It's our responsibility to pass "the torch to future generations," Dayan said. "The world should listen; the world should act; the world should make sure this never happens again," he said. "Not just to the Jewish people, but to all people."

John Loftus, who is known for helping expose Nazis who engaged in espionage work for the U.S. government behind the Iron Curtain after the war, was the featured speaker at Sunday's event and told the crowd that there is a lot more to learn about the Holocaust.

In an earlier interview, Loftus said additional classified government documents should be released and that many State Department and Justice Department officials — who he said had intelligence about the relationship between the U.S. government and Nazis — should be granted immunity so they can tell their full stories.

Ben Van Derfluit, 25, attended the event with his grandmother, 90-year-old Betty Cohen, who survived the Holocaust. Van Derfluit once asked his grandmother to speak to one of his college history classes so they could hear what it was like from someone who was there.

"I really question how many people, even young Jewish kids, know what happened," Van Derfluit said. "Let's do [a commemoration] for another 150,000 years."

ari.bloomekatz@latimes.com

Read the article at latimes.com

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

The Museum of the Holocaust in Los Angeles (LAMOTH) opened to the public in the fall of 2010. The structure, designed by Belzberg Architects of Santa Monica, is built partially underground and covers an area of 32.000sqf. Situated in Pan Pacific Park, it is adjacent to the existing Holocaust Museum built in 1961, and opposite the Holocaust Monument.

Entrance to the museum is via a ramp which descends steeply and takes us into the underground area where sobriety is mirrored in both the design of the building and the content of the exhibits. The interior of the museum consists of raw concrete walls and low ceilings again suggesting a feeling of discomfort. Faint streams of natural light enter the building at intervals through apertures, aiding energy efficiency considerations to the design.

A priority during the design of the structure was that it would be assimilated into the existing landscape unobtrusively. The result is an emotionally powerful structure as befits the subject of the museum. The undulating shape of the green roof and concrete paths are in perfect synchrony with the topography of the park.

In observance of National Holocaust Week, Donna and I joined a group of friends for a tour of the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum on April 28, 2011. Set on a wedge of parkland between Pan Pacific Park and Farmer's Market, you might actually miss seeing it. Barely rising above ground level, the museum is mostly below grade, reminding me of the megalithic passage tomb mound I observed on a visit to Newgrange on the eastern side of Ireland. The undulating walls and walkways of the museum mimic the rolling landscape of the park. Inside the exhibits are a sober reminder of the evils mankind is capable of. Everyone should experience it!

Located at 100 South The Grove Drive in the Fairfax neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Please continue to Iwan Baan Photography to view all the images of the Museum.

Experts: Don't say 'never again' to Holocaust museums
By MENACHEM WECKER FOR THE CHRONICLE

Must Holocaust museums evolve as they approach an age without any living survivors? As the Nazis recede further into the past, is there a danger of museums devoted to Holocaust memory becoming static?

A recent New York Times article by Edward Rothstein raised these provocative questions and has some experts worried about the view that Holocaust museums need to become more than one-trick ponies.

"When you say that a Holocaust museum must not be static you're implying, very strongly, that being static is bad," says Walter Reich, former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Stagnancy could mean bankruptcy for clothing designers, but what's true of fashion isn't true about the "catastrophic vulnerabilities of human nature," says Reich, now a professor at George Washington University.

"That history and those vulnerabilities are fundamentally static," he says. "It should be portrayed in a way that depicts exactly what happened. It should not become a vessel for current trends, concerns or fashions and should not stop being a museum about a discrete historical event."

Ira Perry, director of marketing and public relations at the Holocaust Museum Houston, agreed.

"Holocaust museums do not necessarily need to evolve into something else," he said. "They serve a distinct role in honoring the victims' histories and the survivors' legacies."

According to Perry, the museum, whose permanent exhibit was created by genocide scholar John Roth, Edward J. Sexton professor emeritus of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., devotes an "extensive amount of effort" to histories of survivors who moved to the Houston area and are a "critical and active" part of the museum.

Though the museum doesn't "assert any equivalence among any of the genocides," it does feature exhibits on Darfur and Rwanda.

"Beyond the fact that all had hatred as a root cause, they are all unique in why and how they occurred, the impact on their victims and their place in history," Perry says. "We believe it is critical to our own mission of teaching the dangers of hatred, prejudice and apathy to speak to today's patrons and students in relevant and meaningful ways of the variety of forms of hatred and prejudice that can and have led to violence and genocide around the world."

That message, Perry says, is all about the future, and is part of the reason the museum's education department launched a new program for students on social cruelty. "Hatred, prejudice and apathy led to the tragedy of the Holocaust, and as we have seen, they have led to other genocides since," he says. "As we teach, with knowledge comes responsibility."

The museum also sponsored the recent world premiere of Kaddish, which sets the words of survivors to music, with the Houston Symphony, and its multimedia exhibit Through Their Eyes, which records testimony of survivors — anticipating a time when they can no longer share their stories in person.

"We continue to seek new ways to speak to new audiences each and every day," Perry says.

Mark Rothman, executive director of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, which was the focus of the New York Times article, says he is thrilled "the Gray Lady has taken her place at the large table of media that looked at the museum from multiple perspectives."

Rothman is even considering creating a new lecture series at the museum based on the article, which would focus on everything from the "hysterical" Soup Nazi character from Seinfeld to inappropriate references to the Holocaust in criticism of the new health care legislation.

But Rothman says he does not understand the line of argument that Holocaust museums need to strive to remain relevant. "I don't get what motivates people to think Holocaust museums are anachronistic," he says.

Visiting a small museum near where George Washington crossed the Delaware River once, Rothman found the "very traditional exhibit" helped him understand not only the historical event but America today. "Was that anachronistic? I don't think so," he says.

Richard Hirschhaut, executive director of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, Ill., which was also mentioned in the New York Times article, says the "inherent and enduring power to the Holocaust narrative" should remain paramount always.

But the museum, which opened its current building in 2009, is evolving as all cultural institutions must, Hirschhaut says. In particular, it is focusing on preventing bullying of young people, and it strives to use social media to communicate with its audience.

"It is important to create these museums now while the survivors are with us," he says, "but they remain equally, if not more important, after the survivors are no longer with us, when the survivors can no longer tell their stories themselves."

Please vistit chron.com to see the whole article on Houstin Chronicle's web page.

Potion Designs Three Interactive Experiences for LA Museum of the Holocaust

Potion announced the completion of two interactive installations and one interactive device for the new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in Pan Pacific Park. In 2010, Potion worked with the Museum and interactive strategy consultant Variate Labs to design and fabricate a set of interactives that not only enhanced the museum visiting experience but did so in a way that respected the content at hand. The results, after a year of intensive design, content production, software development and fabrication, are a large-scale fluid interactive surface (Memory Pool), a field of interactive screens (18 Camps), and a portable touch-based guide to the museum (Spatial Audio Guide).

Memory Pool
Potion was commissioned by the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust to develop and design the "Memory Pool" interactive table as the centerpiece for the museum's first gallery. A commanding presence in matte-black aluminum and crystal-clear half-inch glass, this large-scale interactive installation tells the intimate stories of thousands of families prior to World War II via personal photography and direct testimony.

At the center of the table, three light pools continuously flood the dark table surface with photos of individuals, families and related artifacts from the museum's collection. Up to fourteen visitors may approach the table at once. Upon doing so, they are presented with hundreds of historical photos floating before them, and occasionally sinking to the bottom of the deep black pool. Visitors may then pull one of the photos towards edge of the table, whereupon the story behind the photo is slowly revealed. Every photo is associated with a person's name, a country of origin, and a significant testimony by that person or a direct relative or friend. Having parsed this information, the visitor may choose to view photos in a collection that is related to the one at hand. For example, the visitor may choose to see photos from the same family, or country, or simply look at photos with similar themes.

All of the photos and information displayed on the "Memory Pool" table are stored in a custom content management system created by Potion. The database draws the mass of its content from a database belonging to the Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation. Potion's database also stores photos and data about artifacts within the museum's collection. All of this information can be updated on regular basis by the museum staff.

The "Memory Pool" table has proven to be a true success with visitors of all ages. It is central not only to the gallery but to the conversations that take place there.

18 Camps
The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust engaged Potion to develop and design 18 Camps, a field of united interactive displays within the gallery devoted to the darkest moments of the Holocaust. As the name of the installation suggests, each screen with 18 Camps embodies a specific concentration camp, giving it a unique voice in the space.

Given the nature of the content, Potion designed the touch-sensitive displays to be as simple as possible, placing emphasis on the power of the photography. Each screen features historical photographs of the camps, stories of victims, first-person accounts of survivors and statistic about each camp. Several of the screens also offer artwork and poems by survivors of the camp. There is also a section reserved for perpetrators from each camp, along with details of their iniquities.

18 Camps' minimal interface exists in the lower fifth of each screen within a translucent overlay above the full-screen photographs. Since the photographs exist on a single line, the visitor may view all of them simply by proceeding from one to the next. Along that line, photographs are grouped together within general categories, such as "victims" and "survivors". Visitors may jump directly to these photographs by touching one of the category labels along the bottom of the screen.

When the screens are not being used by a visitor, all eighteen displays sync with each other in a choreographed sequence of imagery and text, suggesting the camps' mechanical role within the Nazi machine. Parallel statistics roll across the suite of screens, followed by maps of the camps' locations, followed by stories of specific victims. The result is a gently-paced but nonetheless overwhelming display of the Holocaust's colossal yet distributed tragedy.

Spatial Audio Guide
Potion broke new ground with the handheld audio guide created for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust's new permanent home in Los Angeles' Pan Pacific Park. Unlike traditional museum audio guides, Potion's custom-designed device is the primary source of non-visual information within the museum and is recommended for all visitors. In fact, it is free to every visitor.

The palm-sized audio guide provides narrated descriptions for up to 100 artifacts in each of the museum's ten galleries. The guide also provides synced audio for a handful of video displays located throughout the museum. This feature is the first of a kind in a hand-held listening device, and even supports syncing with video presented within the Potion-designed interactive touchscreens.

The guide features a visual browser that allows visitors to browse and select curated content with the touch of a finger. There are two ways to access every audio clip. The guide offers a list-view for each of the ten galleries, so that visitors can quickly view the type of content within each gallery, and so that it is simple to move from one artifact to the next. In addition to the gallery view, the guide allows visitors to enter the four-digit code that is associated with each artifact on display.

Potion worked closely with the Museum's staff to create a system that was both visually appealing to visitors and easily manageable for curators. In order to maintain dynamic and fresh content, Potion developed an accessible content management system for museum staff, easing the museum's exhibit updates. Potion's checkout system for the one hundred guides allows visitors to easily pick up and return the handhelds with minimal staff support. A multi-lingual version of the audio guide will be released ensuring equal access for the Museum's diverse visitors.

Please go to dexigner.com to see the full article with pictures of our interactive exhibits.

L.A.'s Holocaust Museum Creates a Quiet Oasis Amid City's Bustle

Belzberg Architects's Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is a subtle memorial in an unsubtle place.

Santa Monica-based Belzberg Architects has sent us breathtaking images of its new Holocaust museum in Los Angeles. Completed last fall, the design looks like plenty of other Holocaust memorials out there -- it's got a somber, Spartan aesthetic and lots of curving concrete (the material is actually Shotcrete, a sort of concrete lite) -- with one notable addition: a massive green roof.

Which might seem like a curious decorative flourish for a building meant to commemorate one of the darkest chapters in 20th-century history. But this is L.A., a place where cosmetic embellishments are the rule not the exception, and besides, the roof goes a long way toward minding a larger design imperative: to preserve the precious public park on which the museum sits.

Belzberg's strategy was to transpose aspects of the park onto the roof. He tucked the museum beneath street level Vietnam Memorial-like, then draped the roof overhead. Here, plantings are broken up by pedestrian walkways that connect to existing park pathways so that from overhead, the whole thing looks like a literal extension of the park. Belzberg claims it's one of the largest green roofs in Southern California.

The museum has been criticized for being too inconspicuous, for, being, as the L.A. Times's architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne writes, "oddly deferential" and "happy to erase its public presence." It's important to note that the park is hard by the Grove, a horrifyingly huge shopping mall, parking garage, and all-around gridlock magnet that represents L.A. worst instincts. Against that, we'll take "oddly deferential" any day. 

Written by Suzanne Labarre

Please view the picture slideshow at fastcodesign.com

L.A.'s Holocaust Museum Uses High Tech to Create a Highly Personal Experience

Just the location of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust makes it clear that it's doing something different. The museum itself is a series of sculptural concrete waves which are tucked almost imperceptibly into a hill of native grasses in Pan Pacific Park, near the Disney-fied architecture of the Grove shopping center. Inside, the walls curve around a series of video screens, back-lit photos and artifact installations. People wander the space in silence, listening intently to voices of Holocaust survivors, taking in what's possibly the most innovative museum experience in the city.

Founded in 1961, the museum is the oldest in the country devoted to the Holocaust. So when it moved into a new home, it also adopted new technology. With a collection that includes thousands of video interviews of local Holocaust survivors, the museum was a prime candidate for an interactive, multimedia experience. But it also needed a smart narrative. "Rather than recreate the Holocaust like every other Holocaust museum, we made it about content and personal stories relevant to L.A.," says Miles Kemp, president of Variate Labs, who designed the exhibits in collaboration with architect Hagy Belzberg and with New York-based Potion.

Visitors to the museum each get an iPod Touch equipped with headphones to wear throughout the experience. There are no printed captions on photos, nor are their lengthy descriptions of artifacts: For each exhibit or video, the visitor must dial in the exhibit number to get the audio. It's a bold move to force all visitors to use this technology, and I wondered how people who might not be comfortable with Apple touchscreens would react. "It's completely intuitive," says Kemp, demonstrating the interface. "80-year-old people have no problem using it. They love that the people are talking to them."

As I slip on my headphones I realize he's right: Hearing all the content conveyed through voices, not on written placards, gives the experience a dramatic intimacy. Instead of hiring actors to read the exhibit information, Kemp used L.A survivors, who recorded their voices themselves. The result is audio that's not overly polished or edited, which he thinks gives a sense of authenticity to the words.

By placing Los Angeles and its survivors squarely at the center, the museum becomes immediately relevant to its local audience. The narrative starts with a video of Jack Taylor, an American soldier from L.A. who liberated one of the first concentration camps. Clips about the war are cut from the Los Angeles Times, and a massive wall on Jewish culture focuses on entertainers and artists with L.A. ties. Throughout, the experience features L.A. survivors and artifacts owned by Los Angeles residents.

A centerpiece of the exhibition is a massive interactive table where a touchscreen interface allows visitors to sift through more than 25,000 images of Jewish life before the Holocaust. The images, black-and-white photos of weddings and family portraits, float up like they're surfacing in a large pool of water. You could spend an hour here flicking through photographs. Kemp shows me how the table can be operated in "curator mode," allowing docents to highlight and browse images in unison for school groups gathered around the table.

One of the most poignant moments is created in a room full of 18 kiosks, each one representing one of the concentration camps. Each kiosk presents stark facts about the camp it represents, like the number of people killed, but also lets visitors view video interviews from survivors and photos from the camps, humanizing the data. As I looked through images of camp life, I was surprised by the effectiveness of the narration in my headphones. Hearing the captions spoken, rather than reading them, allowed my eyes to focus more on the images themselves. Giving people this flexible, multimedia experience, Kemp hopes, will result in a more personalized—and more engaging—museum. "It enables people to stay longer since they're not on one linear path."

Like the museum experience, L.A.'s Holocaust story is still evolving. A final section, which is not yet completed, will feature more context about ongoing persecution and genocide throughout the world. Right now, survivors serve as docents, giving guided tours through the museum. But this won't always be the case, acknowledges Kemp, so they're working on creating a massive video wall where statements from survivors can be accessed through the iPod Touch system, effectively allowing visitors to tune in to any story. Variate Labs also built the content management system and trained the museum's archivist to digitize and upload new pieces into the system, helping them keep the collection as up-to-date as possible.

That flexibility is what makes the L.A. Museum of the Holocaust radically different. In essence, the museum exists completely in the cloud, and can be completely catered to your own personal interests. Ideally, says Kemp, the museum's content could become a mobile app that could live on your phone, allowing you to access the stories and images at home in order to engage more fully with the content. That would accomplish what all institutions want—to expand their experiences beyond the museum walls.

Alissa Walker
A writer, a gelato-eater and a walker in LA

Please see the entire article with images at www.good.is

Bearing Witness Beyond the Witnesses

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: March 23, 2011

LOS ANGELES — Is the Holocaust too much with us? Or if not the Holocaust, then Holocaust museums?

It can sometimes seem so. The Association of Holocaust Organizations has 293 institutional members around the world, each at least partly devoted to commemoration. The association counts 16 major Holocaust museums in the United States, in Richmond, Houston, New York, Washington and other cities to which Jewish survivors immigrated after World War II. And they are still being built. Two years ago the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center opened near Chicago. And last fall the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust opened here in a new $15.5 million building. It is actually the city’s second such museum; the other, the Museum of Tolerance, examines the Holocaust’s connection to its main theme and welcomes 350,000 visitors a year.

But the answer to these questions is not easy for it seems that while almost all of these institutions have developed out of the desires of survivors to offer testimony, command remembrance, educate the young and ensure that nothing similar occurs, at the same time exaggerated and wrong-headed Holocaust and Nazi analogies have proliferated at an even greater rate than the museums themselves. It is as if familiarity is breeding analogy, and analogy is unaffected by how many institutions meticulously survey the horrors of calculated, systematic murder on a mass scale. The new museum here, in Pan Pacific Park, not far from the traditionally Jewish district of Fairfax Avenue, should not, of course, bear the brunt of these broodings. It does, however, in its successes and failures, indicate some of the challenges that will face Holocaust museums when there are no longer any remaining survivors and they commemorate a receding historical trauma.

The Holocaust museum here is a strange hybrid, for not only is it the country’s newest, it is also, its literature asserts, the oldest, tracing its origins to 1961, when a group of survivors studying English as a Second Language at Hollywood High School decided it would be important to display some of the objects that had survived with them and that might, in a museum setting, bear witness.

The museum was supported by the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles until 2005. But it lost its Wilshire Boulevard home after a 1994 earthquake and found itself wandering from one place to another, its primacy eclipsed by the Museum of Tolerance and its future in doubt. It was able to lease the current site from the city, but it is unlikely the museum could have been built without the assistance of the Los Angeles lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg (who is the grandson of two Viennese Jewish composers: Arnold Schoenberg and Eric Zeisl).

Mr. Schoenberg was the lawyer for Maria V. Altmann, who challenged the Austrian government by asserting her claim to Gustav Klimt paintings stolen by the Nazis. After Mr. Schoenberg triumphed in that case in 2006, he and his wife, Pamela, donated more than $7 million to the museum. He became its president, helped shaped its displays and even wrote some of the exhibition text. Under the museum’s executive director, Mark A. Rothman, the board has raised almost all of the $20 million the institution sought as its endowment.

The 32,000-square-foot building, designed by Belzberg Architects, is radically self-effacing and, in a city designed for cars, weirdly easy to miss while driving past. It bears no evident symbols of its subject and is largely subterranean. Its entrance on one end elides into the park’s play areas and a 1991 Holocaust memorial; on the other side, the entrance is a corridor slicing through its low grass-topped roof. As required by the city, the building hardly intrudes on the park. The problem is that this also puts out of sight the very thing the museum is supposed to bring to notice.

Like many Holocaust museums this one tries to approach its subject with a local perspective. Many of its artifacts and the people it discusses have some connection to the Los Angeles area. That is often fascinating, because many important scholars and artists from Germany and Austria came to Southern California, which is why Herbert Marcuse gets a mention here, along with Carl Laemmle, a founder of Universal Pictures.

Along the museum’s main corridor are chronicles of the Holocaust told using the front pages of local newspapers. One of the earliest, from The Los Angeles Times in 1933, reports that Secretary of State Cordell Hull had reassured Jewish leaders that while there was “considerable physical mistreatment of Jews” in Nazi Germany, “government leaders had taken action resulting in termination of the outrages.”

There is also a tabletop touch screen called a Memory Pool, on which photographs of Jews in prewar Europe seem to float. Touch them and you learn more, say, about Gabor Weisz’s restaurant in Fot, Hungary, or about other once-anonymous individuals, the images contributed by families or drawn from a centralized European database.

An iPod Touch is provided for each visitor (with admission, which is free). Each artifact is numbered; key in the number, and audio commentary, ranging from the cursory to the encyclopedic, can be heard. So can Nazi songs, recordings of prayers made in postwar displaced-persons camps, diary entries by ghetto inhabitants and poems from the period.

In the museum’s most intense gallery there are 18 touch screens, each giving information about a death camp, along with video interviews with survivors. On a monitor a survivor of Sobibor, in Poland, Thomas Blatt, points to a wooden model of the camp he constructed from memory, showing how an escape was planned. Before us, on display, is that very model.

Artifacts on loan from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland require no commentary: a battered shoe, a worn suitcase, an enameled child’s cup. And a special exhibition also shows remarkable comic and sardonic drawings acquired by the museum, secretly sketched by Erich Lichtblau-Leskly while he was imprisoned at Theresienstadt.

The material here is so extensive and the subject so important that it might seem perverse to complain. Nevertheless, too much of the exhibition is still unfocused, and its overall purpose is not clearly defined. Some problems are organizational. The story is chronologically told, and each gallery is lined with backlighted black-and-white photos. But within galleries, the order can be haphazard. Examples of books burned by the Nazis are interrupted by displays of Nazi uniforms and Nazi political cartoons.

Many displays are almost miscellaneous gatherings of objects. Some audio entries need to be drastically cut. Others do not correspond to anything on view. And artifacts lack identifying labels; they only have audio-tour numbers, so without listening you don’t know what you are seeing. (A decision has recently been made to provide labels, which will be a great help.)

In a gallery describing European ghettos, why is a panel devoted to Unites States wartime internment camps for Japanese-Americans? Is an argument being made about similarities? If so, important differences also need to be analyzed. And near the Sobibor model we read about genocide in general, and about Darfur, Rwanda, Cambodia and Armenia. But if the museum’s purpose was to explore genocide, it would have to be done in far greater detail; these cursory accounts seem to challenge the uniqueness of what we are seeing, even as the museum has gone out of its way to emphasize it. The approach asserts equivalence without really showing it.

These moments illuminate why the impact of Holocaust museums has been so qualified; many seem to feel obligated, given their claims on wider public interest, educational grants and class attention, to generalize beyond the particulars, as if simply recounting history would seem overly parochial. And thus they set the stage for poor analogies being made every day.

But as survivors die and the history grows distant, how can such institutions evolve? They have to present a different context for this awful history. What about getting more particular rather than more general?

As a Los Angeles museum, for example, this institution might strengthen its local focus and tell the history of the Holocaust as a story with regional implications for Southern California. It might follow local reactions to the Holocaust, trace the lives and families of survivors and émigrés, and expand the intriguing examples it already provides.

For example there is a haunting panel here about Dina Gottlieb Babbitt, who, as an 18-year-old art student in Prague, was deported to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz. She comforted the children at Auschwitz by drawing pictures from the film “Snow White” on the barracks walls. They were seen by Dr. Josef Mengele, who was so impressed he ordered her to draw pictures of Gypsies before he experimented on them.

She used her talents to barter for the lives of inmates, including her mother. She survived, we learn, moved to Los Angeles and married Art Babbitt, an animator who had, by coincidence, worked on the same movie whose images she drew at Auschwitz. Years later she tried to get back the drawings she made for Mengele from the Auschwitz museum. The request was denied.

Read this and you get a vivid sense of the Holocaust not as a genocidal abstraction but as a fearsome conglomeration of particular evils, whose shadow can still be felt, even here.

View the artcile at nytimes.com

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust by Belzberg Architects

The new building for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH), designed by Belzberg Architects, is located within a public park, adjacent to existing Los Angeles Holocaust Memorial. Following is some information by the designer, “Paramount to the design strategy is the integration of the building into the surrounding open, park landscape. The museum is submerged into the ground allowing the park’s landscape to continue over the roof of the structure. Existing park pathways are used as connective elements to integrate the pedestrian flow of the park with the new circulation for museum visitors.The pathways are morphed onto the building and appropriated as surface patterning. The patterning continues above the museum’s galleries, further connecting the park’s landscape and pedestrian paths. By maintaining the material pallet of the park and extending in onto the museum, the hues and texture of concrete and vegetation blend with the existing material pallet of Pan Pacific Park. These simple moves create a distinctive faade for the museum while maintaining the parks topography and landscape. The museum emerges from the landscape as a single, curving concrete wall that splits and carves into the ground to form the entry. Designed and constructed with sustainable systems and materials, the LAMOTH building is on track to receive a LEED Gold Certificate from the US Green Building Council.

Patrons begin their procession at the drop off adjacent to the park. Their approach is pervaded by sounds and sights of laughter and sport of kids playing in the park and picnicking with their families. Because the building is partially submerged beneath the grassy, park landscape, entry to the building entails a gradual deterioration of this visual and auditory connection to the park while descending a long ramp. Upon entering, visitors experience the culmination of their transition from a playful and unrestrained, public park atmosphere to a series of isolated spaces saturated with photographic archival imagery. As part of the design strategy, this dichotomous relationship between building content and landscape context is emphasized to bolster the experience inside the museum and allegorically correlate the proximity with which German forest revelers enjoying public parks were to sites of horrific and inhumane acts being carried out in 1930’s and 40’s. Visitors exit the museum by ascending up to the level of the existing monument, regaining the visual and auditory connection with the park environs.

The first room is titles, “The World That Was”, and incorporates a large, single interactive table, mimicking a conceptual “community” or dinner table. The exhibit brings a large group of patrons together around one interactive exhibit. The lighting of the interior galleries dim as the visitor steps down into the subsequent rooms where two separate exhibits depicting “Kristallnacht” and a “Book Burning” display divide the singular crowd; diminishing the “community” provided by people nearby. Through the third room and into the fourth, the floor continues to step down as ambient lighting becomes scarcer leading individuals to the room titles, “Concentration Camps”. The ceiling is low, and the room is almost entirely illuminated by individual video monitors, about the size of a notebook, which limits viewing to a single spectator. The visitor is now confined to the most isolated, darkest and volumetrically concentrated underground area in the museum. The journey from this point forward in one of ascension and of finding the comfort of familiar space as floor levels begin to rise and natural lights begins to penetrate the interior once again. The ascent up to the existing monument is filled with sights and sounds of unrestricted park land.”

See more at thedesignhome.com

Young leaders get the lowdown in 10-minute talks

By Jonah Lowenfeld

As he took the stage on Feb. 23, Mark Rothman, executive director of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, had just one question.

“Where’s my timer?” he asked.

You have 10 minutes: That’s the first rule for speakers at BINA-LA, a monthly program for young professionals. The events are sponsored by the three-year-old Israeli Leadership Council (ILC), whose third annual sold-out gala is set to take place at the Beverly Hilton on March 20.

Bina is the Hebrew word for insight; BINA-LA is the ILC’s young division. First launched in August 2010, BINA-LA has held seven events so far, offering up a handful of presenters, most of them local. This is intentional, said Amir Give’on, the 37-year-old Israeli-born NASA researcher who helped found BINA-LA. “It’s about bringing people from within the community to talk about what they do,” Give’on said. (He said he’d make an exception to the group’s “no celebrities” rule if Sarah Silverman wanted to speak at BINA-LA.)

Most BINA-LA talks relate to Israel or Judaism in some way, but the topics vary widely. At the February BINA-LA, four back-to-back presentations included Rothman’s talking about the Holocaust’s role in the founding of Israel, choreographer Barak Marshall on the politics of Israeli dance, composer David Rodwin on the Jewishness of 20th-century orchestral music and Sharon Rechter, an Israeli American entrepreneur who co-founded a television channel for babies, talking about what startup companies could learn from Israel. (And no, she hasn’t read that book.)

The BINA-LA speakers, like the coordinators, are all volunteers. Programs like this one show the vast talent pool that the ILC can draw upon.

“It’s like an Israeli TED,” said Shanee Feig, the sole paid ILC staffer working on BINA-LA. Feig, 29, was born and bred in Los Angeles to Israeli parents, and she was referring to TED, the organization that brings the smart, rich and/or famous to present “Ideas Worth Spreading.” As in TED Talks, BINA-LA’s speakers all use PowerPoint, and all of the presentations are videotaped. Many of the videos are posted on the group’s Web site, binala.org. (Sasha Strauss’ presentation at the first BINA-LA, “$100,000 of Brand Strategy Advice,” is very TED-like.)

The goal isn’t to create a forum for frontal dissemination of information, though, but rather to foster a community of smart, young Angelenos who care about Israel.

The 100 or so 20- and 30-somethings who made it to the Mark event space on Pico Boulevard for BINA-LA in February were a mix of Israeli Americans, American Jews and hybrids who fall somewhere in between those categories.

“Look around,” Give’on said after the evening’s talks were over. The BINA-LA dress code runs from tailored suits to shlumpy sweaters. Give’on favored a happy medium — Chuck Taylors and a slim sport jacket. People picked at sushi from the buffet and/or kept the bartender busy. And even during the time for socializing, a sizable chunk of the room was taken up by three of the evening’s speakers, who were busy fielding questions. “The speakers didn’t just come here and give a talk,” Give’on said. “They threw a topic on the table. People here have a lot to talk about.”

An eavesdropper at BINA-LA might have overheard the young, mostly (but not exclusively) single Jews conversing about their Facebook friends, their medical subspecialties or their opinions about the Israeli TV show “Ramzor” and its American remake, “Traffic Light.”

BINA-LA isn’t intended to be a straight-up singles scene, but there’s a lot of seeing and being seen that goes on. “If you see how many girls in the restroom are fixing their makeup,” one female attendee said, “you’ll get a lot of the reason that they’re here.”

Which isn’t to say that BINA-LA’s programmers don’t take their task seriously — they do. BINA-LA emcee Daniel Housman, a former arts journalist and screenwriter, talks with every speaker beforehand. So do Give’on and his fellow volunteer coordinators. “Before I tell you what to speak about,” Give’on tells BINA-LA presenters, “let me tell you about the feeling I want people to come out of the room with.”

Rothman, a seasoned public speaker, confessed to being a bit surprised by the intensity of the preparation. “I’ve never had performance anxiety like I had before BINA,” Rothman said afterward.

Generously funded by the ILC (Haim Saban is a major supporter), BINA-LA isn’t an expensive night out. (Tickets are $25 at the door including one drink, and cheaper in advance.) And it still flies somewhat under the radar. “It’s all friends of friends,” Give’on said. “That’s why you won’t see us on regular calendars.”

The same can’t be said for BINA-LA’s powerful parent organization. Since its founding in 2007, ILC members have supported many charitable efforts in and around Los Angeles. That’s the organization’s goal. “We don’t solicit somebody to become our member,” ILC board co-chair Eli Tene said. “We solicit people to get involved in other organizations.”

Among the nearly 100 members of ILC are individuals who sit on the boards of other Jewish community nonprofits, the former president of a Jewish community school and major supporters of AIPAC, StandWithUs and other Israel advocacy groups.

ILC also underwrites select projects of its own. Israeli Scouts (Tsofim) troops in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles and Orange County all expanded in recent years thanks to ILC support. ILC recently launched ILCare, a new volunteer-matching initiative, and is considering expanding to other American cities.

And of course, there’s BINA-LA. For Give’on, assembling “a well-connected group of intelligent Israelis and Americans” is his way of helping Israel.

“Israel has always been at war,” Give’on said, “and we know today that war can be anywhere. The war can be in the media, and BINA is really a way to help Israel, in that sense.”

Listen to Mark Rothman's entire speech at binala.org.

ARCHITECT: LAMH, Los Angeles by Belzberg Architects :

Please go to A1212.com to see the images posted of the Museum.

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust Designer: Belzberg Architects

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Image Credits: Iwan Baan

The building is submerged into the ground allowing the park’s landscape to continue over the roof of the structure. This eco-structural element is one of the largest intensive green roofs in Southern California, which instantly creates sensitivity and an understanding to its surroundings.

Please go to spaceinvading.com to see posted images of the Museum.

LAMH // Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust by Belzberg Architects
published in: Architecture By Tina Komninou, 15 March 2011

Project Title: Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust // LAMH
Year: 2010
Status: Completed
Project Type: Cultural
Construction Type: New
Size: 27,000 ft2
Location: 100 South The Grove Drive, Los Angeles, CA  90036
Client(s): Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
President: Randy Schoenberg
Director: Mark Rothman
Design Architect: Belzberg Architects
Principal: Hagy Belzberg
Project Manager: Aaron Leppanen
Project Team: Andrew Atwood, Barry Gartin, Brock DeSmit, Carina Bien-Wilner , Christopher Arntzen, Cory Taylor, Daniel Rentsch, David Cheung, Eric Stimmel, Erik Sollom, Justin Brechtel, Philip Lee, Lauren Zuzack
Structural Consultant: William Koh & Associates
Mechanical Consultant: John Dorius & Associates
Electrical Consultant :A&F Consulting Engineers
Plumbing Consultant: Tom Nasrollahi & Associates
Soils Engineer: Irvine Geotechnical
Methane Engineer: Carlin Environmental
Environmental Engineer: Enviropro, Inc.
General Contractor: Winters-Schram
Special Fabrication: Spectrum Oak Products, Swiss Woodworking
Photography: Belzberg Architects, Benny Chan - Fotoworks, Iwan Baan
Awards: 2008 (Mayor’s Award)  Allen Matkins Green Building Design Concept Award, Sponsoring Organization:  Los Angeles Business Council

In 2010 the LAMH (Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust) was completed, created by Belzberg Architects. This project covering an approximate area of 32,000 sqft, has been designed with a great sensitivity and an even greater need to capture the essence of its displays through, form, structure, light and circulation. The architecture plays a primal role in the emotional journey that its visitors are ready to commence, taking them form past to present.
The museum is located in a public park adjacent to the existing Holocaust Memorial. The building is submerged into the ground allowing the park’s landscape to continue over the roof of the structure. This eco-structural element is one of the largest intensive green roofs in Southern California, which instantly creates sensitivity and an understanding to its surroundings. The journey to the LAMH begins with a day in the outdoors passing by children playing football, hearing laughter and observing motions and activities. Upon arrival the building is almost concealed into the landscape and the visitor is surprised and anxious to discover the journey that lies ahead. The actual entrance into the museum entails a gradual deterioration by a descending long ramp into the lower level. With this gradual journey to the levels below ground, you move from the planes of openness and movement of the outside world into the secluded and isolated spaces of the indoors.
As one keeps stepping down to commence his journey the lighting dims even more and the ceiling lowers. The design intent is to allegorically relate the visitor’s chronological experience of the building to that of Holocaust victims.  In order to achieve this, the experience of the building is largely dictated by the timeline of a visitor’s passage from point of arrival through to his/her ascension back to park level. This emotional journey is designated by the architectural structure indicating the sensitivity of the space and embracing you in its interiors.
The main and sole architectural materials used in this building are formed shorcrete and glass. The passages through the irregular form openings almost make you feel like you are in a cocoon like space. A separation from the outside world but not a claustrophobic or intimidating one. This has been achieved by the use of these two prime materials which are simplistic and balanced between fragility and solidity. There is an absolute harmony between the form of the architecture and the materials used to implement this.  
From the first room that you are guided to titled ‘The War that Was’ to the fourth titled ‘Concentration Camp’ the lighting is almost scarce and the room is almost entirely illuminated by video monitors, the visitor is now confined to the most isolated, darkest and volumetrically concentrated underground area in the museum. Now from here on the journey is one of ascension and of finding the comfort of a familiar space as floor levels begin to rise and natural lights begins to penetrate the interior once again.  Your journey has started from the past at the lowest and darkest level and now it is gradually moving you towards the present. The intended purpose is not for the visitor to live the museum feeling emotionally drained and dark. By ascending up to the existing monument filled with sights and sounds of the unrestricted park land, the visitor feels the visual connection and is left with a lasting impression of the journey which is now looking into the future.
In such a delicate themed architectural project Belzberg Architects have paid great tribute to the essence of this museum, while at the same time giving respect and hope to all its visitors. A structure that does not want to emotionally drain you. A building that takes you into the future by remembering the past and paying great attention to the present.

sources:Belzberg Architects

SCULPTURE PAYS HOMAGE TO KINDERTRANSPORT
      
By Suzan Filipek

Before the start of World War II, 10,000 Jewish children rode trains safely to London.

Foster families, farms and orphanages took in the German children, some who were still toddlers. Most would leave their families behind forever.

Their story is told in artist Gabriella Karin’s sculpture, “A Tribute to the Children of the Kindertransport,” which opened last month at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, Pan Pacific Park.

The colorful, 14-foot wide by five-foot tall display of 65 train cars carries snapshots of 744 children.

These are among the children who had traveled from Germany and the annexed territories of Austria, Poland and the Czech lands to London in the years 1938 and 1939.

“It’s bittersweet,” Karin says of the sculpture she made in her Miracle Mile home studio, with assistance from her husband Fred Ofer.

Most of the thumb-sized faces that look out from the orange, red and purple-colored box cars would never see their parents again.

“Can you imagine?” says Gabriella, a Slovak native.

The project is a co-effort with fellow museum docent Michelle Gold, who helped gather the photos from museum archives in Washington D.C., the Kindertransports Assoc. and from survivors and their relatives.

Gold’s mother was 15 when she arrived in London. A Glasgow family, who her parents had met on a holiday a year before in Holland, adopted her.

“She always said she was one of the lucky ones,” the younger Gold said. But her mother would never see her parents after she left Leipzig.

The whimsical style of the railroad cars was intentional. “[Gabriella] made it very childlike so children of the same age could relate to it,” said Gold.

Some of the cabooses are double deckers to accommodate all the photos. “We didn’t want to refuse anybody,” Karin added.

Karin was hidden in a convent for three years during World War II. The young artist created her own stamp on a forged paper declaring her a Catholic. Her mother worked for the Underground and arranged for the family to spend the final nine months of the war in hiding in a neighbor’s apartment. It was in an unfortunate spot—across from Gestapo headquarters in the German-occupied Slovak capital Bratislava.

And yet, “they [Nazis] went apartment to apartment but they never entered this house,” recalls Karin.

Eight people hid and survived the war in the home of the neighbor, a 25-year-old Roman Catholic lawyer. Years after the war Karin traced him to his burial site in Ohio.

The last kindertransport left Prague on Sept. 3, 1939, carrying 250 children. But they were sent back because the Nazis had invaded Poland, marking the start of World War II. In all 1.5 million children would perish during the Holocaust, Karin said.

Despite the trying times, many of the children who were transported to London thrived. They would have families of their own and went on to promising careers, including Supreme Court judges and positions in London parliament, said Karin.

A dark side of the sculpture shows most of their parents’ fate.

At the bottom of the exhibit a dark brown cattle car carries their parents headed toward Auschwitz.

“A Tribute to the Children of the Kindertransports” is at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, 7600 Beverly Blvd. Free. Parking is free for four hours in the Pan Pacific Recreation Complex on Beverly Blvd.

For more go to Larchmont Chronicle's website.

ADL Young Leaders Visit Museum of the Holocaust

Date: March 2, 2011
ADL Young Leaders

Young professionals who are part of the Glass Leadership Institute in both the Los Angeles and San Diego regions joined together to visit the new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust on February 27.  The event started with a docent presenting information about the story of the museum, its architect (a former Glass graduate) and future plans for the children's memorial.  

The group was introduced to the artist and museum staff person who assembled and mounted a temporary exhibit comprised of pictures of some of the 10,000 children who escaped on the Kindertransport.  Regional Director Amanda Susskind pointed out the picture of her father, who escaped from Prague in August of 1939.

The participants toured the entire museum with audio-guides that provided an overview of the museum's Holocaust-era artifacts and exhibits.  Following the tour, the group had a discussion with a Holocaust survivor and learned about ADL's Holocaust Education programs and resources.

For more information read the full article here.

Technology + Art = iPhone apps

February 28, 2011


I saw an article in Art Daily that caught my attention: “A New iPhone App, Which Recognizes Art, Set to Transform the Art Fair Experience.” It was bound to happen and I entirely expected this transformation in the art world.

We already saw the infiltration of technology into experiencing art with the creation of Google’s Art Project . Now, iPhone users can experience New York art fairs digitally.

The Collectrium iPhone app.

    “The art fair visitor equipped with the Collectrium mobile app will be able to point her iPhone at any registered artwork exhibited at the fair and:
    • instantly receive extensive information on the artist and the piece;
    • add the artwork to “My Collection” favorites;
    • share with friends via Facebook, Twitter and email;
    • contact the gallery about the artwork.” –Art Daily

The app is essentially a “social art management system” and aims to enhance art visits.

Art going digital isn’t a new idea. However, I wonder how far this notion will venture in the art world. I did some research on what’s out there now…

Turns out, iPhone and digital apps are quite the trend in the museum industry. For example, the Martin Agency in Richmond, Virginia has used QR codes in ads and a Facebook page dedicated to their Picasso exhibit that opened in mid-February.

Because QR codes are “ugly”, the agency decided to create a portrait of Picasso using the QR codes.  I must say, that is too cool for school.

iPhone apps are also being increasingly created by museums in the U.S. The Museum of Modern Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the American Museum of Natural History, all have iPhone apps (just to name a few).

Some argue that the infiltration of digital touring into museums takes away the art experience: the getting lost, the discovering items, the taking notes and looking up information when you get home aspects of museums. With iPhone apps, you can easily find a map of the museum, where the closest restroom is, and additional information about some exhibits.

But, could this be enhancing a viewer’s experience? I guess only time will tell the true impact of these applications on the art experience. But like I said, I definitely expected it.

In turn, Apple is also influencing how art is created. Mashable highlights some awesome iPhone, iPod touch and iPad creations made on apps through these devices…

Visit kristenwishon.wordpress.com for more information

A museum dedicated to teaching visitors about the Holocaust, The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMH) design represents a harmony between presentation, architecture, history and education.

Belzberg Architects say the museum’s allegorical interpretation of the Holocast era gives visitors a sensory experience. They are taken on a chronological journey, heading underground through the museum and eventually ascending back to the surface, where they are re-exposed to natural light.

Guests enter the museum via a long ramp that heads downward, thus diminshing visual and auditory connections to the outside.

As they head further into the museum, the lighting decreases. When they are learning about the most gruesome aspects of the Holocaust, such as concentration camps, they are in an isolated room that’s nearly dark. When they finally exit the building, they are reconnected with light and sound in the outside world.

Part of the museum is submerged under a grassy park area, that’s one of the largest green roofs in Southern California. It’s intended to correlate with parks in Germany, where people enjoyed lighthearted company with friends, while at the same time, inhumane acts were carried out against other victims in the 1930s and 40s.

The 9750 sq m buidling is constructed of shotcrete and glass. The designers say the LAMH uses architecture ‘to enhance the ambient foundation for visitors to receive the intended messages deliver through each display.’

Maria Altmann, Who Sought Nazi-Looted Art, Dies

by Karen Grigsby Bates

Maria Altmann spent the past 60 years of her life in Los Angeles. The Viennese native had fled the Nazis, and her wealthy family's possessions were looted. But in 2004, Altmann won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that allowed her suit against the Austrian government to recover some of the looted art to go forward.

Please go to NPR to listen to the NPR news story.

Transcript:

MELISSA BLOCK, host:

You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

When 94-year-old Maria Altmann died on Monday, she left not only grieving relatives and friends, she also left a legal legacy, one that may in the future help families right a decades-long injustice.

NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates has her story.

KAREN GRISBY BATES: Maria Altmann died in Los Angeles, but she was born in Vienna when the city was a flourishing center of the arts. She told NPR in 1998 her aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, was at the center of it all.

Ms. MARIA ALTMANN: She was a patron of Gustav Klimt who painted her portraits, and she died at age 42. And there was a memorial room in the palais of my uncle, where all the Klimts were, and the house was full of beautiful artwork. So I grew up with that.

BATES: Altmann lived in luxury until the eve of World War II. She fled the Nazis, who commandeered her family's home and all of its possessions, including what's become one of Gustav Klimt's most famous paintings, a Klimt's portrait of her aunt now valued at more than $130 million.

After the war, Altmann visited the painting as it traveled in exhibitions, but despaired of ever having it returned to her family.

Ms. ALTMANN: I had given up all hope and so did my sister and brother who, unfortunately, deceased by now.

BATES: When Austria passed a law in 1998 that allowed heirs to looted estates to press for their belongings to be returned, Altmann tried again. No luck.

Some of Altmann's family possessions have been returned, but the family had had to give up rights to several important paintings in order to get the rest out of the country. The late Hubertus Czernin, an Austrian journalist who wrote about his country's looted art holdings, put it bluntly to NPR in 1998.

(Soundbite of archived NPR broadcast)

Mr. HUBERTUS CZERNIN (Journalist): This was, in my point of view, a classic case of blackmailing. They had no chance and no choice.

BATES: Maria Altmann decided to enlist the help of a young family friend, lawyer Randy Schoenberg.

Mr. RANDY SCHOENBERG (Lawyer; President, Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust): It's unusual to find a case this long after the initial taking that is so large and not properly resolved.

BATES: Schoenberg, himself a child of Holocaust survivors and president of L.A.'s Museum of the Holocaust, based this case on 1976 U.S. law that says sovereign entities do not have absolute immunity when they appropriate U.S. citizens' property. And the law was retroactive. Schoenberg took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and won. The next step, he told Altmann, should be arbitration in Vienna.

Mr. SCHOENBERG: And she said, are you crazy? We just went all the way up to the Supreme Court and back. Why would we ever want to go back and have the case decided in Austria? And I said, Maria, if you want the case decided in your lifetime, we have to take this chance and do it.

BATES: To many people's shock, the arbitration panel agreed the painting should be returned.

Michael Bazyler, an expert on Holocaust restitution law at Chapman University Law School, says the Austrians should be given credit for that decision.

Professor MICHAEL BAZYLER (Chapman University Law School): Austria could have just said, so what? We're not going to comply with it. They just complied with it.

BATES: A very satisfied Maria Altmann was present when they arrived.

Ms. ALTMANN: The biggest triumph for me is the chance to admit publicly now how everything that they said was not true.

BATES: The portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer is on display in a small museum in New York, a city with one of the country's largest Jewish communities.

Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR News.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

The Museum of the Holocaust in Los Angeles (LAMOTH) opened to the public in the fall of 2010. The structure, designed by Belzberg Architects of Santa Monica, is built partially underground and covers an area of 32.000sqf. Situated in Pan Pacific Park, it is adjacent to the existing Holocaust Museum built in 1961, and opposite the Holocaust Monument.

Entrance to the museum is via a ramp which descends steeply and takes us into the underground area where sobriety is mirrored in both the design of the building and the content of the exhibits. The interior of the museum consists of raw concrete walls and low ceilings again suggesting a feeling of discomfort. Faint streams of natural light enter the building at intervals through apertures, aiding energy efficiency considerations to the design.

A priority during the design of the structure was that it would be assimilated into the existing landscape unobtrusively. The result is an emotionally powerful structure as befits the subject of the museum. The undulating shape of the green roof and concrete paths are in perfect synchrony with the topography of the park.

Article by Konstantinos Deloudis. Posted on December 31st, 2010 in Specials & Belzberg Architects.

Visit delood.com for more.

Budding Relationship - The merger of landscape and architecture is creating fertile new approaches to building.

In case you didn’t notice, the architecture world is embracing all things green with an enthusiasm not seen since the 1970s. But this time around, the movement has expanded far beyond the grass-roots level to a broader merging of architecture and landscape. This soil-meets-steel trend, precipitated largely by our limited space resources, by the crossover in design fields, and by our desire to return to our roots, has forced architects and landscape architects to collaborate more closely, and occasionally, even to reverse roles.
“The boundary between landscape and architecture barely exists anymore,” said architect Michael Maltzan, who this summer opened the Playa Vista park on LA’s West Side, a composition broken up into a series of “urban rooms,” as the architect calls them, including floating recreation areas, large angular planted mounds, carved granite bridges, and a tensile fabric band shell. Combining valuable techniques learned from landscape architect James Burnett with his own architectural expertise, Maltzan used materials to reinforce the separation of space and employed shapes and textures to lead people through the park. In the end, the park is as much architecture as it is landscape.

“The concerns and investigations are the same,” said Maltzan. “If you remove the traditional distinctions between what disciplines are supposed to be doing and imagine what needs to be done, then you can create real innovation,” he added. Several of Maltzan’s upcoming projects merge architecture and the land, including the Cornfields Park in LA, the Piggyback Yard near the LA River, and the Art Park, next to the Geffen Contemporary in Downtown LA.

And Maltzan’s work is no aberration. Building green and stretching creative boundaries are just two reasons that “earth-itecture” is taking off. As we run out of buildable land, and as our sprawling lifestyle stretches our resources, it seems inevitable that we must learn how to better overlap architecture and green space in smart ways.
“It’s about adding public space in a tight environment,” said Curtis Fentress, whose firm is designing the San Diego convention center expansion, which will provide five acres of green park space on top of the convention center’s roof. Such projects are more than standard green roofs, which often overflow with plants but are not intended for people as with Renzo Piano’s instantly iconic green roof on top of the California Academy of Sciences.

In more extreme examples, the difference between architecture and landscape is almost impossible to discern. One struggles to tell landscape and structure apart when looking at Hagy Belzberg’s Museum of the?Holocaust in LA’s Pan Pacific Park. Here, sharp, undulating, planted forms are built into the park’s existing sloped hillside. In this case, building underground had the added ability to create a powerful architectural experience inside counterbalanced by a lighter experience outside.
Another project in which landscape and building are often indistinguishable is Morphosis’ and SWA’s new headquarters for Giant Interactive Group outside Shanghai, which is completely covered in green; a “prairie blend” of 15 plants that undulates and twists at extreme angles, and slopes down to the surrounding waterscape. While all green roofs provide thermal protection, this project is an entire eco-system, filtering water for the nearby canal and feeding several life forms. The green space has become an attraction for workers and locals alike.
“We’re all interested in the same things these days,” said SWA principal Ying Yu Hung. “Energy efficiency, natural materials, the healing power of nature.” Of course, making landscapes fit into the schemes of an adventurous architecture firm was often challenging. In some places, the building slopes as much as 53 degrees, forcing the firm to come up with inventive measures to keep the soil clinging to the surface. “We were like, ‘Are you sure’?” said Hung.

Hung’s LA office has two architects to complement its 13 landscape architects, an increasingly common admixture. With “earth-itecture” becoming so common, it makes sense for an architecture firm to have landscape expertise on board. San Francisco firm Interstice Architects’ principles are Andrew Dunbar, an architect, and Zoee Astrakhan, a licensed landscape architect who studied landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Several of their projects combine the disciplines, including the upcoming Center For Science and Innovation at the University of San Francisco. That project includes a new green plaza made of native plants built on top of an expansion to the school’s Harney Hall. In order to provide more light inside, the firm included benches that double as skylights and a side-facing “storefront window wall” that cuts into the earth. They worked to constantly communicate with the architects, NBBJ, and the project engineers to make sure that “all the players were in the room and decisions were not relegated to one discipline,” said Astrakhan. That meant that meetings addressed storm water, mechanical decisions, interfaces, ventilation ducts, and so on. “It was a constant give and take,” added Astrakhan. “When you begin documenting things, the lines are difficult to draw. There was definitely a lot of time spent figuring out what made sense; figuring out what was architecture and what was landscape. It wasn’t always that clear to us.”

Small LA firm Freeland Buck includes an architect, David Freeland, and a landscape architect, Brennan Buck, who studied landscape architecture at Cornell. Their proposed Hunters Stand Cabin in Maine wedges itself into a hillside, lifting out of the ground plane, clad with shingled wood planks and cut with sharp windows. The earth has proven an inspiration for the firm in several ways: the bottom of the house is fitted with a soil medium so plants and trees can grow in the middle of the house; the coloring of the rooms change in response to the changing landscape; and triangulated spaces are carved out of the earth to maximize light and landscape interaction. Floors are partially above grade and partially below, emphasizing this divide, and giving the house an “embedded quality,” explained Freeland. A thin green roof on top gives the building a feeling of “immateriality,” adds Freeland. “Landscape gives you a variety of readings and experiences and feelings. That’s why it’s interesting to us,” he said.
Of course, the ways that landscape is being incorporated into architecture are not all new. San Diego architect Kevin Defreitas recently completed the St. Bartholomew Chapel, a Catholic church on the Rincon Indian reservation outside of San Diego. The rammed earth project incorporated 120 tons of local soil to form the building’s walls, and also used natural elements like a Live Oak Tree, which was harvested for the altar, and a three-ton boulder which was turned into the building’s baptismal font.
In this case, the use of natural materials—the rammed earth walls are several feet thick—help prevent the building from burning down in a wildfire, as its predecessor did a few years ago. And its incorporation of local materials was vital for the Indian tribe, which considers land on its reservation sacrosanct. Defreitas found working with the local soil a transformative experience, and hopes to continue, despite San Diego’s insistence on not classifying rammed earth as a usable building material. “It’s just dirt, but it’s an incredible material,” said Defreitas. “It’s hard to go wrong with natural materials. They seem to age in a way that others don’t. And there’s an honesty to the material; you immediately understand what it is. It’s as renewable as you can get, and when the building is done, it can go back to where it came from. It’s like they say: when God created Adam, he made him out of mud.” For some, the back-to-roots movement can be quite literal.
Sam Lubell

Sam Lubell is the West Coast Editor of The Architect’s Newspaper.

Please visit archpaper.com for the full article including images.

February 2, 2011
Piecing together daily life in Terezin

by Iris Mann

Erich Lichtblau-Leskly is relatively unknown, but the power of his art — created while he was an inmate of the concentration camp known as the Theresienstadt ghetto — is evident in the exhibition “The Art Of Erich Lichtblau-Leskly” at the newly opened Museum of the Holocaust in Pan Pacific Park. The paintings, on display through May 1, are rendered in a cartoon style, and many are sarcastic commentary on the desperate conditions under which the Jewish prisoners existed, contradicting Nazi propaganda that promoted Theresienstadt as a model facility where Jews supposedly were well treated. Lichtblau-Leskly’s work is singular when compared to most Holocaust-related art, according to E. Randol Schoenberg, president of the museum’s board of directors.

“There’s not a great deal of artwork that was created within the camps. And the artwork that was created under those circumstances in the ghettos and camps often looks quite different from what Lichtblau did. … It’s an attempt to record scenes within the ghetto, but privately. It’s clear that he’s only showing them to his wife and not to other people, because he’s making fun of a lot of the other people, including people who could have punished him.”

When other artists were discovered and ultimately sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Lichtblau removed slogans, titles and captions from his paintings and cut most of them into pieces that his wife hid in the boards of her bunk. After liberation, she retrieved them and Lichtblau reassembled them. He also reproduced them, first in Czechoslovakia, where he changed his name from Lichtblau to Leskly, and then in Israel, where the couple eventually settled.

Among the themes running through the work is the artist’s personal experience. “My First Night in the Ghetto: Overcrowded” is a biting comment on conditions in this “model” camp. The work depicts rows of double-decker bunks, all occupied, with clothes hanging on nails. Lichtblau-Leskly is shown sleeping on the floor, with a physician leaning over him. The accompanying text explains that the artist was ill with a fever. The doctor is telling him, “All you need to get a place on a bunk is vitamin P — protection (or patronage).”

The shortage of food — especially for the elderly, who couldn’t perform hard labor and thus were given very sparse rations — is another subject. In “Competition for Potatoes,” an old woman in a long, black coat with a fur collar and a black, fur-lined hat forages with a twig for potatoes in a garbage pile as rats eye the same food.

“The woman foraging,” Schoenberg said, “could have been the wife of a doctor from Vienna, once a very elegant woman, reduced to this level of searching for scraps, like a rat, through the garbage.”

Lichtblau-Leskly also criticized some of his fellow prisoners. “ ‘Organizing’ and Stealing Are Not the Same” shows two men who are identical, or two aspects of one man. On the left, the prisoner “organizes” or takes food from a common supply, which is considered a necessity for survival and thus acceptable; on the right, the man steals food from the bowl of another prisoner, who is old, using a cane, and almost blind. The latter form of stealing, as the text states, was considered morally reprehensible, but, Schoenberg noted, Lichtblau-Leskly also sympathized with the thieves.

“Nearly everybody had to become an opportunist,” Schoenberg said. “To not become an opportunist was suicide. And so, people were put in certain positions, and sometimes the positions provoked envy in other people, or gave opportunities that other people didn’t have. Lichtblau shows the terrible position that people were put in; while they were trying to save their own lives, they were put in positions that hurt other people, too. It’s just terrible, if you think about it,” he added.

Schoenberg commented that the artist chose as subjects specific incidents that were repeated consistently. “They’re somehow archetypes of the life and what people were forced to do in the camps. That’s what makes them so powerful. They aren’t merely individual scenes, but they represent activity that occurred over and over again”

Sickness, especially paratyphoid, which causes intense diarrhea, was suffered by virtually every inmate and is illustrated in “Terezinka — A Ghetto Disease,” a caricature depicting a man in yellow trousers who runs down a long staircase terrified that he won’t make it to the latrine in time. “Death Rate: 150 Daily” refers to the horrific level of mortality in the camp — it shows nurses making up beds that appear to hold dead or dying prisoners who, as the text explains, will be carted off to the crematoria on a hearse. Other inmates will be forced to pull the cart. In the foreground, an old woman with a yellow star on her chest leans on a nurse for support.

“Obligatory Salute and Forbidden Cigarettes” delineates the precarious position of even the most privileged prisoners. “Here’s a person who is relatively high up in the hierarchy and protected,” Schoenberg explained. “He’s one of the ghetto officers. He’s there at a deportation, and someone hands him some cigarettes, which are, of course, illegal, but are very valuable as a result. So he hides them under his cap, but, walking away from the deportation scene he sees an official, a German or Czech official, and has to remove his cap. The cigarettes fall out, and Lichtblau says he was on the next transport to the East. So what he thought was his good fortune ended up being his undoing.”

Schoenberg estimated that of the approximately 150 Lichtblau-Leskly works in the museum’s collection, some 70 or 80 are on exhibit. He pointed out that in documenting these scenes from the ghetto, Lichtblau-Leskly was literally risking his life. But, in an essay in the exhibition catalogue, the artist’s daughter, Mira, said her father had a compulsion to paint these scenarios, and that painting “helped him keep his sanity in that valley of darkness.” She added that the works were also a way for her father to record for the world what had taken place at Theresienstadt.

The Erich Lichtblau-Leskly Collection at the Los Angeles Museum of The Holocaust 100 S. The Grove Dr., Los Angeles, Calif. 90036

T (323) 651-3704 | F (323) 651-3706 | E info@lamoth.org | Admission- FREE | http://www.lamoth.org

Hours of Operation
Mon.–Thu. 10:00am - 5:00pm
Fri.        10:00am - 2:00pm
Sat.        CLOSED
Sun.      10:00am - 5:00pm

See the entire article on the Jewish Journal website.

The Architecture of Memory
At the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, Hagy Belzberg brings sensitivity to a troubling subject

Edie Cohen -- Interior Design

“In Europe in the 1930’s, the years leading up to the Holocaust, people went about living their lives. Families had daily routines. Schoolchildren played in the parks. But nearby, terrible things were happening.” Hagy Belzberg’s opening remarks describe the scenario that looped through his mind, over and over, when he started to think about designing a new building for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Recognized as the oldest of its kind in the U.S., the museum was founded in 1961 and has moved at least four times since then.

The city donated the latest site, 3/4 acre in Pan Pacific Park, and Belzberg’s design is of ??the park, tied to its vibrant life, without impinging on it. Given the solemn subject, he opted to bury most of the museum. Galleries, archival storage, offices, and parking occupy three subterranean levels capped by a green roof barely distinguishable from the park’s rolling topography. The underground location also ties in with his intention not to make this a statement building like counterparts by James Freed Design and Associates in Washington and Studio Daniel Libeskind in Berlin. Never mind that the $15.2 million L.A. museum is clearly Belzberg Architects’s magnum opus to date--seven years in the making, including permitting and excavation. “The architecture is just the container,” he explains. But a powerful container it is.

Though constructed almost entirely of concrete, the underground museum is anything but a bunker. Belzberg infused the interior with sunshine from clear skylights and translucent glass walls. He also used form--sloping ceiling panels of preformed concrete and knife-edged complex curves of sprayed-on concrete--to create a procession strictly adhering to history’s time line. There’s no aimless wandering. Instead, the journey begins with a transition from the park, life as we know it. From here, the entry ramp slopes gently down to the sparsely furnished lobby, where the lowered lighting and a sense of compression are immediately palpable. Belzberg maps out the path ahead with substantial columns and archways. More human in scale are framed “vitrine walls”  stopping short of the ceiling, which varies in height from 8 to 22 feet. Displaying graphics, video monitors, or artifacts, the “vitrine walls” reinforce the U-shape circulation route and break down the 32,000-square-foot expanse into exhibition areas.

To bring the subject matter home to the visitors, most of them L.A. students, the lobby features a video telling the story of Jack Taylor, a Hollywood High School graduate and U.S. Navy lieutenant who survived the concentration camp in Mauthasen, Austria. On view just beyond are 1930’s and ’40’s L.A. newspapers recounting events taking place a continent away. Deeper in, the pathway moves literally and figuratively into increasing darkness. The initial series of rooms focuses on the preceding years, Kristallnacht, and the ghetto. Then, at the far end of the U, the space opens up into a gallery mostly empty except for black-painted steel stands supporting computer monitors; each tells the story of a different concentration camp. Terminals with access to the Shoah Foundation database of survivor videos will soon be nearby in a glass enclosure, thanks largely to funds raised by E. Randol Schoenberg, grandson of composer Arnold Schoen­berg and president of the museum’s board of?directors. The return journey passes through a room focusing on resistance, followed by deportation and the camps. In the next room, liberation, interior changes signify hope. “The ceiling rises. The LEDs brighten,” Belzberg explains. “Then you’re back at the park. Natural light helps organize the story and acts as a guiding partner.”

The final stop is an open-air children’s memorial. To correspond to the 1.5 million people under age 15 when they were killed, he dig­itally composed the same number of round holes in lightweight concrete wall panels. Returning to his original allusion, he reiterates, “We’re next to the basketball courts and the jungle gym here. We can hear the laughter yet see the loss.”
Like the everyday environment, technology was part of the program from day one. An iTouch is the tour guide--every visitor receives one on arrival. “How do you connect with kids from different cultures, speaking a number of languages?” Belzberg wondered. His response: “The one thing they share is technology.” Operating technology, however, is almost entirely hidden. The ducts for air-conditioning and heating are integrated into the perimeter.

Another absence one can’t help but notice is the lack of Jewish iconography. That’s precisely Belzberg’s point. “This is not Jewish holy ground,” he states. “It teaches Angelenos about the Holocaust and how to prevent bullying behavior today.” He’s teaching sustainable building practices, too. The museum has already won the Los Angeles Business Council Green Building Design Award and is on track for LEED Gold certification.

For more please buy the January 2011 issue of Interior Design Magazine.

Honoring Holocaust Remembrance Day Here at Geni

The Holocaust is one of the most tragic events in human history. Today, we try our best to honor the memories of all of the victims of the genocidal policy of Nazi Germany.

A little while ago, some Geni staffers were given a tour of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust by Randy Schoenberg — the president of the museum, and an avid member of Geni. He was kind enough to give us an interview on camera, and I asked him to explain to us how the Holocaust affected him and his family tree. Here is what he had to say:

    My grandparents all escaped the Nazis and came to America. They left behind many relatives who did not survive, including my great-grandfather Siegmund Zeisl who was murdered at Treblinka. I began working on my family tree when I was just a kid, and my grandmother was able to tell me many stories about my family. Since then I have felt a strong duty to record what happened to my family and others during the Holocaust. Over the past five years I have helped to build the new building and exhibit for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

Geni user and curator Shmuel-Aharon Kam had this to say:

    My grandmother, Cecilia Etkin, grew up in Sighet, Romania. There were 22 people in her immediate family (parents, siblings and their kids). A total of 4 survived, 3 by hiding as non-Jews, and my grandmother who lived through 3 years of Auschwitz and other camps. If I expand the circle to include her cousins the numbers are MUCH higher, but even the genealogical information itself is lost! My other grandmother, Ruby Kahn (Rothman), lost a couple hundred 2nd and 3rd cousins. ALL killed in the environs of Stryy, Ukraine. There was a single survivor, Shmuel Zelig Rothman

    So the Holocaust IS very much present in our lives, not only because we have survivors among us, but due to the effects of their trauma on their descendants, easily seen in the 1st generation, but also in the 2nd (and even 3rd). It wasn’t easy growing up with a (grand)mother who would get up in the middle of the night to check if the refrigerator was full, having starved for 3 years, or who, once she got started, could orate for hours on the horrors she had experienced.

    Living in Israel, with the largest number of survivors and the constant wars, the Holocaust is strongly felt at a cultural level, to the extent that it will probably take another century before we can be truly objective about it. It’s part of the 1st Grade curriculum, and the exposure to this topic is massive, in my opinion, to the degree of an unhealthy obsession. So we tend to have a somewhat cynical sense of humor.

    Living in the Middle-East, we hear the word “Genocide” far too often, whether wrongly being accused of it, or having our neighbors declare they’ll “Erase us off the map.” I actually once used a Geni screen shot of my grandmother’s tree to “Demonstrate” what actual Genocide looks like. So yes, the Holocaust is very much a constant presence in our lives. Especially as I don’t think the world has fundamentally changed since then…

As you can see, the aftermath of the holocaust is still impacting the world family tree every single day. We hope that Geni can provide the tools to keep the memories of those who were tortured and murdered in the holocaust alive.

View the whole article and video here.

The Company for Location & Restitution of Holocaust Victims’ Assets is a unique entity, founded under the mandate of the Law for Holocaust Victims Assets (2006).

The main goal of the company is to right an historical injustice by returning assets, purchased in pre-state Israel by Holocaust victims, to their rightful owners. Since its inception, the company has returned assets valued at 40 million NIS (about $10.2 million).

The company is a non-profit organization. Any applications or requests from potential heirs or individuals looking to locate an asset are carried out free of charge.

The Company is composed of three main branches:

1.    Assets Location & Heir Search Division

This branch is charged with all activities dealing with locating both assets not registered with the company as well as heirs to existing assets being managed by the company.

·    Assets are located by cross referencing both public and private archives, utilizing various databases and analyzing historical data made available to company researchers. This division is also in charge of transferring discovered assets to the company’s administration care, based on the requirements as indicated by law.
·    The Company actively searches and contacts heirs of Holocaust victims who have left behind assets. The division conducts genealogical research to build a family tree which can help lead us to heirs. Researchers, lawyers and investigators utilize country censuses, global databases, archives, internet resources and similar organizations to complete these tasks.  

 
2.    Restitution Division

This branch checks restitution requests of potential heirs corroborating both the identification as well as the legitimacy of claimant on a specific claim. The division has three departments to handle claims based on the type of asset be it real estate, bank accounts or shares in Jewish organizations. The division compares data provided by the claimant to that in the asset file to determine eligibility of each claim based on the State of Israel’s inheritance laws.     

3.    Holocaust Survivors Aid Division

The Company has been mandated by law to assist Holocaust survivors in need, based in Israel, using the resources derived from assets whose heirs could not be found. The company also gives grants to organizations which are directly involved with survivor welfare. The division directly disburses quarterly stipends and supports programs which provide; food stuffs, medical & dental care and other key necessities.

More detailed information can be found on their website www.hashava.org.il.

The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust's website, designed and built by Fastspot, won the People's Champ award in the 2010 Pixel Awards Non-Profit category. The Pixel Awards were established in 2006. The Pixel Awards take a fresh look at the best on the web. They are the cutting-edge website award, annually honoring compelling sites that have shown excellence in web design and development. Sites are submitted in 22 diverse categories, including the unique Agency, Geek, and Green categories. Any site can enter. Only 22 exceptional sites win.

Since launching its innovative Website in the Spring of 2010 the LAMH has seen over 100,000 visitors click through and explore the interactive features and resources. Visitors from over 100 countries and territories have come to the new site, ensuring the Museum's mission reaches far beyond those who are fortunate enough to visit in person.

Thanks to everyone who voted for us!

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust by Belzberg Architects

Written by  Murrye Bernard

It seems paradoxical to integrate a structure intended to immortalize the horrific Holocaust within a public park, a setting for recreation and relaxation. The deliberate juxtaposition of these conflicting elements sets the stage for Santa Monica-based Belzberg Architects to curate a meaningful experience for visitors to the recently opened Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH).

Founded in 1961, LAMOTH occupied several spaces prior to settling into its Belzberg-designed building, located on the northwest corner of the Pan Pacific Park, appropriately adjacent to the existing LA Holocaust Monument and, less so, The Grove shopping center. With an area of only 32,000 sq.ft., the new LAMOTH is not a large museum, and it appears even smaller because the architects chose to partially bury it beneath the landscape. The decision was metaphoric -- allowing for a dramatic entry ramp that looks like a gash through the earth -- but it also proved practical in relation to the context. The architects created a large green roof populated with native vegetation, contributing to the building's projected LEED Gold certification and status as one of the largest intensive green roofs in Southern California. The roof's landscape design and the building's interior circulation tie into existing pathways, successfully knitting together museum and park.

In contrast to the lush landscape, the smooth interior surfaces of LAMOTH are constructed with shotcrete -- a sprayed concrete product typically used for swimming pools -- and infilled with translucent and opaque glass. Peculiar, three-sided columns create a warped sense of perspective as visitors descend down another long ramp to view the exhibitions. Ceilings begin to drop, compressing the space, and natural light fades. Visitors lose connection with nature as the story of the Holocaust grows progressively grimmer. But there is a proverbial light at the end of the tunnel; as visitors move chronologically toward the present time, the ceiling height expands and light penetrates once again, providing a glimmer of hope.

The Museum, which offers free admission, is fitted with advanced technologies in order to connect with younger visitors. Belzberg Architects collaborated with New York City-based exhibition designer Potion to create interactive digital content. Upon entering, each visitor is handed an iTouch, which syncs with interactive displays that play audio accounts of the Holocaust from Los Angeles residents. Throughout the exhibits, Los Angeles Times covers recount the Holocaust's effects on the city. Also on view are photographs, models, and other artifacts.
As a Holocaust museum, LAMOTH naturally draws comparisons with others among the building typology, such as Studio Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin. Libeskind's raw, angular concrete surfaces create uneasiness and disorientation for visitors, evocative of the horror of the Holocaust. Though Belzberg's design uses spatial distortion to influence visitors, it is ultimately sleek and inviting -- fitting for a city that is known to value surface impressions. Stereotypes aside -- as they should remain, if we've learned anything from the Holocaust -- LAMOTH creates an experience that is uniquely Los Angeles, acknowledging both its historical and modern physical contexts.

The new Holocaust museum in Los Angeles, which was inaugurated a few weeks ago at the multiplayer, is difficult to identify at first glance. It is carved into a large public park west of the city next to playgrounds and sports, and a green roof planted vegetation. The only hint of its existence is a kind of long, narrow corridor leading to the underground and put the visitors never ever day of memory and commemoration.

"This is the most prominent Holocaust museums built in the last decade is their class of architecture and use of motifs taken directly from the death camps and ghettos, "says architect Hagee (Haggai) Belzberg. "We wanted to create a building that could connect the upcoming environment - and vice versa, the building will be a receptacle of content and representation of history. " The museum planned a response can be seen monumental characterizes the impressive new Holocaust museums were built in Berlin, Washington and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. For two decades, all by well-known architects. He proves that architects can find a solution to an attentive and sensitive, a relatively small budget, and charged complex historical content. Museum of Los Angeles (LAMOTH) is the oldest of its kind in the United States. It was established in 1961 by a group of survivors and townspeople who wanted to share their stories with the public. It is based on personal items left in their hands, like a yellow star, photos and various documents, recently donated a few items of historical information courtesy of the Research Center of the Auschwitz death camp.

Over the years, the museum moved between several rented buildings in the city until the federal government of California agreed to allocate its own space. Selected field is located in Pan Pacific Park Beverly - Fairfax where many of my friends living Jewish community. Gilad was already in place in memory of victims of the Holocaust Museum is another side of the urban memorial site.

Unlike the popular Museum of Tolerance huge budgets established in downtown Los Angeles by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the new museum seeks to modestly to the personal stories of survivors. He built a small budget of $ 15 million target population are school children. "Los Angeles is a city spokeswoman hundred languages - Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Weiatanmit - but the historical lessons of the Holocaust is important to every person regardless of origin," says Belzberg. To give access to the contents of multi population - cultural arrives, each visitor gets an iPod with a touchscreen interface in four languages. IPod connected with the visit using wireless sensors are displayed. "The first example is shown in a video clip that shows survivor named Jack Taylor. It appeals to visitors and as a teenager attended high school in the next street. Then he starts talking about his escape Nazi Europe. It makes the whole thing a local story of the Los Angeles, something very close behind. "

Experiencing the museum is both symbolic and universal stems from its seemingly trivial - in a public park adjacent to the parking lot of a neighborhood shopping center. The main entrance is located in the corridor burrowing into the ground. Visitors walk down while the sounds from outside are disappearing. The building itself is an organized timeline. All space is devoted to a different era - "Life before the war," Kristallnacht "and so on. Spaces themselves are going to deepen in the ground also disappears accordingly natural lighting. The deepest space, dedicated to the extermination camps, completely dark. "We wanted to refine the statement that life in Europe continued to operate normally during the extermination camps there were terrible things. The contrast between the hard content of the museum and nature today - Daily of the park represents it well."

Belzberg has Israeli parents who immigrated to the United States in the 70s for academic studies (his psychologist and his father an engineer.) Disrupted school friends the name Haggai Hagi and is careful to explain that even fix them. After completing his undergraduate studies in Architecture at Harvard, he worked for the Jewish architect - American Frank Gehry for a short period, and then set up an independent office. Today he discusses the parallel design of public and private projects. Planning the Holocaust Museum is involved in seven years. The museum can be associated with the digital style of contemporary architecture, primarily the design of all parts of the building and its details through the computer. West coast is the focus of the activities of several prominent digital architects like Frank Gehry and Greg Lynn, in part thanks to the advanced production technologies that are there.

The decision to place the museum in the ground due to urban strategy - integration of the ecological environment and maintaining the continuity of the green areas in the park. In this respect, it joins a series of contemporary projects, digging in the ground, such as "city of culture" that builds the American architect Peter Eisenman in Galicia in Spain. Los Angeles, characterized the topography of hills and valleys, it looks like the right decision.

The building externally linked motifs completely innocent of Judaism or representations of the death camps. Belzberg Secretary of the Berlin Jewish Museum (designed by Daniel Libeskind), consisting of sections like "The Road of Death", "Holocaust Tower and The Garden of Exile", and Detroit's Holocaust Museum is built of red brick walls echo the massive wooden fences surrounding the camps. He believes that in the case of Los Angeles, a city that is not geographically or politically related to the Holocaust, was not to design a building that competes with the content. "Representation is not a Jewish building because he is not building 'Jew'. The Holocaust is a global disaster when you try to talk with the public here in the city you need to speak a particular language. You have to remember that the ideology defeat the Jews and other groups also toppling Europe. The Holocaust is not related to architecture, but people who experienced it ".

Do you think the great museums of the Holocaust have lost their relevance today?

"Absolutely not. I think they have tremendous relevance. If a community with economic power, political establishment you can build a building like that. Monumental speaks to many cultures and still very relevant. But even if you do not have this opportunity does not mean you should not to the Museum. "

Anti-architecture - symbolic of Belzberg may become irrelevant. If the building is a "receptacle" content, which ties him to actually populate the Holocaust preventing it from another public institution? In addition, because of its handsome curved lines there is a feeling sometimes too nice to stay at the museum. High world Holocaust memorial institutions dull excitement, one could ask whether burial of the Holocaust Museum in the ground is something true, or it may be still too tepid role that he plays for the visitors.

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
by F. Ron Smith on December 1, 2010

Offering a culturally enriching and educational experience, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust opened to the public on October 14th, 2010.

Founded in 1961, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust has moved multiple times, but with this amazing new building and the fact that the museum has been built next the the existing Holocaust Memorial, it may have found at last found its perfect place.   Located on the North West corner of the Pan Pacific Park (off of The Grove Drive behind The Grove shopping center), the LAMOH is possibly one of the most innovative architectural designs that Los Angeles has seen this year.

The LAMOH was built by the Belzberg Architects who are a local Santa Monica based Architect group. Driving along the Pan Pacific Park, you might miss the museum as the museum was built to blend in and incorporate the natural beauty of the park.  There are many fascinating architectural features and strategies incorporated into the building’s conception and creation, including:

    * The top of the building is curved and the roof itself looks as though it is pulling up the corner of the park.
    * The design of the building received the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission Design Honor Award and The Los Angeles Business Council Green Building Design Award prior to completion.
    * The design layout was kept sensitive towards the institute’s history, and a large part of the museum is built underground to add to the emotional elements of the Holocaust. Although this creates a darkness about the building, the building allows for natural light to shine through.
    * Existing park pathways are used as connective elements to integrate the pedestrian flow of the park with the new circulation for museum visitors. The pathways are morphed onto the building and appropriated as surface patterning.

Designed and constructed with sustainable systems and materials, the LAMOTH building is on track to receive a LEED Gold Certification from the US Green Building Council.

The architecture alone makes The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust worth going to, but of course, there are many other reasons to go as well. The museum strives hard to present the history of the Holocaust as objectively as possible, and through interactive exhibits, group tours, audio narration, virtual photo books and many original artifacts, the stories will speak for themselves.

Will you be visiting the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust?  Have you been to the new addition at the LACMA or visited another great gallery recently?  Please leave your comments below.

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

Showing a little love for something local to LA, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust opened recently and it’s got some nice interactive exhibits.

The museum is a fairly small space and so interactive was required to allow visitors to as much content as possible. The experience may not be revolutionary, but it’s elegantly done. There are three interactive components: 1) the “World That Was” is an interactive table with images that float to the surface and can then be selected by visitors; 2) “18 Camps” kiosks detail experiences at individual concentration camps, and 3) the “Audio Guide” gives overview information on the galleries as well as detailed information on artifacts.

The overall information, content and interaction strategy was designed by LA-based Variate Labs whose site has a good overview of the project. The interactive pieces were designed by Potion, whose website has detailed information on the three interactive projects.

?Click here to see images from the article!

On November 16, 2010 architect Haby Belzberg was interviewed on 89.9 KCRW. He was featured on the radio show DnA: Design and Architecture.

Click here to listen to the interview!

Guy Horton: Impossible Architecture: A Review of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

While it should have been impossible for something like the Holocaust to take place, it did. Now that we have this history we must deal with it as best we can. Events such as this simply overpower the present. For this reason, perhaps, there exist physical places to anchor those memories, so they can be put somewhere.

So how do you spatialize memory in a meaningful way that also animates and informs the surrounding metropolis? As an architect, how do you materialize the horror, the madness, and the dehumanization? You can’t simply re-create a concentration camp. As Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times so aptly put it, “The architect’s nearly impossible job is to mark murder on a mass scale.” So what does a museum devoted to the memory of murder look like? Descending down into Hagy Belzberg’s new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust may provide some clues.

Rather than embodying violence and confinement as Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, Mr. Belzberg chose to emphasize the hope of release. While Libeskind took inspiration in part from intellectual sources like Arnold Schoenberg’s unfinished opera, Moses und Aron, and Walter Benjamin’s One Way Street. Mr. Belzberg drew from the everyday experiences of Pan Pacific Park, where the museum is sited off to one edge. The normalcy of the park is where the journey through this “green”, LEED Gold museum begins and ends.

As Mr. Belzberg's brief for the project describes, the dichotomous relationship between the building's content and the peaceful landscape mimics the proximity "German forest revelers enjoying public parks were to sites of horrific and inhumane acts being carried out in the 1930's and 40's." This is one reason Pan Pacific Park is such a surprising yet appropriate location for the museum.

The form of the building was designed to interplay with the park setting and modulate the experience of the outside from within. Wedged into the earth like a berm, it seems to have been carved out rather than built in. Moreover, its placement allows the life of the park to carry on.

In keeping with this, the building's green roof, designed by Karla Dakin and Lisa Benjamin, seems to flow from the park's grounds. It's responsible, low-water mix of plants includes Blue Grama and Esparto Grass, Pine Muhly, Red Carpet Stonecrop, and Star of Bethlehem, a type of Hyacinth. When these reach their projected height of thirty-six inches, the building will become even more integrated with the landscape.

The curved shapes of the building's structure immediately bring to mind Zaha Hadid's aesthetic. But here such futuristic-looking contours make sense because they embody the continuation of the park's layered geology. These computer-generated forms were physically achieved by employing shotcrete, a form of concrete that is pneumatically projected into shaped reinforcement--a method commonly used to make swimming pools.

The museum's design also derives from Mr. Belzberg's desire to transition patrons from the light, airy normalcy of the park down into a sequential experience that becomes ever darker and which follows the progression of genocide. As Mr. Belzberg explained to me, wherever you are in the interior there is a glimmer of hope for exodus. You never lose sight of the sun even as you progress into darker and darker areas. Patrons depart their daily world as they descend down the long ramp to the mostly underground structure. Like the Holocaust itself, the building thus represents the interruption of everyday experience.

As one walks down into this porous "cave", the green roof gradually recedes and gives way to the entry lobby. Unlike the experience of Holocaust victims, though, we in the present immediately know how this journey is going to end. The exit is just in front of you, looking out at the original Holocaust Memorial that the building frames and accents.

The subtle passage through light becomes somewhat abstracted by all the displays and technology on the interior. There are fluidly interactive touch-screen monitors throughout. The first one encountered is a giant table, designed for community engagement. Further inside, individual touch-screens make the experience more personal. People become divided as prisoners were in the camps.

While the displays are necessary to communicate content, their obvious presence at times obscures the building's gentle orchestration of light, space, and its connection to the outside. One wonders if the architecture would not be more powerful without all of this. Here, then, is the difficulty of reconciling such content with architecture. Sometimes less is more, but with the Holocaust there is just so much to show that such austere minimalism would be inappropriate. After all, the point of the building is to bring the horror that took place out into the everyday world. When I asked one Holocaust survivor what he thought of the architecture, he just smiled and said he was glad this place was here.

Click here to view the entire article with pictures of the Museum!

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust by Belzberg Architects

Contextual Strategy:
The new building for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH) is located within a public park, adjacent to the existing Los Angeles Holocaust Memorial. Paramount to the design strategy is the integration of the building into the surrounding open, park landscape. The museum is submerged into the ground allowing the park’s landscape to continue over the roof of the structure. Existing park pathways are used as connective elements to integrate the pedestrian flow of the park with the new circulation for museum visitors. The pathways are morphed onto the building and appropriated as surface patterning. The patterning continues above the museum’s galleries, further connecting the park’s landscape and pedestrian paths. By maintaining the material pallet of the park and extending it onto the museum, the hues and textures of concrete and vegetation blend with the existing material palette of Pan Pacific Park. These simple moves create a distinctive façade for the museum while maintaining the parks topography and landscape. The museum emerges from the landscape as a single, curving concrete wall that splits and carves into the ground to form the entry. Designed and constructed with sustainable systems and materials, the LAMOTH building is on track to receive a LEED Gold Certification from the US Green Building Council.

Circulatory Strategy:
Patrons begin their procession at the drop off adjacent to the park. Their approach is pervaded by sounds and sights of laughter and sport—of kids playing in the park and picnicking with their families. Because the building is partially submerged beneath the grassy, park landscape, entry to the building entails a gradual deterioration of this visual and auditory connection to the park while descending a long ramp. Upon entering, visitors experience the culmination of their transition from a playful and unrestrained, public park atmosphere to a series of isolated spaces saturated with photographic archival imagery. As part of the design strategy, this dichotomous relationship between building content and landscape context is emphasized to bolster the experience inside the museum and allegorically correlate the proximity with which German forest revellers enjoying public parks were to sites of horrific and inhumane acts being carried out in 1930’s and 40’s. Visitors exit the museum by ascending up to the level of the existing monument, regaining the visual and auditory connection with the park environs.

The first room is titled, “The World That Was”, and incorporates a large, single interactive table, mimicking a conceptual “community” or dinner table. The exhibit brings a large group of patrons together around one interactive exhibit. The lighting of the interior galleries dim as the visitor steps down into the subsequent rooms where two separate exhibits depicting “Kristallnacht” and a “Book Burning” display divide the singular crowd—diminishing the “community” provided by people nearby. Through the third room and into the fourth, the floor continues to step down as ambient lighting becomes scarcer leading individuals to the room titled, “Concentration Camps.” The ceiling is low, and the room is almost entirely illuminated by individual video-monitors—about the size of a notebook—which limits viewing to a single spectator. The visitor is now confined to the most isolated, darkest and volumetrically concentrated underground area in the museum. The journey from this point forward is one of ascension and of finding the comfort of familiar space as floor levels begin to rise and natural lights begins to penetrate the interior once again. The final ascent up to the existing monument is filled with sights and sounds of unrestricted park land.

Click here to see images from the article!

ARCHITECT: Belzberg Architects, Santa Monica, California, www.belzbergarchitects.com. CLIENT: Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. LOCATION: 100 South The Grove Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90036. DESCRIPTION: Cultural. AREA: 32,000 sq ft. MATERIALS: Formed shotcrete and glass. PRINCIPAL: Hagy Belzberg. PROJECT MANAGER: Aaron Leppanen. PROJECT TEAM: Andrew Atwood, Barry Gartin, Brock DeSmit, Carina Bien-Wilner, Christopher Arntzen, Cory Taylor, Daniel Rentsch, David Cheung, Eric Stimmel, Erik Sollom, Justin Brechtel, Philip Lee, Lauren Zuzack. STRUCTURAL CONSULTANT: William Koh & Associates. MECHANICAL CONSULTANT: John Dorius & Associates. ELECTRICAL CONSULTANT: A&F Consulting Engineers. PLUMBING CONSULTANT: Tom Nasrollahi & Associates. SOILS ENGINEER: Irvine Geotechnical. METHANE ENGINEER: Carlin Environmental. ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEER: Enviropro, Inc. GENERAL CONTRACTIOR: Winters-Schram. SPECIAL FABRICATION: Spectrum Oak Products, Swiss Woodworking. DATE: 2010.
COPYRIGHT: Belzberg Architects. PHOTOES: Belzberg Architects, Benny Chan (Fotoworks), Iwan Baan. No part of this web site may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of Morfae and the copyright owner.

REMEMBERING THE HOLOCAUST
Dedication Ceremony for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

Los Angeles - In 1961 a group of Holocaust survivors were brought together by fate at Hollywood High School while learning to speak English. They shared their stories and discovered that each of them had different artifacts from the Holocaust era. They decided that the special relics needed a permanent home where they could be safely displayed and preserved. Together they founded the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

Now, after fifty years and four different locations, the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum has found a permanent home at Pan Pacific Park, a City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks facility. The new building is located next to the Martyrs Memorial and is partially built underground to preserve the green parkland.

The Department of Recreation and Parks General Manager Jon Kirk Mukri along with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Councilmembers Tom LaBonge, Eric Garcetti and Paul Koretz, Supervisor Zev Yaroslovsky, Assemblymember Mike Feuer and a group of Holocaust survivors proudly dedicated and opened the new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust on Thursday, October 14, 2010.

The $18 million structure was created by award-winning architect, Hagy Belzberg. The new museum building has one of the largest green roofs in California and mixes technology advanced exhibits and authentic artifacts. The high-tech design has already received the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission Design Honor Award and the Green Building Design Award.

The museum presents the history of the Holocaust as objectively as possible by displaying original artifacts. The museum's architecture and layout play significant roles in visitors' experiences. The rooms descend and decrease in light as they progress towards the darkest part of history. A powerful and affecting interactive Memory Pool in The World That Was will help build understanding of Jewish life throughout Europe prior to World War II. Other displays include a touch-screen computer table with 25,000 floating photographs and a testimonial wall with 85 video screens that allow visitors to hear survivor stories.

The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is the only Los Angeles institution with a sole focus on the events of the Holocaust and FREE admission. Museum attendance is expected to increase to 50,000 visitors per year from the 13,000 average of previous years.

The new museum is located at 100 South The Grove Drive in Los Angeles 90036. For more information visit http://www.lamoth.org/ or call (323) 651-3704.

Click here to see pictures from the article!

MEDIA CONTACTS:
Andrea Epstein: (213) 202-2690
Amy A. Garcia: (213) 202-2689

Friday, November 5, 2010, by Neal Broverman

LA's Newest Museum Up and Running

A model of an Nazi-run Austrian palace is being given to the new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, reports artdaily. A large replica of Hartheim Castle--a 410-year-old mental institution turned death factory will go on permanent loan at the Pan Pacific Park museum, thanks to a gift from Austrian officials. William C. Eacho III, the U.S. ambassador to Austria, says the model of the palace "reminds us of what can happen when society loses its moral compass and forgets the intrinsic value of human life." [artdaily]

la.curbed.com

New Los Angeles Holocaust Museum Designed to Look Forward

Santa Monica-based Hagy Belzberg, FAIA, of Belzberg Architects designed the newly finished Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust with forward movement in mind. Built into the landscape of Pan Pacific Park, the sleek white building is sunken into the earth, and its green roof and white pedestrian paths blend it seamlessly into the rest of the park. The building, adjacent to the existing Holocaust memorial, gives a new home to the oldest Holocaust museum in the United States.

Founded in 1962, the museum began with the intent of giving place to the artifacts of Holocaust survivors. The interior of the new museum is built to display the collection with sloping concrete walls, low ceilings, light manipulation and purposefully cramped spaces. A ramp lined with chronological exhibits guides visitors down into the structure, before rising back up again. Understated and modern from the outside, with thoughtfully crafted interior spaces, the 32,000-square-foot structure offers, at last, a fitting permanent home to the museum.
NOTE: Thursday, November 11, 6-8 PM - Guided tour of museum by Hagy Belzberg, FAIA
AIA|LA Interior Architecture Committee presents.  RSVP only/Space limited

Click here to see the entire article with pictures!

Model of Austrian castle where Nazis murdered thousands headed to US museum

By Veronika Oleksyn (CP)

VIENNA — A model of an Austrian castle where the Nazis murdered about 30,000 people — including many who were mentally ill or disabled — is headed to a U.S. museum.

Hartheim Castle was one of several notorious institutions that Adolf Hitler and his regime turned into the main venues for what they called "euthanasia" and where individuals who did not meet their ideals were gassed or given lethal injections.

William C. Eacho III, the U.S. ambassador to Austria, formally received the replica of the castle, located in the northern Austrian village of Alkoven, on Friday. It will now go on permanent loan to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

"The model reminds us of what can happen when society loses its moral compass and forgets the intrinsic value of human life," Eacho said during a ceremony in the Austrian Foreign Ministry. "We must work together to ensure that this never happens again."

After years of denial, Austria has turned in the past few decades from depicting itself as Hitler's victim to acknowledging, and making amends for, its role in the Holocaust.

That includes spending millions on compensation payments and returning artwork and other assets seized by the Nazis to their rightful owners or heirs, most of them Jews.

Eacho praised Austria's efforts, saying the country has done, and continues to do, much to come to terms with its terrible past.

Upper Austria Gov. Josef Puehringer, who also attended the ceremony, said history could not be undone and that it was Austria's responsibility to learn from what happened and make sure such abuses don't occur again.

Copyright © 2010 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Maya Zack: A Series of Conversations and Interactions
November 5, 2010 - November 14, 2010

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

The Jewish Artists Initiative (JAI) of Southern California is pleased to announce our next Israeli artist in residence noted video and multi media artist Maya Zack. She will participate in a ten-day residency in the Los Angeles region. This artist exchange is meant to share with the Los Angeles community new works of contemporary Israeli culture – as expressed through the fine arts. The Jewish Artists Initiative (JAI) in partnership with the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity (CJCC), the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles, the Jewish Federation’s TA/LA Partnership and NEI Program, the Israeli Consulate and the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust invite you to a video screening, Q & A, and Museum Tour on Sunday, November 7, 2010.

Commemorating the anniversary of Kristallnacht, visiting artist Maya Zack will screen her award winning short film Mother Economy, which critics have described as “a meditation on Holocaust remembrance and an homage to resourceful women during violent periods of political upheaval.”

Sunday, November 7, 2010

3:00 pm: “Mother Economy,” Film Screening

3:30 pm: Q & A with Israeli Artist, Maya Zack

4:30 pm: Tour of the new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

For more information about this program and addition events with artist in resident Maya Zack please visit: http://www.jaisocal.org/

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust 100 S. The Grove Dr. Los Angeles, Ca. 90036

The Museum is located in the North West corner of Pan Pacific Park.

About the artist

Maya Zack a 2000 Bezalel graduate already boasts an impressive filmography and catalog of worldwide film screenings, solo exhibitions, and awards. A frequent lecturer at Bezalel Academy and the Tel Aviv University Department of Film and Television, Zack is currently best known for her award-winning short film ‘Mother Economy’. This masterful twenty-minute work, selected from 500 submissions as the winner of the Celeste Art Prize during the 2008 Berlin Video Art Festival, is a contemporary exploration of issues of Jewish identity, cultural memory, and emotions.

Maya Zack’s residency is generously supported by the 2008 Cutting Edge Grant awarded to JAI from the Jewish Community Foundation, the Center for Culture and Creativity, the Jewish Federation’s NEI Microgrant Program, as well as the LA/Tel Aviv Partnership and the Israeli Consulate.

L.A. Holocaust Museum Gets Permanent Home

The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust just moved into its first permanent home since local Holocaust survivors founded the organization in 1961 – the nation’s first Holocaust museum.

The architecturally avant guard building, designed by acclaimed LA-based architect Hagy Belzberg, is the culmination of a six-year dream, said E. Randol Schoenberg, president of the museum board of directors. “This is a significant moment for the museum, as well as for survivors and all who understand the importance of learning from our past,” he said.

Located in Pan Pacific Park in Los Angeles’ Westside, the contemporary glass-and-steel structure is mostly underground so as to blend with the park and features eco-friendly designs including a roof planted with grass and greenery. It’s expected to receive a LEED Gold certification.

Inside, displays including original Holocaust artifacts, photos, oral histories and high-tech interactive exhibits chronicle the horrors of the Holocaust, the pre-war world the Nazis destroyed, rescue and life after the Holocaust. Activities include docent-led tours, self-guided tours including tours by cell phone, Holocaust survivor lectures, community and school programs and special events. Admission is free. (www.lamoth.org)

Click here to see the whole article at leisuregrouptravel.com

The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
Wed , 3 November 2010

The new building for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH) is located within a public park, adjacent to the existing Los Angeles Holocaust Memorial. Paramount to the design strategy is the integration of the building into the surrounding open, park landscape. The museum is submerged into the ground allowing the park’s landscape to continue over the roof of the structure. Existing park pathways are used as connective elements to integrate the pedestrian flow of the park with the new circulation for museum visitors. The pathways are morphed onto the building and appropriated as surface patterning. The patterning continues above the museum’s galleries, further connecting the park’s landscape and pedestrian paths. By maintaining the material pallet of the park and extending it onto the museum, the hues and textures of concrete and vegetation blend with the existing material palette of Pan Pacific Park. These simple moves create a distinctive façade for the museum while maintaining the parks topography and landscape. The museum emerges from the landscape as a single, curving concrete wall that splits and carves into the ground to form the entry. Designed and constructed with sustainable systems and materials, the LAMOTH building is on track to receive a LEED Gold Certification from the US Green Building Council.

Circulatory Strategy:
Patrons begin their procession at the drop off adjacent to the park. Their approach is pervaded by sounds and sights of laughter and sport—of kids playing in the park and picnicking with their families. Because the building is partially submerged beneath the grassy, park landscape, entry to the building entails a gradual deterioration of this visual and auditory connection to the park while descending a long ramp. Upon entering, visitors experience the culmination of their transition from a playful and unrestrained, public park atmosphere to a series of isolated spaces saturated with photographic archival imagery. As part of the design strategy, this dichotomous relationship between building content and landscape context is emphasized to bolster the experience inside the museum and allegorically correlate the proximity with which German forest revelers enjoying public parks were to sites of horrific and inhumane acts being carried out in 1930’s and 40’s. Visitors exit the museum by ascending up to the level of the existing monument, regaining the visual and auditory connection with the park environs.

The first room is titled, “The World That Was”, and incorporates a large, single interactive table, mimicking a conceptual “community” or dinner table. The exhibit brings a large group of patrons together around one interactive exhibit. The lighting of the interior galleries dim as the visitor steps down into the subsequent rooms where two separate exhibits depicting “Kristallnacht” and a “Book Burning” display divide the singular crowd—diminishing the “community” provided by people nearby. Through the third room and into the fourth, the floor continues to step down as ambient lighting becomes scarcer leading individuals to the room titled, “Concentration Camps.” The ceiling is low, and the room is almost entirely illuminated by individual video-monitors—about the size of a notebook—which limits viewing to a single spectator. The visitor is now confined to the most isolated, darkest and volumetrically concentrated underground area in the museum. The journey from this point forward is one of ascension and of finding the comfort of familiar space as floor levels begin to rise and natural lights begins to penetrate the interior once again. The final ascent up to the existing monument is filled with sights and sounds of unrestricted park land.

REMEMBERING THE HOLOCAUST
Dedication Ceremony for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust


Los Angeles - Fifty years ago, a group of Holocaust survivors were brought together by fate at Hollywood High School while learning to speak English. They shared their stories and discovered that each of them had different artifacts from the Holocaust era. They decided that the special relics needed a permanent home where they could be safely displayed and preserved. Together they founded the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.


Now, after fifty years and four different locations, the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum has found a permanent home at Pan Pacific Park, a City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks facility. The new building is located next to the Martyrs Memorial and is partially built underground to preserve the green parkland.


The Department of Recreation and Parks General Manager Jon Kirk Mukri along with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Councilmembers Tom LaBonge, Eric Garcetti and Paul Koretz, Supervisor Zev Yaroslovsky, Assemblymember Mike Feuer and a group of Holocaust survivors proudly dedicated and opened the new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust on Thursday, October 14, 2010.


The $18 million structure was created by award-winning architect, Hagy Belzberg. The new museum building has one of the largest green roofs in California and mixes technology advanced exhibits and authentic artifacts. The high-tech design has already received the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission Design Honor Award and the Green Building Design Award.


The museum presents the history of the Holocaust as objectively as possible by displaying original artifacts. The museum's architecture and layout play significant roles in visitors' experiences. The rooms descend and decrease in light as they progress towards the darkest part of history. A powerful and affecting interactive Memory Pool in The World That Was will help build understanding of Jewish life throughout Europe prior to World War II. Other displays include a touch-screen computer table with 25,000 floating photographs and a testimonial wall with 85 video screens that allow visitors to hear survivor stories.


The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is the only Los Angeles institution with a sole focus on the events of the Holocaust and FREE admission. Museum attendance is expected to increase to 50,000 visitors per year from the 13,000 average of previous years.


The new museum is located at 100 South The Grove Drive in Los Angeles 90036. For more information visit http://www.lamoth.org/ or call (323) 651-3704.

Click here to view the entire article and pictures!

The Indicator: Wind Swept Dune

By Guy Horton, 29 Oct 2010

Architect Hagy Belzberg recently showed me around his latest creation, the new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. He had kindly agreed to give me a personal tour since I was preparing to write up a review.

While I had fully intended to focus on the architecture, the site, the ideas behind the design, I was caught off-guard by something unexpected: people.

Prior to my visit I had been looking at some new photographs of the building taken by Iwan Baan. Architecture photographed for reviews is usually uncluttered by the messiness of life. The buildings are often empty vessels waiting to be activated. People appear as mere apparitions, like objects, often blurred. Thus, there is little evidence of other responses or adaptations to the architecture. If we overlook the gaze of the photographer, there is then only one gaze present: that of the singular “I”. And this “I” had expected an encounter with a building.

More after the break.

The critic is not the first one to compose a narrative for a building but he is often the first one to record it, interpret it, and position the architecture within a larger cultural context. He may also be the first to reflect on its meaning and significance once it has been materialized in the city.

On this windy morning, the building sat like a dune. The tall grass of its coiling green-roof whipped back and forth. Within the thrum of the wind came the high pitch of children playing in the park.

Once inside, under the earth, the architecture disappeared. I don’t mean this in any negative, hyper-critical way. The building simply gave way under the intensity of its contents. The museum’s architecture is good because it facilitates its own disappearance. It steps aside to make room for the force of history. I don’t know of any design that could overpower the human evidence of something like the Holocaust. Design shouldn’t aspire to this anyway.

The building isn’t quite finished. There are some rough patches. You can still see indications of its on-going construction—this too isn’t revealed in the photographs. I wonder if it wouldn’t be good to leave it this way. The stories continue to be told while the building continues to be built—like some Italo Calvino scenario.

I asked one survivor what he thought of the architecture. “It’s good this place is here,” he said. He really could have cared less what it looked like. There were some steel folding chairs strewn around the area where he was to give his talk. This was one of the unfinished spaces.

A small group sat on these chairs, rapt as he explained how he helped build Auschwitz. There was nothing there, he said, when the first groups of prisoners came—close to 75% of them had died in the box cars en route. The first thing those still living did was dispose of mountains of corpses. He was so exhausted he used the corpse of his neighbor for a chair. Those severely weakened or close to death were shot. Those who were able were forced to construct the camp.

The informality of the unfinished room seemed appropriate. There was never any intention of having the architecture mimic or stage the spaces of the death camps, but something too refined, too precise would not suit such devastating stories.

Hagy said he didn’t mind at all that the concrete was showing cracks here and there. “It should crack. It’s not meant to be some pristine thing,” he said. Exactly, I thought. Let it crack. Let it get old. Let it survive.

The old survivors who volunteer are also cracked and weathered. They are dying off. Soon all that will be left is the building. It will be known for having been the place where they told their stories. The architect’s name is on the facade, but he would be the first to say the building isn’t about him.

The Indicator, a weekly column focusing on the culture, business and economics of architecture, is written by Guy Horton. The opinions expressed in The Indicator are Guy Horton’s alone and do not represent those of ArchDaily and it’s affiliates. Based in Los Angeles, he is a frequent contributor to Architectural Record, The Architect’s Newspaper and other publications. He also writes on architecture for The Huffington Post.

Click here to view the entire article!

Architecture review: Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

The Hagy Belzberg-designed museum in Pan Pacific Park seems conflicted. Its elegant, rippling shapes don't seem tough enough to hold the horrors within.

By Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times Architecture Critic

October 28, 2010

Architectural symbols are rarely more layered, complex or self-aware than in a Holocaust museum, where the architect's nearly impossible job is to mark murder on a mass scale while at the same time providing some sense of resilience and hope.

In some cases the resulting design takes on a slashing, dissonant form, as in Daniel Libeskind's 1999 Jewish Museum in Berlin. In others it tries to communicate at least a small part of the claustrophobia and confusion that awaited prisoners inside Nazi camps; that was among the central goals of James Ingo Freed, who designed the bluntly powerful 1993 United States Holocaust Museum on the National Mall in Washington.

Santa Monica architect Hagy Belzberg took a third approach in shaping the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, which occupies a sliver of a site on the western edge of Pan Pacific Park, across the street from the Grove shopping center. Eager to steer clear of direct architectural representations of either persecution or liberation — both of which, Belzberg told me, he thinks lead all too quickly to kitsch — the architect instead designed a sleek building full of liquid curves that is sunk partially below ground and topped with a steeply raked green roof. The walkways slicing through that rooftop landscape, along with the museum's curving interior walls and ceilings, are made of shotcrete, a kind of concrete that is sprayed on rather than poured and is common in the construction of swimming pools.


The result of all those architectural choices is an elegant, energy-efficient and economical building whose stance toward the city, and toward history, is oddly deferential. By tucking itself beneath the rolling landscape of the park, the museum seems happy to erase its public presence, even as it creates spaces for contemplation in its rooftop garden. The shotcrete walls, for all their appeal when seen from afar, have a rather insubstantial quality up close, unlike the poured-in-place concrete they impersonate.

As a community center or a small science museum, Belzberg's building could easily qualify as an inventive response to the range of constraints he had to contend with, including a tight budget and an unusually tricky site. As a Holocaust museum, it strikes a conflicted note, its cost-effective, rippling shapes seemingly miscast.

I don't know that a Holocaust museum, by definition, requires architectural toughness. But given that its contents are so horrific, there should be a sense that the container — the building — has enough heft, solidity and resolve to hold its own. A certain frankness about construction and materials would also seem fundamental, though that is largely missing here.

The new building, which covers 32,000 square feet and had construction costs of $15.5 million, represents the culmination of a long search for a permanent home by the Museum of the Holocaust, which was founded in 1961 and is the oldest Holocaust museum in the United States. For years it moved from one rented space to the next. Most recently it was located inside a Wilshire Boulevard office building. Finally the museum reached an agreement with the city to build on the site in Pan Pacific Park, adjacent to an existing Holocaust memorial erected in 1991.

Inside, Belzberg has produced an appealingly legible floor plan despite a number of complex circulation challenges. There are three ways, for instance, to reach the lobby. From the curb on the museum's western edge along the Grove Drive, where buses will drop off the schoolchildren who make up the bulk of the museum's visitors, a partially hidden ramp leads down to the front door. Immediately across from that entrance is another one bringing visitors in from the park. A third path is to come up in an elevator from the underground parking garage and enter the museum from the east.

Those three routes come together in a surprisingly small if high-ceilinged lobby. Behind a row of interior windows and above a sleek walnut ticket desk lie the museum's offices, as well as an archive for scholars.

After entering the museum, visitors start down another ramp, this one lined on one side by exhibits designed by Randy Schoenberg, president of the museum's board, in collaboration with Belzberg. The exhibits move chronologically; borrowing a strategy from Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, the ramp takes museum goers into the depths of the war, and the Holocaust, before bringing them back toward ground level and daylight.

At the bottom of the ramp is perhaps the museum's most powerful, if also one of its most basic, exhibits: A model of the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland built (entirely from memory) by one of its former prisoners, Thomas Blatt. The display, chillingly simple, has the childlike quality of the architecture in a model train set.

One of the strengths of Belzberg's design is its resistance to narrow, simplistic interpretation. By avoiding direct symbols of the Holocaust — and, for that matter, of Jewish identity — he has created a piece of architecture that operates on a number of symbolic levels. Its rooftop forms — designed with the Colorado landscape firms K. Dakin Design and Evo Design — suggest an extension of existing pathways in the park.

Gavriel Rosenfeld, writing in the Forward newspaper, has even suggested, fascinatingly, that the museum's "self-effacing character" is the architectural version of an interest in cultural assimilation. "After all," Rosenfeld notes, "some of the city's most important Jewish institutions, such as the Museum of Tolerance and the Skirball Cultural Center ... have strived not to appear architecturally Jewish in any way, a strategy that echoes their universalistic mission of reaching out to non-Jewish audiences."

Rosenfeld also calls the museum an example of "stealth architecture." But ultimately the design is too aware of its own good looks — too fond of the bending formal flourish — to qualify. One gesture Belzberg leans on heavily — curving walls framing expanses of clear or opaque glass — begins after several appearances to feel gratuitously decorative. The notched row of skylights above the ticket desk, on the other hand, is a bluntly effective touch.

The decision to lower the building's profile in the park by sinking much of it underground, meanwhile, had as much to do with pleasing public officials and community groups concerned about new construction in the neighborhood as it did with Belzberg's architectural goals. But there is no getting around the fact that it has produced a rather apologetic landmark — not to mention a sign of the anemic support politicians and the public give to cultural as opposed to developer-driven architecture in this city.

To an extent Belzberg faced a paradox in designing the museum: Working with a minimal budget, how do you create a permanent, serious monument to the Holocaust in a city famous for its love of the impermanent and where the prevailing construction practices favor the flimsy, the stucco-wrapped and the expedient?

Ultimately, he decided to bring those two poles together, employing fluid, lightweight and relatively inexpensive materials to create an atmosphere of somber reflection. As you might guess, it is something of an uncomfortable marriage.

christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com

Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

Small But Packed with Profound New Information

by By Harriette Ellis

The architecture is not meant to be in competition with the massive National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. No, there’s no intention of that. Indeed, the much smaller, but equally impressive new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust will easily stand on its own merit, as a powerful antidote to hate and “make a living statement of hope that humanity can put behind itself, once and for all, the depravity it exhibited during the Holocaust,” said Mark Rothman, executive director of the museum in a message to me.
The architect, Santa Monica’s Hagy Belzberg, is giving the Jewish community a thoughtful and most creative new home (now its third, and final, site) for the Holocaust museum, though small in size — only about 26,000 square feet — yet large in concept and care. The ideas, history, information, and educational opportunities that will be packed into this space should prove to be astonishing, once everything is in place. And that is scheduled for Thursday, October 14, when the opening is announced with ribbon cutting, reception, and other appropriate fanfare.

Recently, I was given the opportunity to preview the museum, allowing us a glimpse of what to expect, once the museum is open to the public. A small group of Holocaust survivors and a few dignitaries had been invited to a reception and viewing. But finding the museum, which is located at the southeast corner of Beverly Boulevard and Stanley Avenue in Pan Pacific Park in Los Angeles, took some exploration, since much of it is below grade, and while constructed to a large extent of concrete, a portion of the roof is covered with soil and plants, and at that time the entrance we were to take was obscured by wooden planks. Needless to say, it took a bit of maneuvering.

The subterranean effect designed by Hagy proved to be a subtle reminder of what was to follow. Here, the architect has created an interesting and meaningful – certainly to Holocaust survivors – effect, as we discovered as our tour guide led us through the currently empty halls of the building. Pointing out the future titles of each room and what would be exhibited in each one prompted much excitement among all of the guests. Here are a few glimpses of what visitors will see as they progress from room to room, down a long hall, which dips deeper and deeper into darkness, as more and more information about the horrors of the Holocaust emerge.

Using the latest technology, visitors will be encouraged to touch digital artifacts and learn about the lives of European Jews prior to 1933, just as the Holocaust began to rear its frightening head. There will be touch screens for hearing music and poetry and seeing images and artifacts.

As hope and peace return, the hall ascends into lightness “and a world of normalcy.” Audio and printed guides will assist the visitor as he or she traverses the museum. As the visitor steps into sunlight on an outside plaza, one is greeted with a simple monument, “Memorial to the Martyrs,” consisting of six large granite columns and a children’s memorial room with 1.5 million holes representing all the children who perished.

The present Holocaust Museum in L.A., opened 15 years ago, is closed in preparation for the move to its new quarters.

Rothman stated: “Our new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust offers itself as a gift to all of Southern California, empowering our cultural kaleidoscope to come together in harmony,” and centers, he said, on a two-fold mission: to commemorate and to educate.

It will present the history of the Holocaust as objectively as possible. E. Randol Schoenberg, president of the Board of the Museum and chief curator of the new permanent exhibit, said, “We also made sure to provide emotional, aesthetic experiences. We have an entire room dedicated to stories of Rescue and Resistance.” He also pointed out that the “temporary exhibition space will initially feature the incredible artwork made in Theresienstadt by Erich Lichtblau-Leskly.”

Although the founders of the museum in 1961 knew that it was really not possible to convey the true horror of the Holocaust in a museum, Schoenberg said he hoped “to continue our institution’s long history of providing insight and evidence to educate our local community.  At the same time, we hope we have created a fitting memorial to those who witnessed the destruction first hand.”

So, after my initial visit, my curiosity unabated, I now eagerly look forward to seeing the completed project. The museum will surely make its mark as a shining jewel for the West Coast Jewish Community.

Click here to see the entire artcile on ocjewishlife.com!

belzberg architects: los angeles museum of the holocaust

santa monica based office belzberg architects has finished the design of
the new los angeles museum of the holocaust (LAMOTH). now open to
the public, the museum features an undulating green roof that pulls up
the northwest corner of los angeles' pan pacific park. serving as an annex
to the already existing holocaust monument, the multi-cultural museum
aims to integrate completely into the public green space, minimizing the
visual impact on the park's atmosphere.

the roof, while subtle in height, features graphic lines of concrete that divides
the surface into a series of zigzagging pedestrian paths. slicing through
the center is the descending entry ramp, which tapers in to an interior space
that is flanked by sloped ceilings and perspective-altering floors. the design
of the layout and circulation kept conscious the institute's 50 year history,
utilizing the building's underground elements to evoke certain emotions from
the visitors. clever usage of natural light from above alleviates the darkness
and compressive atmosphere provided by the shotcrete columns.

designboom.com, 10/25/10

Click here to see the full article with pictures!

Holocaust survivors and members of the community interact with a multimedia table, during the opening of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMH) at the Pan Pacific Park on Thursday, Oct. 14, 2010, in Los Angeles. Survivors founded the museum in 1961 as a permanent repository for their personal artifacts from the Holocaust and the world the Nazis destroyed.

Photo from AP Photo

The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust's 2010 video promo is now available to view on youtube. The promo was premiered at the Museum's 2010 Annual Gala Dinner on October 17, 2010.

Click here to view the video!

Video courtesy of JankovicMedia 2010.

Jona Goldrich was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2010 LA Museum of the Holocaust Dinner, held on October 17, 2010.

This short video provides a glimpse into the life of Jona.

Click here to view the video!

Video courtesy of JankovicMedia 2010.

Beth and Jon Kean were honored with the Next Generation Award at the 2010 LA Museum of the Holocaust Dinner, held on October 17, 2010.

This short video explores the Keans' interest in the Holocaust, and why they are passionate about the museum.

Click here to view the video!

Video courtesy of JankovicMedia 2010.

Pictures from our 2010 Annual Gala Dinner are now available to view on the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust's Facebook page. The dinner was held at the beautiful Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills on October 17, 2010. LAMOTH was excited to welcome 500 guests at this year's event.

Click here to view pictures from the dinner!

Pictures from LAMOTH's official dedication ceremony and ribbon cutting are now available to view on Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust's Facebook page. The special ceremony was held in front of the Martyrs Memorial in Pan Pacific Park on October 14, 2010. Speakers included Executive Director, Mark Rothman and the Mayor of the City of Los Angeles, Hon. Antonio Villaraigosa.

Click here to view pictures from the ceremony!

Pictures from LAMOTH's book release party for the new publication They Shall be Counted: The Theresienstadt Ghetto Art of Erich Lichtblau-Leskly are now available at Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust's Facebook page. The release party celebrated the publication of the book and was held in the Museum on October 14, 2010.

Click here to view images from the event!

LA's newest museum is the permanent home for the Holocaust Museum, a 50 year-old institution. The striking building designed by Belzberg architects features a generous green roof  that acts as an extension of the adjacent Pan Pacific Park. The project was also designed to express one of the darkest moments in human history - a buried organic form greets visitors as they descend into a unique museum space that memorializes those who died and survived the holocaust.

The museum just opened this week in a lot adjacent to the Holocaust Memorial placed in 1992. The LAMH is the oldest holocaust museum in the US and this is its fourth and final location. Its subtle design is meant to blend in with the park, offering a public open space. The exterior is very gracious, featuring a green roof  with a series of walkways pressed into its undulating shape – pedestrians may not even be aware when they are on museum grounds.

The entrance is subtly placed as a long descending corridor, splitting the body of the building into two. Windows on either side of the descending entrance let light into the heart of the space. The spaces are designed with lowered ceilings and lighting as the embedded rooms tell the story of the Jewish experience as the war unfolds.

The provocative undulating concrete forms are evocative of bones, creating a somewhat chilling dialogue with visitors. The architecture plays with natural light in the lobby and core of the building, then gives way to low-intensity artificial lighting the further you go into the 32,000 square foot space. As visitors go through the purposely oppressive rooms, they finish in a naturally-lit filled space as the liberation ending the war is unveiled.

by Andrew Michler, 10/19/10 - Inhabitat

Read more and view images of the Museum!

Variate Labs designed the information, content and interaction strategy for the new LAMH. Our concept was to create one unified content experience and make it accessible, personal and seamless across many different platforms.

The first day we heard about the project, we visited the existing museum and listened to the life story of one of the survivors. We immediately knew that we wanted to play a role in reshaping the museum experience to showcase the stories and perspective of the Los Angeles Jewish community. The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is the oldest Holocaust museum in the United States and has an incredible collection of physical content. When Variate Labs started this project, the museum’s content consisted largely of physical artifacts, photographs, video testimonials, an outdated website and the stories of living survivors. We reviewed this content and designed a new strategy that would showcase the museums content in an optimized way across many different platforms to create a new type of museum experience. We came to the table with the following ideas to guide the project:

* The physical artifacts are the most important part of the museum. Use technology to provide context to the artifacts by augmenting and enhancing them. Technology should work with the content, not overshadow it.

* Embed and integrate the content and technology into the architecture of the museum itself. The architecture is the collection and the collection is the experience.

* Create one unified content set. All digital and physical content should appear to be part of the same visual system. The way visitors interact with the physical and digital artifacts should be consistent across the entire experience.

* Let content speak for itself. No extra navigation elements or non-authentic things. Keep it simple and focus the visitors attention on absorbing the materials with low barrier to entry.

* Create a personal connection between visitors and content. The museum experience does not need to be the same for each visitor. It is more important to create a long-lasting connection between visitors and content.

Our role in this project exemplifies how we would like to work on all projects. We worked with the museum director (Mark Rothman), the board president (Randol Schoenberg) and Hagy Belzberg Architects to develop the overall concept and design for the museum’s information, content and interaction strategy. During this 1.5 year project, we designed and developed everything in the museum that relates to content: from the high-level narrative of the museum experience to all of the specific moments in the museum experience and on the web. Variate Labs designed, developed and supervised the construction of the new museum database, database standards, digitization workflow, new website, print exhibits, audioguide, interactive touch table exhibit, interactive multiple screen learning interface, interactive exhibit monitors, audioguide takeaway and logo. Each component of the larger master vision was a project in-and-of itself.

New Museum Database, Standards and Workflow

When Variate Labs started the project, all artifacts in the current museum were analog and physical. Variate designed a workflow that would allow the museum to capture and document all of the artifiacts. This included designing the new database standards, outlining the workflow, aiding in the purchase of all digitization materials and teaching the staff how to digitize content.

Personas and Use Cases

Variate developed a number of different architype personas that represented museum goers. After analyzing the museums content offering and the behavior of the personas, Variate designed a number of different use cases for the new museum experience that would showcase the rich content of the museum. A number of interactives were designed to give context to specific artifacts and to showcase a rich variety of content when there were space limitations.

Interactive Concepts

After developing the personas and use cases, Variate designed and developed concepts for a number of interactives located throughout the museum exhibits. Variate Labs worked closely with the architect to ensure that the design of the interactives worked with the style of the architecture. All of the interactives were mean to feel embedded and integrated within the architecture itself.

Construction

Variate worked closely with the executive director (Mark Rothman) board president (Randol Schoenberg) and the architects at Hagy Belzberg Architects (Hagy Belzberg, Aaron Leppanen, Carina Bien-Willner and Lauren Zuzack) throughout the entire construction process. Variate Labs staff members were routinely on-site to answer questions about the interactives and to coordinate the forms and technology.

Print Exhibits

Variate Labs designed the content layout for all of the digital and physical exhibits. Variate completed a comprehensive audit of the museums existing artifacts and imagery and mapped this content to various locations throughout the exhibit. Content was organized by themes and was mean to be experienced in a clock-wise direction. The design layout uses large images in the background that exemplify general themes and then layer smaller more detailed imagery in the foreground to tell specific stories. After determining the type and quantity of content, Variate planned out all of the images in elevation and created a consistent rigor for sizing. Variate worked closely with the architect to ensure that the imagery worked with the exhibit structure. Variate also played a role in determining the new museum font, font size and graphic standards for the print displays. It was important to create a system and rigor that would carry into the digital interactives to create one seamless visual content set.

Audioguide Takeaway

Variate Labs designed and developed an audioguide takeaway that would allow visitors to experience the museum through the eyes of an individual that lives in Los Angeles. Variate designed a concept whereby visitors could find artifacts and images throughout the museum that offered glimpses into an individuals life. Each visitor that enters the museum could experience the museum in a different way. As part of this concept images relating to individuals would be shown in the foreground of the displays overlaid onto larger images that give thematic context.

Revolutionary Audioguide

Variate Labs designed the concept behind the new audioguide system. After doing extensive research and visiting all types of museums around the country, Variate designed an audioguide experience that was different from anything else on the market. The goal of the new audioguide system was to enable visitors to get context about artifacts and themes in an uprecedented seamless way. Variate designed an audioguide system that would seamlessly sync audio on the device to videos located on interactive screens throughout the exhibit. Rather than going with a typical -Touch to begin- mentality, the new museum would let videos continuously loop and visitors could listen to synced audio just by entering in an audioguide number. This audioguide system was built and implemented. To date its functionality has never been replicated in another museum environment. Variate Labs worked with Potion Design to fabricate this interactive.

World That Was Touch Table

The museum has an extensive collection of images from the Jewish community prior to the beginning of the Holocaust. The museum has so many images that it would be impossible to display them all in a conventional way. The goal of this interactive was to create a learning tool, with a low barrier to entry, whereby visitors could explore the rich images and learn about the history and life stories of the Jewish community. This table offers visitors a personal connection with content and allows for spontaneous exploration. All of the content in the table contains rich metadata that allows for images to be organized by various themes. The table also has a teaching mode whereby a docent can activate a robust content management tool and show images of a specific family, theme or name. The table was designed so that 14 people can use the table simultaneously. The table was also designed to allow videos to seamlessly sync with the audioguide device. Variate Labs determined the overall concept and functionality for this interactive and worked with Potion Design to design and develop the specific user interface and hardware.

18 Camp Freestanding Interactive Displays

The goal of this interactive was to create a series of freestanding displays that would each tell the story of an individual camp. These displays were designed to be informative and showcase content ranging from text and photographic history of the camps to survivor stories. All of the monitors are linked together to create an attract mode that speaks to the overall scale of the horror. Upon entering the room, visitors will see all monitors showing the same type of information. This info includes camp statistics, maps and Los Angeles survivor images. Visitors can also listen to audio files that sync with survivor videos on each monitor. A visitor can walk through the exhibit and learn about the collective devastation or stop and learn about a specific camp in more detail. Variate Labs determined the overall concept and functionality for this interactive and worked with the architect and Potion Design to design and develop the specific user interface and hardware.

New Website

The goal of the new website was to create beautiful website that would represent the museum’s new image, showcase the museum’s collection and be extremely accessible to the public at large. The entire website is controlled by a robust content management system that is managed and updated by the museum’s staff. Prior to starting this project the museum was not in control of their own website and relied on 3rd parties for updates. The new website showcases many different types of information including: general information about the museum, visitor information, information about the exhibits, a virtual tour, news and events, a map of the building and surrounding area, access to the archives, educational resources and collection highlights. Variate Labs determined the overall concept and functionality for the website and worked with LAMH and FastSpot to design and develop the user interface and content management system. The new website can be viewed here.


Variate created the overall strategy and vision for the project. The schedule was extremely aggressive. Because of the compact timeframe we oversaw the development and execution of some of the elements by outside vendors. We are proud to have partnered with Potion Design (NYC), FastSpot (Baltimore) and The Tech Consultants (Los Angeles) to bring this project to life.

See more at variatelabs.com

Generally, the most effective architectural designs make you feel welcome and comfortable. But in a museum meant to recall the horrors of the Holocaust, that mission is turned on its head. So it’s no surprise that the most emotionally resonant spaces in the new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust are those where the rawness and constriction of the building evoke a period that the museum doesn’t want you to forget.

Disjointedly located in a park just behind the hyper-happy Grove in West Hollywood, the museum, designed by Belzberg Architects, is the new home for an institution that has existed since 1962. It previously occupied a relatively small and unremarkable space in an office building on Wilshire Boulevard.

Belzberg didn’t have the size or the budget of some of the world’s more famous Holocaust museums, such as Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum or Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, or Moshe Safdie’s Yad Vashem in Jersualem.

But within a 32,000-square-foot footprint, at about $350 a square foot, he managed to accomplish a lot. The boldest step was the decision to bury the museum underground, preserving the rolling parkland that was donated to the museum by the state and highlighting visitors’ movement into a realm distinct from their ordinary lives.

The structure’s undulating form echoes the curving landscape; the roof is planted with native fauna and a natural irrigation system, and concrete-lined pathways zigzag sharply, preserving the calm of the park but indicating that all is not quite right underneath.

As a jutting entry ramp compresses the visitor’s perspective and seems to slice through the ground, things start to change quickly. Circulation is carefully choreographed throughout, making you cognisant that you’re entering a building that Hagy Belzberg says “is going to provide some discomfort.”

That sense of discomfort is heightened right away by twisted shotcrete columns, which were formed from digital models and sculpted while still wet by a local pool contractor. Bleak raw concrete walls and ceilings slope in multiple directions, throwing perspective off and evoking a grim, trapped feeling.

Descending into the story of the Holocaust—told in separate spaces formed by flexible black cubicles that open up to the museum above—the sense of compression and darkness increases. The story starts in pre–World War II Europe; then the lights get dimmer and the ceilings lower as the full horrors of concentration camps and mass killings of the Holocaust unfold. Finally, as the stories of hope and liberation are detailed, the visitor turns a corner and returns to the light.

An educational system, via iPod, provides a more interactive experience. Exhibits include films, memorabilia, models, and digital components—including touch-screen technology—that allow more to be told in this relatively small space.

One of the most powerful aspects of the experience are the glimmers of natural light coming in from above, through translucent glass that reveals both glow and movement, but not clear views. The murky light provides some orientation while also evoking a sense of the isolation that Jews must have felt at the time. In a children’s memorial outside, the sound of children playing in a nearby park trickles in provocatively as you sit in a constricted space with only the sky above you. Nearby lies an amphitheater and a large memorial sculpture of black steel pillars by architect Herb Nadel that the museum inaugurated years ago.

I went through the museum twice, measuring my reactions. Belzberg could have gone even further with the darkness, twisting, and compression. Now you can only move so far into the darkness, while it might have been even more effective to make some exhibit walls touch the ceiling, heightening the sense of isolation. Concrete walls, ceilings, and floors make the space noisy, dulling the sense of dislocation as you move into the story.

Still, bold gestures far outweigh any shortcomings. Under difficult circumstances, Belzberg has created a memorable museum that broadens understanding not only of a horrible time but of the raw emotional impact that architecture’s spatial and tectonic qualities can deliver.

http://www.archpaper.com/e-board_rev.asp?News_ID=4910

PAN PACIFIC PARK, LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust held its grand opening at Pan Pacific Park Thursday.

The building was built with green space in mind, created with part of the facility underground. The high-tech building cost $18 million to create.

The building is owned by the museum, its first.

Extra space added allows more exhibits and artifacts to be displayed from the museum's archives.

The museum, founded in 1961, expects yearly visitors to reach more than 50,000 per year.

Artifacts include a concentration-camp uniform, a replica of a boxcar that transported Jews to death camps, and a model of a death camp.

Watch the news report at:

http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news%2Flocal%2Flos_angeles&id=7726186

http://www.flickr.com/photos/37176081@N02/sets/72157625040034513/with/5081594395/

Years after Masha Loen was liberated from a Nazi death camp, she met other Jewish genocide survivors at Hollywood High School, where they assembled a collection of photos and artifacts that became the nation's first Holocaust museum. 

Forty-nine years later, the last living founder of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust will celebrate the grand opening today of its permanent home in Pan Pacific Park.

"It's the best thing to happen – to see this open before I go," said Loen, 80, of Valley Village.

"It's for mankind to learn. This should never happen again. Never, never. To anybody, any race, religion or country. Never again."

"Never again" could be the theme of the museum, which was housed at four Wilshire Boulevard locations before settling into the $18 million building set into a knoll overlooking the Holocaust Memorial Monument.

There, up to 250 schoolchildren a day are expected to walk down a sunny ramp under a grass-covered roof and into the 32,000-square-foot tribute to a Jewish world that was – and the six million murdered Jews who might have been.

Visitors will descend through the award-winning concrete edifice designed by architect Hagy Belzberg into ever-darker exhibits that culminate in one of the blackest periods in history.

Artifacts and photographs help tell the story of Europe's Jews from the rise of Nazism, to their deportation, extermination and liberation after World War II, as well as the few who tried to save them.

"The museum is important to me because the Holocaust is the greatest tragedy, the most brutal form of murder, in the history of mankind," said E. Randol Schoenberg, president of the museum board. "It's our duty as Jews to teach that history so that history isn't forgotten.

"And mankind can learn from this horrible experience and never repeats it."

The Museum of the Holocaust is one of two in Los Angeles dedicated to the Holocaust. The Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance also focuses on Shoah.

Aided by a host of audio and touch-screen displays, visitors to the Fairfax District museum walk through nine galleries lined with floor-to-ceiling photographs of Jews and their Nazi killers.

There are 25,000 photographs of Jews that swirl about a digital table, surrounded by once-cherished Torahs, china, clothing and toys.

There are Nazi flags and memorabilia, including children's books used to teach anti-Semitism. There are stacks of luggage packed hastily by Jewish refugees fleeing the Germans, only to be turned away by nations such as the United States

There's a cattle car like the one used to transport Loen and her family, its doors creaking shut on museum-goers.

There are uniforms worn by Jews at Dachau and children's shoes left behind at Auschwitz, as well as the audio-visual testimonies of survivors and a sprawling model of the Sobibor camp.

And there's a "Perp Wall" of Nazi "hangman" Reinhard Heydrich and other major perpetrators behind the Holocaust. Some of the photographs are graphic, and not suitable for young children.

"Evil flourishes when good people do nothing," said Mark Rothman, executive director of the museum, before entering an exhibit of rare exploits to save the Jews. "This museum gives people the understanding of tragedy, and the power to reinterpret it for good."

Rene Firestone survived Auschwitz, but her 14-year-old sister Klara Weinferd died from its medical experiments. In filmmaker Steven Spielberg's documentary, "The Last Days," she interviews the Nazi doctor who experimented on her sister.

"You saw on TV that people saved 33 miners in Chile," Firestone, of Beverly Hills, said before giving a survivor lecture on Wednesday. "And when six million Jews were murdered, nobody gave a damn ... The whole world stood still."

Loen lost her mother and two sisters at the concentration camp in what is now Poland. She and others were freed by the Red Army, only to be imprisoned once again by the Soviets. After she emigrated to the United States, she met other Holocaust survivors while learning English at Hollywood High in 1961.

When each decided to donate photographs or personal effects, a Holocaust museum was born.

"They had the same feeling I did – we must do something," Loen said. "I wanted to take revenge. This was our revenge. I devoted my life to this museum ... It is a miracle I'm still around."

See the photo gallery at:

http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_16337682?source=rss

In grade school, Randy Schoenberg made a 12-foot-tall family tree. In college at Princeton, he led a Holocaust Remembrance Day. As a litigator, he argued all the way to the Supreme Court on behalf of Maria Altmann and ultimately recovered five Nazi-looted Klimt paintings from Austria for his client.

"A psychiatrist from Vienna once gave me an article about this syndrome called the torchbearer syndrome," says Schoenberg, 44, who has the intense, heavy-lidded eyes of his paternal grandfather, composer Arnold Schoenberg. "It's very common in families affected by the Holocaust, where you have one person in the next generation or the generation after who becomes the keeper of mementos, the teller of family stories, the one who's interested in preserving the history."

Now Schoenberg, an L.A. native, has embarked on what might be his most ambitious historical undertaking: overseeing and helping to finance with his gains from the Altmann case the expansion of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in its new home in Pan Pacific Park. A 14,000-square-foot concrete cave of a building designed by Hagy Belzberg, the museum officially opens to the public Thursday with a ribbon-cutting ceremony expected to attract Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other dignitaries.

The new museum has nine galleries, covering topics that include pre-Holocaust Europe, the horrors of the concentration camps, and accounts of rescue and resistance. The goal, Schoenberg says, is to showcase artifacts and documents from the museum's 3,000-plus-piece collection, alongside reproductions, such as large-scale photographs, that give the items context.

"In theory we could have made this one big theater and showed ' Schindler's List' on a reel all day long," he says. "That would be wonderful in one way, but our goal is to show original artifacts so people feel like they're in the presence of this terrible event — something tangible they can see and almost feel."

He gestures toward a child's shoe in a display case: "The idea is that this shoe belonged to an innocent child."

Schoenberg says this content distinguishes the museum, founded in 1961, from the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, which opened in 1993. As its name suggests, the Museum of Tolerance goes beyond the Holocaust to consider contemporary genocides and other sorts of discrimination, past and present, such as public school segregation or cyber-bullying.

"Everybody asks why Los Angeles needs two Holocaust museums. We came first — should we scrap our collection because a second museum opens or a third?" he asks. "Plus, we're the only dedicated Holocaust museum in Los Angeles."

Schoenberg speaks not only as president of the museum board but also as its de facto curator. The chairman of the board's content development committee, he has written many of the wall panels himself and developed the basic concept for the iPod Touch-based audio guides. He also pays homage to his grandfathers, Arnold Schoenberg and fellow Austrian émigré composer Eric Zeisl, with a small section called "Holocaust and Music."

He describes multiple points of entry into the new Holocaust museum, calling it open-ended, user-driven on a "museum 2.0" or "Wiki-museum" model. One gallery, for example, has 18 touch-screen monitors for 18 concentration camps, with choices such as "statistics," "victims" and "survivors" providing more information and images on each. "It's not just Auschwitz here," Schoenberg says, pointing to lesser-known transit camps, such as Drancy in France.

He says the approach is more "experiential" at the Museum of Tolerance: "You walk in and the lights go off and a speaker goes on to tell you what you're supposed to know — in a way it's like Disneyland."

Liebe Geft, director of the Museum of Tolerance, rejects the analogy. "This is not some fun trip — our immersive experience has been shown to be extremely moving and effective from an educational standpoint." (She also notes that a Disney Imagineering team on a recent visit "saw no parallels.")

But she agrees with Schoenberg that there's room for two museums. "There are millions and millions of people to serve in Southern California alone. There is always room for good education that helps raise our awareness so we can create a better world," Geft says.

The L.A. Museum of the Holocaust was founded in 1961 by a group of local Holocaust survivors and for many years was a low-rent, low-profile operation. The museum had four locations, all on Wilshire Boulevard, before it separated legally from the Jewish Federation in 2003 and began looking for a permanent home.

Jona Goldrich, a longtime board member and a sponsor of the existing Holocaust Monument pillars in Pan Pacific Park, says he lobbied for the park location because of its diversity. "Being in the park lets us reach people who think of the Holocaust as a Jewish thing — they don't realize that next time it might not happen to Jews but to another minority." (Goldrich adds that in hopes of reaching more park visitors he is trying to overturn the museum's plans to close on Saturdays in religious observance.)

By the time Schoenberg was elected board president in December 2005, the museum already had Belzberg's plans for the park site in hand. The following month, to the surprise of many, Austrian judges in arbitration awarded Altmann the five looted Klimt paintings. Altmann and her relatives sold one canvas privately to Ronald Lauder of the Neue Galerie for an amount believed to exceed $130 million. The others went up for auction at Christie's and brought a total of $192.7 million.

Schoenberg declines to confirm his cut, which Forbes reported as 40%, but he acknowledges that it was staggering. "I will admit I got a lot of money, probably more than anyone should ever get. I decided with my wife, Pam, that if we got all this money, we should be doing something good with it, and relevant to how we got it."

To date, he has donated $6 million of the $19 million of anticipated building costs, plus an additional $1 million for operating costs. Other lead donors include Goldrich at $4 million and John Martz, a board member who donated $3 million before he died this year.

The board is now working to create an endowment — "ideally $20 million, which would be enough to operate the museum in perpetuity," Schoenberg says, assuming an annual operating budget of $1 million. (The museum's lease from the city is $1 a year for 50 years.)

Although the museum is open to the public with free admission, Schoenberg expects the core audience to be students, noting that the Holocaust is part of the 10th grade social studies curriculum in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The museum's goal is 250 schoolchildren a day, or 50,000 a year. (The Museum of Tolerance says it sees around 130,000 students in groups a year.)

"You bring in that many kids and one of them one day is going to be mayor or governor or president," Schoenberg says. "And one day someone is going to say to them that the Jews are making all of this stuff up. And they will say: No, I saw the documents and photographs."

As for his own role in growing the museum, he says, "It feels a little like lawyering — you're putting together evidence of the Holocaust."

See the photo gallery:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-1013-holocaust-pictures,0,3471524.photogallery

Read the article:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-new-holocaust-museum-20101014,0,5907597.story

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hundreds of people toured the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust during its grand opening Thursday at Pan Pacific Park.

The museum, founded in 1961, has been moved four times over the years, but never had its own building and has always had limited space. But its new $18 million, high-tech, very green museum changes all that, executive director Mark Rothman said.

The building, designed so it is partially underground to preserve green space, is located next to the Martyrs Memorial, built in the park 18 years ago.

There will be many familiar artifacts, including a concentration camp uniform, a partial replica of a boxcar used to haul Jews to death camps and a death camp model.

All the added space will allow more artifacts to be brought out of archives and put on display, Rothman said.

In addition to a touch-screen computer table that seems to allow 25,000 photographs to float, there is a testimonial wall with 85 video screens that allow visitors to hear survivor stories in their own words.

Attendance is expected to swell from around 13,000 a year to more than 50,000 a year. But there will never be an entry fee to the museum, Rothman said.

Fundraising for the new building started in 2004 with a $3 million gift from museum board member John Martz, who wanted to honor his parents, survivors of multiple camps, Rothman said.

Attorney Randy Schoenberg donated $6 million to the museum after recovering five Nazi-looted Gustav Klimt paintings for Maria Altmann of Los Angeles. When the paintings were sold or auctioned off in 2006, he received a sizable award.

He has been chairman of the museum’s board since 2005.

Watch the news report at:

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2010/10/14/la-holocaust-museum-opens-doors-to-new-18m-home/

When I began working in the Jewish community in 2002, my colleagues at the Israeli Consulate General told me that there were two things that united every Jew in the city: a war involving Israel and the Holocaust. After attending this morning’s public dedication of LA’s relocated Museum of the Holocaust (the nation’s oldest), I’m tempted to scratch that last one off the list. With the exception of Israeli Consul General Jacob Dayan and Jewish Federation head Jay Sanderson, I did not see one other member of the organized Jewish community in attendance. No one from the ADL, the AJC, the Simon Wiesenthal Center/Museum of Tolerance, or any of the many other Jewish organizations that fill the pages of the Jewish community directory. Only one rabbi (Rabbi Larry Scheindlin, headmaster of Sinai Akiba Academy) was there. A choir from Shalhevet, a modern Orthodox high school, sang the opening song, but no student groups from any of the city’s other Jewish day schools bothered to show up. Their absence was all too evident when LA Schools Superintendent Ramon Cortines was applauded by the crowd. The city’s non-Jewish chief educator apparently found the time to come and honor a Holocaust museum, but Jewish educators couldn’t be bothered. The museum is located within walking distance of a huge Orthodox community with hundreds of families, but I guess they all had more important things to do this morning.

I made a few phone calls afterwards to former colleagues in the Jewish community to find out why they hadn’t come to the dedication of their city’s Holocaust museum. Their uniform responses left me cold. Yes, the Holocaust was very important to them. Yes, they were all for having a Holocaust museum in the city. Yes, they had a great deal of respect for the museum’s backers. Yes, Thursday mornings are usually good for them. However, they all cited the same reason for not coming: they had not received a personal invitation. I don’t know about you, but I find this laughable. I didn’t receive a personal invitation either, but when I saw the ads in Jewish media for the dedication of a Holocaust museum, I made it a point to be there. If the Prime Minister of Israel were coming to speak at a public event in this city, something tells me that Jewish leaders who had not received gilded invitations would somehow manage to be there. We all make time for people and events that are priorities in our lives.   

Sadly, this isn’t the first time that I have observed this apathy dynamic in the Jewish community. While the community’s size (around 600,000) would appear to be a blessing, in reality it is a community of many smaller communities, movements, organizations and synagogues, many of which have little to do with each other. When I attended the memorial for the Chabad rabbi and his wife who were slain in Mumbai, India, my colleague and I joined the head of the Jewish Federation as the only representatives from the organized Jewish community (we were working for the American Jewish Congress at the time) in attendance at the moving ceremony held at the Chabad house in Westwood. Almost everyone else at the public event was Orthodox. On the other hand, almost everyone who gathered at a public memorial to honor gay Jewish teens who were gunned down in Tel Aviv was gay or lesbian. This time there were no Orthodox Jews to be found.

The hierarchical LDS Church doesn’t have movements and a plethora of organizations to deal with, so the social dynamic is markedly different. Tomorrow night one of our apostles is coming to rededicate the Visitors Center next to our temple, and hundreds of Mormons from around the region are expected to attend the ceremony with their friends. Very few members will have received personal invitations (many of which are earmarked for interfaith leaders and other prominent non-Mormons), but seeing an apostle is important enough to them that they will fight traffic on a Friday evening to be there when he speaks.

I hope that Jewish leaders will prove me wrong on Sunday night, when the Museum of the Holocaust holds its gala dinner in Beverly Hills. For all I know, they may in fact have skipped today’s ceremony because they’re planning to buy tickets to the $500/plate dinner instead. Whatever their plans are, the fact that there were as many Mormon leaders in attendance at the dedication of a Holocaust museum as there were rabbis and executive directors from a 600,000-member Jewish community should give everyone pause for reflection. And shame.       

The last time Randy Schoenberg, grandson of the famous composer, made headlines, he was the lawyer representing L.A. resident Maria Altmann in her attempts -- ultimately successful -- to recover five Nazi-looted Klimt paintings.

"Yes, it was the case of a lifetime," he says, describing the seven-year journey that took him to the U.S. Supreme Court and then into binding arbitration in Austria. It was also the financial gain of a lifetime, with Schoenberg's cut, according to Forbes, exceeding $100 million.

That was four years ago. Since then, Schoenberg has put his new wealth and free time to  use by overseeing the building of a new $19-million home for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in Pan Pacific Park.

Click here to read more about Schoenberg's vision for the museum, which opens to the public this week with an official ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday.

Next weekend, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust publicly opens the plate-glass doors of its brand-new home at the northwest corner of Pan Pacific Park for the first time. Observant visitors might be drawn to the building’s grass-covered roof, or the retro-futuristic shape of the windows, or the repeated use of triangles in a design that seems to nod to the six three-sided black pillars of the Los Angeles Holocaust Monument that sit just outside the museum.

Indeed, L.A.-based architect Hagy Belzberg’s design for the new museum does not look like many other buildings in Los Angeles. Belzberg’s design performs an admirable artistic and political feat: It has nestled a small museum inside a popular and much-utilized public park without raising many hackles among neighborhood residents. And the result is a handsome new home for the collections, with an unbeatable address.

Belzberg’s building doesn’t look much like other Holocaust museums, either. Over the past 20 years, cities around the world have erected structures that attempt to preserve and disseminate Holocaust memory through designs by some of the world’s most prominent architects. Each of these Holocaust museums and memorials bears the unique imprint of its architect, while responding to all the usual architectural challenges — relating to the site, budget and local politics, among others. And Belzberg’s museum is no exception. To best understand the new museum, though, it helps to be familiar with a few of its most influential predecessors.

This country’s largest and best-known Holocaust museum, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., was designed by James Ingo Freed and opened in 1993. Its interior court of exposed red brick and unadorned steel beams recalls the materials Freed saw on a research trip to Auschwitz in 1986. Freed and the museum’s exhibition designers also took care to highlight evocative touchstones that make up the core of most such collections — the names and photographs of Holocaust victims — in distinctly architectural ways. Walls of glass bridges suspended above the large entrance hall are etched with the first names of victims, and, in one of the permanent exhibition’s most affecting exhibits, a three-story tower is covered with 1,032 photographs of people from Eishishok, a single shtetl in Lithuania whose Jewish residents were killed in 1941, over the course of just two days.

The use of thousands of specific individual names is a design strategy that both humanizes the unimaginable (he was Tadeusz; my brother’s name is Ted) and hints at the inconceivable scope of the tragedy (these pictures seem to go on forever). It is a strategy that can be found in other museums as well, including in Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names. Whether by a brick, a steel girder or a photograph, Freed and his collaborators succeeded in establishing, using these materials, a mournful and richly referential atmosphere.

Yet, while Freed used conventional materials in largely conventional ways, Daniel Libeskind’s addition to the Jewish Museum Berlin, completed in 1999, seemed so unlike a typical museum that it opened to the public for two years without any of the exhibits installed inside its galleries.

Libeskind’s extension — which does not have its own door, and which dwarfs the neoclassical building that it purports to extend — can be reached only by descending underground. Walls and ceilings don’t appear to be straight, and visitors instinctively walk slowly through the spaces, nearly silent, appearing like corpses under eerie artificial light. A few items dot the walls, but they feel secondary to the three subterranean hallways in which they are installed.

Libeskind named these hallways “The Axis of Continuity,” “The Axis of Emigration” and “The Axis of the Holocaust,” and each leads to a different symbolic destination. At the end of “The Axis of the Holocaust,” a grim four-story shaft of unadorned concrete signifies the dead end of genocide; an unwelcoming garden of tall, narrow pillars topped with oak trees is meant to evoke the nearly unattainable (but still promising) opportunity at the end of “Emigration”; and the “Continuity” axis ends in a stairway that leads back above ground, into the rest of Libeskind’s building.

Even above ground, Libeskind’s building occasionally and purposefully disorients visitors. Voids perforate the building at seemingly random points, reminders of what isn’t there. For everything present, the building seems to say, the history of Jews in Berlin and in Germany is one of gaping absences that cannot be ignored.

Architects at their best aim to shape visitors’ experiences of a place, and Holocaust museums often take this goal to an extremely specific level, often choreographing the visitor’s every move. The Berlin museum tells visitors exactly what each space symbolizes. Within moments of entering the Washington, D.C., museum, visitors are crowded into elevators that spit them out into a somber gallery, where they are immediately faced with a mural-size photo of American troops in a liberated concentration camp looking at the charred bodies of the Nazis’ victims.

Architect Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also in Berlin, avoids such forceful guidance, instead leading visitors through an otherworldly environment with a much lighter touch. The memorial is made up of 2,711 rectangular concrete blocks — repetition again — somewhat reminiscent of gravestones. The shorter blocks at the edges of the configuration are often used as benches by tourists and by toddlers as balance beams. But as visitors penetrate deeper into the field, the ground descends, and the blocks become taller, muffling the sound of the streets beyond, darkening the mood, offering an unsettling kind of hiding place.

The memorial occupies five and a half acres at the center of the city of Berlin, making it (like Yad Vashem, like the Washington museum) a space of appropriate vastness. But with some of the concrete blocks descending to the point where their tops are flush with the sidewalk, this memorial is decidedly anti-monumental.

It is tempting to suggest that new home of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is a similarly anti-monumental, almost self-effacing building. But it is not. Approaching the museum from The Grove Drive to the west, Belzberg’s low-slung, green-roofed building appears to have no visible façade at all. To enter the building, one must travel down a ramp that divides the building’s two main gallery spaces.

As poignant as this descent may seem, the architect and others involved with the project freely admit that the initial decision to sink the museum’s new home into the ground was shaped in no small part by the political challenge of building in a public park. And when viewed from the sunken flood control basin inside the park, Belzberg’s building looks far more imposing than its 26-foot height would suggest.

Ultimately, it will be the content of the permanent and changing exhibitions and the docents’ ability — not the green roof or the smooth three-sided concrete beams that surround the trapezoidal frosted-glass windows — that will determine the museum’s success in its mission to tell the story of the Holocaust.

But whether or not visitors notice the way this building can help define their experience, they will very likely be unconsciously affected by subtle changes in space and light orchestrated within the museum’s interior. Following the trajectory of the history it recounts, galleries become progressively darker, and the ceiling slopes downward as the situation for Europe’s Jews worsens. The gallery that tells about the concentration camps is the museum’s darkest, most claustrophobic space. But when visitors turn the next corner, that spatial procession is reversed: The spaces grow lighter and airier as the liberators arrive, as Jews emigrate and begin new lives again.

These subtle architectural orchestrations deepen our understanding of the museum’s subject in immeasurable ways.  It remains to be seen how well Belzberg’s contribution to the Holocaust museum canon will stand amid the cast of buildings by premier architects who are preserving for future generations one of the most difficult memories of modern time.

http://www.jewishjournal.com/community/article/holocaust_museums_la_and_the_rest_of_the_world_20101006/

If the Museum of Tolerance (completed in 1993) was, as founder Rabbi Marvin Hier is fond of saying, designed for “the MTV Generation,” then the new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (completed in 2010) is, for better and worse, the museum for the children of Facebook.

The permanent installation at the Museum of Tolerance uses video, audio and creatively lit dioramas to tell the story of the Holocaust. Visitors experience the exhibits in groups, and are guided through by a docent who adds occasional comments amid the technologically enabled storytelling, which was state-of-the art when the museum opened and still captures the attention of today’s teenagers. At the end of the section on the Holocaust, groups are herded into a gas-chamberlike room with multiple screens embedded in the walls to hear what is surely one of the most horrific stories of the Holocaust that any visitor has ever heard.

By contrast, in the new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, opening Oct. 14, most everything will be experienced in headphone-enforced solitude, and much of the content can only be accessed through a series of touch screens.

Even visitors who will be guided by docents will be issued an iPod Touch upon entry, and unlike at museums like the Museum of Tolerance, where every visitor experiences the museum in largely the same sequence, visitors to the new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust will be able to choose their own paths through the exhibits. And they’ll have to: Nearly every photograph, artifact or replica on display is labeled with a number that must be dialed into the museum’s iPod to access audio explanations of its significance. Once the audio-guide elements are complete, information overload seems all but certain.

http://www.jewishjournal.com/community/article/las_holocaust_museums_one_shared_goal_two_very_different_approaches_2010100/

Sign up for our Grand Opening Week of Events here:

http://www.lamoth.org/the-museum/opening-celebrations/

After more than half a century, the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum is finally opening in its own, permanent location: nestled into the hills of Pan Pacific Park. The Wire got an exclusive tour of the museum as they prepare to officially open their doors on October 14th.

http://www.jewishla.org/blog/entry/new-holocaust-museum-opening-take-a-virtual-tour-via-video/

We are featured in the September issue of The Jewish Journal: http://www.jewishjournal.com/fall_preview/article/a_new_holocaust_museum_pushes_toward_the_future_20100831/

View new pictures of landscaping planted around the Museum, including olive trees for the Garden of the Righteous on our Facebook page!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Los-Angeles-CA/Los-Angeles-Museum-of-the-Holocaust/21974357465#!/album.php?aid=204217&id=21974357465&ref=mf

Thursday, October 14, 2010

10:00 am Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony featuring local dignitaries

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Gala Dinner at our award-winning new Museum

4:00 pm Museum Preview

5:30 pm Cocktails

6:30 pm Dinner

See you there!

View new photos and video of our construction site for our new Museum building at our Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/pages/Los-Angeles-CA/Los-Angeles-Museum-of-the-Holocaust/21974357465

Scheduled construction tours are the best way to appreciate the new building’s breathtaking design. Contact Amy Cabranes, Development Director, (323)651-9915

Film has become one of the most powerful international languages and tools for learning history. It has become paramount that we begin to interpret the Holocaust through the moving image. In light of this notion, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust invited filmmakers of all ages to submit entries into the 2nd annual short film competition.

This year's theme was "Memory, Tragedy, and Truth". Contestants were encouraged to explore any and all aspects of the Holocaust, as well as take into consideration what this year's theme really meant to them.

The 2nd annual short film competition was judged by an internationally acclaimed panel. The judges included: Kate Amend, Editor, Oscar® winning Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, Oscar® winning The Long Way Home, Jon Kean, Writer, Producer, Director, Swimming in Auschwitz, Kill the Man, and Deborah Oppenheimer, Producer, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, President, Mohawk Productions at Warner Bros.

And the winners are...

1st Place - Leather Jude by Evan Pondel

Leather Jude is a documentary that depicts the experiences of Holocaust survivor and master saddle maker Hans Biglajzer. The film juxtaposes Hans' life as a survivor of the Holocaust and a survivor in the dying trade of saddle making. This years themes of memory, tragedy and truth are woven into the story of Hans' survival.

Evan Pondel is the grandson of Holocaust survivors. He has many years experience as a journalist, writing for many well known publications including The Jewish Journal. Evan is a master's candidate in specialized journalism with an emphasis in documentary film at the University of Southern California.

Please click the link bellow to view Evan's film, Leather Jude.

http://vimeo.com/11225562

2nd Place - Shavor Lev (Broken Heart) by Todd Vaters

Shavor Lev features the Hatikvah, the Israeli National Anthem. The film focuses on the lyrics and message of the song while incorporating words and images that emphasize the memory, tragedy, and truth of the Holocaust.

Todd Vaters is a musician, artist and filmmaker who began his creative passions at an early age. Todd has spent many years focusing on music and songwriting. Only recently has Todd taken to using his songs, along with his original art work and filmmaking skills to create videos.

Please click the link bellow to view Todd's film, Shavor Lev.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc4rc9KwagQ

3rd Place - The Resister by Noah Schneider

The Resister is an animated feature that depicts the true story of Lucie Vanosmael, who at the young age of 14 joined the Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust. This film is meant to be a testament to Lucie Vanosmael's courage and bravery, as well as the many others like her who resisted injustice in the face of evil.

Noah Schneider is a 14 year old filmmaker who has studied the art of computer animation on his own. Noah became interested in the Holocaust when he read about Anne Frank in school. Lucie Vanosmael's story was particularly interesting to Noah because he is the same age Lucie was when she joined the Resistance in 1941.

Please click on the link below to view Noah's film, The Resister.

http://www.saucerentertainment.com/Saucer_Entertainment/The_Resister.html

Honorable Mention - Fate and History of the Jewish Community in Altdorf by Garry Slater

Fate and History of the Jewish Community in Altdorf is a film that explores the story of a synagogue in Altdorf, Germany which was desecrated and destroyed during World War II, but was eventually restored to its past glory where it is now used for art exhibitions featuring Jewish artists and writers. The film focuses on memory, tragedy, and truth through the incredible life of the building and its history.

Garry Slater has travelled and worked in Europe his entire life. In 1991 Garry moved to the small German village of Altdorf where he discovered the amazing story of the town's synagogue.

Please click the link bellow to view Garry's film, Fate and History of the Jewish Community in Altdorf.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO4KSXZYPHU

Congratulations to all of our winners! Keep checking our website, Facebook and Twitter for information on our future competitions.

Painful memories of the past
By Bill Hess
Sierra Vista Herald

FORT HUACHUCA — For nearly three years his name was a number — 110362.

Treated as a criminal, Albert Rosa said the six-digit number was a way to take away his human identity.

“It was my name,” Rosa said Wednesday, as he looked down on the faded blue tattoo on his left arm.

One would think the striped uniform he wore was because he was a criminal and like in any prison, numbers are used instead of names.

But Rosa wasn’t a criminal, unless one considers it to be a crime to be Jewish — which Nazi Germany did in the 1930s and 1940s.

World War II came to Greece in late October 1940, when Italy invaded. But for the Italians it was a dismal failure with Greek forces outfighting them.

About six months later, Germany came to the rescue of its Axis ally and the Greeks were eventually defeated, which is when the nearly 100,000 Greek Jews found themselves under increasingly stringent Nazi rules, Rosa said.

Most of the Greek Jews were put in concentration camps and “only 5 percent survived,” he said.

Rosa was at the fort to speak at the annual Days of Remembrance, put aside to remember the Holocaust — when at least six million Jews died under Nazi direction. Another estimated five million gypsies, Jehovah Witnesses, homosexuals and others determined to be ant-Nazi civilians also were killed.

Before his talk, Rosa, who speaks 10 languages, was interviewed by the Herald/Review where he talked about the days as a teenager living under the Nazis. On one side of him was his daughter Regina and the other Mark Rothman, director of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

Nobody thought the Germans could ever do anything so horrible, he said.

“They were a civilized, cultured people,” he said as he sat in the living room of the Hazen House, the fort’s guest house.

But he was to learn differently — of the 70 members of his family, only he survived the concentration camps.

More than once he broke down, tears forming in his eyes, his lips quivering, words unable to flow from his mouth.

It was particularly difficult when he talked about seeing his sister beaten to death, a brother hanged in a camp and finally realizing his parents, grandparents and the youngest members of the family — those considered useless for slave labor — had been gassed. Their bodies were burned in crematoriums, leaving no signs they ever existed, with no monument placed over them so they could be mourned.

Each time, he would apologize for not being able to go on for a short time.

“I’m sorry; it’s hard,” Rosa would say, as his 85-year-old mind went back to those days which happened more than six decades ago.

At those times, his daughter would reach out and touch his arm, gently patting it.

It has been years since he was able to speak about his experiences.

After arriving in the United States, Rosa suffered what he called “a mental breakdown” and was in a psychiatric hospital for three months. Today it probably would be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.

It was there he went through shock treatments and was advised not to talk about what happened to him.

“For 55 years I said nothing,” Rosa remarked.

Regina said she told her father it probably would be good for him to tell his story.

Besides, as she grew up, what happened to him and her late mother, also a Holocaust survivor from Austria, was never talked about at home.

A short man, Rosa said he was an athletic teen, a boxer, swimmer and soccer player.

His older brother, Daniel, who was more than six feet tall, was a champion boxer and taught his younger sibling the art of the sport.

After the Germans took control of Greece, the Jews of the country were constrained into smaller areas, homes of the wealthy members of the community were confiscated, yellow stars of David with the German word for Jew — Jude — had to be worn, he said.

Food was in short supply and more than once he and Daniel violated the rules, took off their yellow stars and went out seeking food.

At the beginning, Rosa and the family remained in Greece, with he and others building roads for the Germans.

But then there was a gathering up of the Jewish community, with families split apart in different trucks as they were driven to a rail head for transportation to a concentration camp.

The trip took 10 days and 10 nights, Rosa said. It was winter and he left a warm Greek beach area for cold Poland.

Traveling in box cars originally used to transport animals, there was no food, water or sanitary facilities.

Along the trip many died, he said.

Upon arriving at Auschwitz, the separation of families continued, with the old and young taken away and the able-bodied, like he and his brothers and sister, becoming forced laborers.

Sometimes mothers would not allow their babies to be taken away and without hesitation, the child was shot. If the woman was able-bodied, she was forced on to the women’s area to work for the Nazis, he said.

Whips and rifle butts were favorite items of discipline among the guards.

It would be some time before Rosa found out the old and other very young were immediately killed.

One day he asked another inmate what was being burned because of the terrible smell coming out of a series of chimneys.

He was told it was the bodies of the old and young being burned.

“Then I knew mommy and daddy were dead,” Rosa said.

Work was hard, starting before sunup and ending after sundown, Rosa said.

Sleeping arrangements in the barracks consisted of a dozen or more men stretching out on wooden beds, without mattresses during the night some died.

One day he heard from a bunkmate his sister Luna was alive and he arranged with the man to switch uniforms so he could try to see her.

The other man worked in an area near where the women were laboring, while Rosa worked in a coal mine.

Knowing the guards only looked at a prisoner’s number on the uniform and did not match it with the tattooed number, Rosa said he thought it would be an easy ploy to get away with and besides, he promised the other, hesitant, prisoner with two days of his food supply.

Making the change, Rosa went to the other man’s work area and through a fence eventually spotted Luna.

Describing his older sister as a beautiful woman with blue eyes and long black hair, he saw her hair had been all cut off and she was emaciated.

Violating every rule, Rosa made his way to the fence and got his sister’s attention and they began to talk.

The female guards, whom he described as big gorillas, carrying whips, wearing pistols and holding dogs on leashes — saw what was happening.

It was then Luna was beaten to the ground and when Rosa tried to interfere — ”I tried to rip the fence apart” — a dog was unleashed against him and male guards arrived to start beating him.

Bitten and beaten, Rosa watched as Luna was pummeled to death and then saw her body put into a cart like it was a piece of trash to be hauled off to be burned.

Returning to the barracks he told his brother Daniel, his boxing instructor, what happened — which angered him.

Daniel promised to kill a German for the death of Luna as Rosa tried to talk some sense into his brother.

Some time later, while both were on a work detail, Rosa stole some raw potatoes and began to be beaten, Daniel came to his defense and knocked down some German guards, strangling one to death.

For Daniel, it was a death sentence.

Try as he might, Rosa could not come to his brother’s defense because his leg had been broken.

Later, his brother was hanged and it was then Rosa promised his dying brother he would survive and take revenge on the Germans.

Initially, another brother, David, was in the same barracks but he had been moved and Rosa learned David had not passed physical muster and because he was so weak and couldn’t work he had been chosen for death.

Rosa’s story of maltreatment was told to an audience at Fitch Auditorium.

Time continued and when the Warsaw Ghetto uprising took place and as put down by the Nazis, Rosa was one of the prisoners who was taken to the area where thousands of bodies, most of them decomposed, had to be removed and disposed of, causing disease and illness among the concentration camp laborers chosen for the detail.

As the Soviet Army pushed into Poland, the Germans fell back and Rosa found himself on a forced “death march” to Dachau, in upper Bavaria in Germany.

Again he survived and when the American Army liberated the area he fell in with the GIs, serving with them “killing Nazis,” Rosa said.

By the time he was liberated his weight had fallen from more than 150 pounds to just more than 80 pounds.

Maj. Gen. John Custer, commander of the Intelligence Center of Excellence and Fort Huachuca, said it is first-person accounts by people like Rosa that must be heard.

It is important for today’s generations of soldiers to know the truth of the Holocaust to ensure what Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower warned should not happen after visiting a concentration camp in 1945. The horrors of such camps cannot be dismissed as propaganda because what happened “beggars description.”

Before he began his talk, Rosa saluted the soldiers in the audience and when he ended he said, “My life was saved by the U.S. Army.”

Today, he no longer responds to 110362 — he is American Albert Rosa.

Rosa’s road after the war

After World War II, Albert Rosa helped with the establishment of Israel, joining the Irgun, an underground, armed Jewish resistance against the British, who controlled the area.

He smuggled weapons to support the fight and was captured by the British, taken to Cyprus, where he was tortured by his captors before he eventually escaped.

He met is wife Betty, who died two years ago, after nearly 60 years of marriage.

Rosa, Betty and daughter Regina, who was born in Austria, came to the United States, where he started work as a janitor and eventually became the foreman of an upholstery factory in Colorado.

Visiting Disneyland, Rosa and his wife decided to move to California and started a deli and wine business.

He speaks to students, law enforcement groups, military and other organizations about the dark days of the Holocaust.?

Are you a Holocaust avoider? Not a denier, just someone like me who struggles with thinking about destruction, death and genocide.

Do you sometimes catch yourself thinking, “Can’t I just think about this another time?”

Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is observed on April 12; what should you do?

There are lectures, symposia and memorial concerts. You could attend a service, read a book or talk to a relative about someone who perished. You could visit a museum.

The new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is nearing the final stages of construction. I drive by the site every couple of weeks and wonder, how will a new museum help me and others face the tragedy?

Seeking an answer, with Holocaust Remembrance Day approaching, I set out to the site for a walk-through with the museum’s executive director, Mark Rothman.

Putting on a hard hat, it wasn’t the unlikely potential of falling masonry that concerned me, it was falling spirits; Holocaust museums really depressed me.

The trip would take me down ramps, past underground girders and large trapezoidal windows, through gray concrete-lined and shadowy spaces, and back into the light of day. I was hoping that a walk through a yet-to-be-finished museum could somehow help me reconstruct my own perceptions of this imponderable period.

Located on a rise at the far end of Pan Pacific Park, across the street from The Grove and Farmers Market, two of L.A.’s biggest shopping and tourism draws, the museum promises to be a very public place. To magnify this sense of accessibility further, admission will be free.

The museum is located in the midst of a Jewish neighborhood that also has perhaps L.A.’s largest number of Holocaust survivors.

Its subtly curvilinear structure, built into a hillside, has a low profile and “green” roof. Rothman and I entered via a downward ramp into a large exhibit space that is mostly below ground level. Rothman says the exhibit space, arranged in a horseshoe, will dim gradually to represent the darkening series of events represented in the museum.

For a museum exhibit designer, presenting the Holocaust is a complicated task. The story urgently needs to be told, but how?

With fading memory but still with a desire to reconnect, the public wants documentation, the all-too-gruesome facts: How many, how, what was the timeline? Too much detail or too graphic and you are faced with the issue that has always thwarted me in these spaces: What draws you in is what pushes you away.

“You can’t get out of the context of the tragedy,” Rothman said later. “We need to be aware of our history, even if it’s dark and tragic.”

Walking though the still-to-be-completed exhibit areas, and listening to Rothman’s explanation of what was soon to fill them, new connections unexpectedly began to form: personal extensions of the exhibits that would soon fill the hall.

At what will be the “Rise of Nazism” exhibit, I recalled that as a child we never discussed the Holocaust much in my home. We did have show-and-tell though.

My father, a World War II Navy veteran, once showed me a war “souvenir” — a belt with a swastika on the buckle. He explained that he joined the Navy to kill Nazis. It wasn’t until much later, as a teenager, that I understood why.

The next gallery, now a blank concrete floor and wall, will hold an exhibit dedicated to the onset of mass extermination. Recently I had begun to read the book “The Holocaust Odyssey of Daniel Bennahmias, Sonderkommando,” a lesser-known Holocaust story of destruction and survival of the Greek community of mainly Sephardic Jews, sent to me by my relative and the author, Rebecca Fromer.

Daniel and his family were sent to Auschwitz by train. Their trip won’t be forgotten; the museum will include a representation of a cattle car.

As we entered the gallery area slated for the labor, concentration and death camps, I remembered my friend of blessed memory, Rose Baumgold, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Forced into slave labor sewing German uniforms, she fought back when she could by sewing the seams so they would quickly pull apart.

Along the wall and area that will be dedicated to the world response to the Holocaust, resistance and rescue, I thought, “This is where Uncle Don will fit in.”

Donald Segel, my wife’s uncle, during World War II was a member of the Rainbow Division (42nd Division of the U.S. 7th Army). Imprisoned much of the war as a POW, he later became a division historian. Over the years, he has taken pride in explaining to many groups his division’s and the U.S. Army’s role in liberating Dachau.

Looking up, I saw the glass double doors that will lead outside to the green of the park and the granite triangular columns of the museum’s already existing Holocaust memorial. Light filtered through, lifting the bare concrete gloom, sharpening the shadows.

Even in an empty museum, images I had avoided for so long became clear.

Edmon J. Rodman is a JTA columnist who writes on Jewish life from Los Angeles.

Federation Cuts Allocations

By Julie Gruenbaum Fax

The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles handed out cuts to all of the organizations it supports in the 2010 budget approved Feb. 18, a result of a challenging fundraising year and some changes by the new president, Jay Sanderson.

Sanderson, who took his post Jan. 3, had delayed final approval on the $45.8 million budget while he reviewed it. Sanderson said he made some minor adjustments but nothing far-reaching.

“We continue to be an enormous supporter of all the agencies that we fund, but, given the economy, each one of the agencies received less in 2010 than in 2009,” Sanderson said.

Sanderson set aside additional funds for cash reserves that had been depleted over the past couple of years, so that Federation has fall-back plans for community crises and emergency capital expenses. In addition, he reserved $1 million to take advantage of worthy programming opportunities that might arise midyear.

In total, Federation allocated $28 million to 400 agencies and programs locally and around the world, ranging from overseas Jewish communities to domestic violence shelters in Los Angeles.

Most agencies contacted said they had expected the cuts, which mostly ranged from 5 to 20 percent.

But some agencies felt the sting more strongly.

The allocation to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust was cut nearly 40 percent, bringing Federation’s contribution to the museum’s $727,000 budget to $33,460 — half of what the museum was getting five years ago, despite the fact that its operating budget has doubled in the same span.

“I think that there is a tendency in the Jewish community to want to use the Holocaust for fundraising, but there isn’t a proportional desire to actually invest in the teaching of its history and the research and the memorialization of the Holocaust,” said E. Randol Schoenberg, president of the museum’s board.

The museum is set to move into its new location in Pan Pacific Park this summer and hopes to draw 40,000 students a year. It has raised 80 percent of the $20 million construction costs. Federation did not contribute to the capital campaign, according to the museum’s executive director, Mark Rothman.

But Sanderson said Federation, which founded the museum in 1960 and ran it until 2005, remains committed to Holocaust education.

“I’m disappointed that they’re taking a negative approach to our support of the museum, considering that a vast majority of the collection is owned by Federation and we have given use of it to the museum because we are committed to furthering Holocaust education,” Sanderson said.

Sanderson said to expect big changes in the 2011 budget.

“We are starting to look at how we will transform this Federation in a way that will really make a maximum impact in the community,” he said. “Things are starting to take shape in our collective thinking, and you will see a new Federation emerging over the next six months.”

Or perhaps you are “Second Generation Kinder”?

Michele Gold is working with Gabriella Karin, a Holocaust Survivor and an artist – who is creating a train sculpture as a tribute to the Children Survivors that were saved by the Kindertransports. Gabriella & Michele are looking to receive as many childhood photographs of Survivors from the Kindertransports as possible to insert into this train sculpture. The more pictures they have, the longer the train will be. They are looking to exhibit this sculpture in our new Museum in Pan Pacific Park. The photographs can be of any size, as they can be reduced to the size that is needed. Please include your name, where you left from and where you arrived to. If possible your age and the approximate date at your final destination.

Photographs and any questions can be emailed directly to Michele Gold, who is organizing this project at: michelegold@covad.net. Tel No. 310-306-2676 or mailed to; 4712 Admiralty Way, Suite 634, Marina del Rey, CA 90292.

Contractors poured the cement forming the new Museum’s entrance ramp. Visitors to the construction site may now enter the building just as the thousands of students and adults will do once the Museum is complete this summer. This significant and exciting step makes it possible to experience the inter-relationship between the green roof, the Museum entrance, and the Holocaust Monument as intended by architect Hagy Belzberg.

People touring the construction site can also see the framing for the S. Mark Taper Atrium welcoming Museum guests, as well as the layout of staff offices and the archives on the Mezzanine. A last-minute design change swapped the conference room and an office.

It will now be possible to view the Museum exhibit level from the conference room, which will be framed in part by glass. This view will allow one to fully appreciate the dramatic, sloping ceiling as well as the interplay of the exhibits, entrance ramp, and Taper Atrium.

Scheduled construction tours are the best way to appreciate the new building’s breathtaking design. Contact Amy Cabranes, Development Director, (323)651-9915.

The new Museum building hosted its first high-level delegation when Executive Directors, Curators, and other officials attending the Council of American Jewish Museums conference walked through the Museum.

Executive Director Mark Rothman welcomed the more than 50 conference participants. “This is a kind of shecheyanu moment,” Mark said, referring to the prayer traditionally recited on the first occurrences of joyous firsts. “You are the first official visitors to our Museum, and we’re thrilled to have you.”

Contractor Winter-Schram scrubbed the site clean, allowing the professionals to walk through the Mezzanine and exhibit level and mingle with Board President E. Randol Schoenberg, Architect Hagy Belzberg, exhibit consultant Miles Kemp, and Museum staff members. The Museum and Zimmer Discovery Museum hosted a light breakfast.

Site’s planners say it won’t conflict with Museum of Tolerance.
By David Haldane
Up Front Los Angeles Business Journal

  A now-obscure museum of Holocaust exhibits and artifacts in

an office building on Wilshire Boulevard is about to become far more

conspicuous.
    A 29,000-square-foot facility for the Los Angeles Museum of
the Holocaust is well along in construction at Pan Pacific Park, just east
of the Grove shopping center.
    The museum, which will have a soft opening this summer
followed by a gala opening in October, will be L.A.’s second stand-alone
institution devoted to World War II atrocities against the Jews. The first,
the Museum of Tolerance, opened on Pico Boulevard in 1993.
    “Being in a vital public place like the park will allow us to fulfill
our mission of educating the public,” said Mark Rothman, executive
director of the collection, which now occupies 6,000 square feet near
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
    The exhibit traces the history of Germany’s persecution of
European Jews from 1938 to 1945, as well as the 1948 founding of
modern Israel.
    In moving to the new facility, Rothman said, the museum will
expand its collection ¬¬– to include many items now in storage – at a
much more visible site. “The new building,” he said, “gives us an
opportunity to transfer our exhibit into the 21st century.”
    Actually, the museum began in 1962 in a building shared by
the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. After being displaced by
the Northridge Earthquake in 1994, the museum began a nomadic
period and has been in temporary rented space for the last few years.
The museum board has been raising money and seeking permits since
2003 to build its permanent home.
    Whether the city can support two major Holocaust museums
remains an open question. A spokesperson for the Museum of
Tolerance declined to comment.
    But Jay Sanderson, president of the Jewish Federation,
which gives the museum money and owns part of the collection, said he
doubts the two museums will compete because they have different
missions.
Several exhibits at the Museum of Tolerance are about other recent
and historical human rights infringements, while the new museum
focuses strictly on the Holocaust.
    The museum’s board has raised $16 million for construction
costs and expects to raise at least $4 million more for an endowment to
cover operations.
    But attracting future donations for the increasing number of
Holocaust museums nationwide (already 16, with an additional 150
more modest centers) could prove daunting, Rothman admitted. That’s
especially so as the traditional supporters of such endeavors –
Holocaust survivors and their children – are dying out.
    “It means broadening our base of support,” he said. “That
involves literally one donor, one day at a time.”

Several European nations, through their Los Angeles Consuls General, committed to planting trees in the new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust’s Garden of the Righteous. The Garden, planned to be located near the existing Monument, will memorialize the Righteous Gentiles of sponsoring countries.

Each sponsoring nation’s $5,000 commitment to the Museum’s Capital Campaign will be recognized with an olive tree and marked with a plaque acknowledging the miraculous efforts of that nation’s citizens who saved Jews.

The nations already committed to the Garden responded quickly to letters sent to them by the Museum. Amy Cabranes, Development Director, continues to work with the offices of the Consuls General of more than a dozen other countries to expand support for the garden.

According to the current landscaping scheduled, the Garden will be planted in late spring and a formal dedication will take place in the fall, during the Museum’s gala week of opening events celebrating the new Museum.

Sponsoring Nations

(as of date of publication, in order of commitment)

Germany

Austria

Belgium

Netherlands

Croatia

Luxemburg

LOS ANGELES, CA - Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust announced today it selected Academy Award winning Producer Branko Lustig as its honoree at its 2nd Annual Dinner. The Museum will also confer a Lifetime Achievement Award upon Dr. Andreas Maislinger, founder and chairman of the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service, and the 2009 Student of the Year Award on Samuel A. Rauch, a senior at Dartmouth College.

Executive Director Mark Rothman said, “We are extremely fortunate this year to celebrate honorees who represent the best of Holocaust education and commemoration. Our 2nd Annual Dinner will allow us to thank those who’ve honored us with their support, innovation, hard work and dedication to making sure the events of the Holocaust and its victims are remembered and that they are never repeated.”

Mr. Lustig’s award recognizes his long-time commitment to Holocaust education and commemoration. This commitment includes producing Schindler’s List as well as maintaining a long and close relationship with many of the survivors on the Board of the Los Angeles Museum.

Dr. Maislinger will be recognized for his work establishing the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service Program. Since its creation in 1992, Austrian Holocaust Memorial Servants have fulfilled their mandatory military service by volunteering at Holocaust institutions throughout the world. Over 400 volunteers have served at institutions all around the world to date.

Dr. Maislinger, who studied law and political science in Innsbruck, Austria and later worked with the University of Innsbruck, fought to obtain official recognition of alternative, philanthropic service for over 10 years.

Mr. Rauch volunteered in the Museum during his summer break from Dartmouth. Based on his accomplishments as a student, he helped translate numerous Holocaust-related German documents and provided appropriate contextual information for them. He assisted the Museum’s education program and worked in the administrative office, among other functions. Museum officials found his skills, work ethic and commitment to the Museum’s mission extraordinary. 

LOS ANGELES, CA  – Mayor Antonio Villaraigrosa and the Holocaust survivors who founded the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust today commemorated the 63^rd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by breaking ground for the Museum’s permanent home. City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, Councilman Tom Labonge, and other Museum representatives also participated in the ceremony, which was held at the future construction site, a currently under-utilized corner of Pan Pacific Park.

“Today, I stand humbled before you, those who still bear the scars of Auschwitz and many other camps on your souls. It is my awesome task to dedicate on this ground what we will together build, a 21^st century museum. The new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust will ensure not only that our fair city will continue to honor the memory of the greatest crime in history. It will also ensure that any school or group or adult or child who wants to learn of that crime can do so,” said Randy Schoenberg, Museum Chairman.

The Museum, the oldest of its kind in the United States, is the only L.A. institution with free admission and a sole focus on the events of the Holocaust. It guarantees a dialogue with a survivor for any group that schedules a tour, and it is particularly focused on hosting students from under-funded schools.  

Mr. Villaraigrosa, Mr. Labonge and Mr. Delgadillo joined the survivors and representatives of the Museum in ringing 12 bells, 6 for the 6 million Jewish victims and 6 more for the additional 6 million victims of other ‘undesirable’ groups.

“The liberation of Auschwitz 63 years ago was the first step towards extinguishing, once and for all, the fire of the Nazi concentration camps. The Russian Army threw open those barbed wire gates and revealed that the Nazis single-mindedly incinerated entire Jewish communities, as well Romany, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, political opponents, and others. The museum we will build will tell the story of all these Holocausts,” said Mark Rothman, Museum Executive Director.

Today’s ceremony also kicked off the Museum’s $20 million capital campaign to fund the building’s construction and an operating endowment. Nearly $9 million has already been donated or pledged.

The ground breaking culminates a 4-year process that included an environmental impact study, unanimous approval by the Board of Commissioners of the Department of Parks and Recreation, and execution of a 50-year lease agreement by the City Attorney.

Construction in earnest is expected to begin this summer, with completion currently scheduled for early 2010.

“When I was in Auschwitz,” said Miriam Bell, one of the Museum’s founders and a participant in today’s ceremony, “I didn’t know if I would live another day. And now, to have lived another 63 years, and to know the Museum I helped create will live on here in the park, it’s just incredible. Beyond words.”

LOS ANGELES, CA - The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust received its largest donation to date yesterday, a $3 million donation from the Schoenberg Family Charitable Gift Fund of Schwab Charitable Fund through the generosity of E. Randol and Pamela Schoenberg. The donation became possible after the City of Los Angeles and the city’s oldest Holocaust Museum signed a lease agreement allowing the Museum to build a state of the art facility and to operate it for 50 years.

The lease signing represents the completion of a movement which began nearly four years ago, when the Museum took its first steps towards gaining the right to build a world-class Museum on a small patch of under-utilized space on the park’s western edge, below the U.S. Post Office.  Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo made the issue a priority for his staff, and the law firm of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips provided pro bono legal assistance to the Museum allowing the Museum’s dream to become a reality.

Using only private funding, the LAMH plans to build a more-than 15,000 square foot building occupying less than 1% of the entire park. Renowned architect Hagy Belzberg’s designs will create a revolutionary Museum that will increase green space in the park and integrate a dual message of tragedy and hope about the events of the Holocaust.

Mr. Schoenberg, Chairman of the Museum, said “I am deeply committed to the Museum’s future, and I’m glad the city demonstrated its commitment as well,” Mr. Schoenberg said.  “Our goal is to build a museum that will allow us to continue to educate people, especially children, about the Holocaust.  Hatred and prejudice leads to genocide.  These lessons are relevant to our time and to our future.”

“Mr. Schoenberg is a visionary who’s made it his personal mission to build a new Museum of the Holocaust. We couldn’t have come this far without him,” said Museum Executive Director Mark Rothman. “At the same time, support from Rocky and his staff, and sage counsel from our Manatt attorneys, helped us cut through red tape that had stalled this project.” Land use and government relations attorneys Daniel Gryczman and Lisa Weinberger advised the Museum,  diligently negotiating with Los Angeles City Attorney David Michaelson.

Mr. Schoenberg’s gift is the largest the Museum received to date, but not the only significant one. Developer and founding Museum Board member Jona Goldrich has promised $2 million and, over the past two years, provided seed funding of $100,000 per year. Supporter John Martz has promised $3 million, and Board members Jon and Beth Kean have pledged $350,000. These funds collectively represent three-quarters of the nearly $12 million the Museum will need to complete construction. The Museum’s $20 million capital campaign expects to raise an additional $8 million for an operating endowment.

“We hope to break ground next year, as soon as the other donations are received and we have all the funds in place,” Mr. Rothman said. “We never stop looking for other people, committed to Holocaust education and memorialization, who will help us fulfill our dream.”

LOS ANGELES, CA –  The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust has filed an appeal challenging a visa denial by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s  U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (“USCIS”).

USCIS denied a visa last month to a young English-speaking Austrian man, Valentin Hofer, who elected to fulfill his national service requirement by volunteering at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.  The agency justified its denial of a visa for Hofer on several grounds, including a claim that the Austrian, who has completed extensive studies on Holocaust history at an Austrian museum and speaks fluent English, lacked “competence” to qualify for the assignment in Los Angeles.

The museum’s appeal accuses Homeland Security of numerous mistakes in denying so-called “cultural exchange” visas to Austrians hoping to do volunteer work in the United States under this provision of Austrian law which allows its citizens to fulfill their military obligations through service in Holocaust institutions abroad.


“Here we have someone born and bred in a country with its own, difficult World War II history trying to spend a year working at a museum dedicated to Holocaust commemoration, reconciliation and education,” said Mark A. Rothman, the Museum’s Executive Director.  “This inexplicable denial frustrates the intention of this young man to strengthen relations between his country and ours.”

Added Rothman: “The primary reason for the Mr. Hofer’s denial was USCIS’s determination the visa would not, in fact, foster cultural exchange.  If work with our museum doesn’t constitute a cultural exchange under American law, I don’t know what would.”

The Austrian government created Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service in 1991 to recognize Austria’s part of the collective responsibility for the Holocaust.  Since then about 150 volunteers, mostly in their 20s, have worked in numerous countries in lieu of military service. Volunteers under this Austrian program have worked in the United States at the U.S. Holocaust Museum and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.  Since Sept. 11, however, immigration authorities have raised repeated roadblocks in seeking visas for these volunteers.

The Museum has received assistance from a legal team that includes Wendy Levine of Bet Tzedek Legal Services and Cristin Zeisler of the law firm Manatt Phelps & Phillips.

Said Cristin Zeisler, of the law firm Manatt Phelps & Phillips: “Our clients have seen numerous difficulties with USCIS and we’re looking into what we might be able to do to help the Museum, particularly once the administrative process is exhausted.”

Bet Tzedek helped the Museum understand the legal status of the Museum’s appeal and what other options the Museum may wish to pursue in its battle on behalf of the Austrian Holocaust service worker.

Chairman of the Museum’s Board, E. Randol Schoenberg, said, “Although the USCIS web site promises a two-month process, the Museum had to ask for early direct intervention from the office of U.S. Representative Henry Waxman just to ensure USCIS acted in time for the start of Mr. Hofer’s service year.  The more we learn, the more we suspect this denial by Homeland Security is part of a pattern of processing lags, errors, and denials. When USCIS finally rendered its inexplicable denial, it was not only wrong but sloppy – it omitted page four of a five-page explanation.”

The Museum’s legal strategy includes challenging the agency’s strange determination that the Austrian volunteer’s preparation was insufficient to demonstrate his competence.

Schoenberg said, “The individual, Valentin Hofer, couldn’t be better prepared for his service year with the L.A. Museum.  Mr. Hofer completed an extensive course of study and worked for several months at an Austrian museum that had itself been a Nazi euthanasia camp during the second World War. He is a gifted honor student and fluent in English. As part of the visa application, the museum submitted more than enough information to immigration authorities on Valentin Hofer’s extraordinary background and experience, including descriptions of his work at the Austrian museum, his full resume, school records, letter of intent, and other materials.”

Added Rothman:  “We all understand the need for post-9-11 security and the added administrative burden that puts on immigration officials.  But where is the justice when they hand down arbitrary and capricious denials of good people who bring good will and understanding to our nation because they can’t take the time to understand the facts?”

LOS ANGELES, CA – Thanks to a Museum for America grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH) will be able to organize and restructure its vast Archive for the benefit of the community, students, and scholars.

The Archive Project will permit the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust to thoroughly assess its Archive and complete the first inventory of thousands of World War II era artifacts, documents, and precious records of historical, sociological, educational, and biographical value.

“A varied and accessible Archive is the life blood for a museum that prides itself on its free education programming.  We are committed to creating a state of the art collection that is easily accessed by all and enriches the cultural and educational life of the Museum. Ultimately, the Archive will be digitized and attached to our website,” said Mark Rothman, Executive Director of LAMOTH.

“Museums for America grants invest in our nation’s communities by supporting museums as active resources for lifelong learning, cultural heritage, and community engagement.  The programs and activities these grants support include hands-on educational programs, innovative uses of technology, and ground-breaking partnerships.  All help to strengthen museum services and improve communities,” said Dr. Anne-Imelda M. Radice, Director of the IMLS.

Museums for America is the Institute’s largest grant program for museums, providing more than $17 million in grants to support the role of museums in American society.  Grants strengthen a museum’s ability to serve the public more effectively by supporting high-priority activities that advance the institution’s mission and strategic goals.

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is in an exciting period of growth right now.  In addition to building its Archive, they are embarking on a capital campaign for their new home in Pan Pacific Park adjacent to the Holocaust Monument. World renowned architect Hagy Belzberg (designer of the interior of the new Disney Hall) has designed a signature building which actually adds green space to the park.

The fastest growing city in the United States demands a fitting and permanent home for the myriad voices of the Holocaust.  LAMOTH is the oldest Holocaust museum in the country.  The Archive of its survivor community deserves a sacred space that’s worthy of its collective stories of loss, struggle, and healing.


The Museum is always open and free to the public.  As a result, it hosts many school tours from under-served communities reaching across the state and as far away as Arizona, Texas, Canada, Montana, and Nevada.  The Museum provides groundbreaking educational projects and programs for elementary and high school students, while serving as a valuable repository for research.  LAMOTH presents students with the experience of true interactive learning in an intimate environment.  Perhaps most importantly, they are the only Jewish/Holocaust organization in Los Angeles which guarantees dialogue with an actual Survivor, a living embodiment of history.  Some of its current partners include the ADL, Facing History and Ourselves, the Freedom Writers, and the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support to the nation’s 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums.  The Institute’s mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas.  To learn more about the Institute, please visit www.imls.gov.

Los Angeles City Council Approves Lease Agreement for Holocaust Museum in Pan Pacific Park Led by Member Tom LaBonge (District 4), the Los Angeles City Council today voted unanimously to recommend signing a lease with Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (“LAMH”). The lease will allow LAMH to construct a permanent home in Pan Pacific Park for its exhibits and archives devoted to Holocaust commemoration and education. “The vote this morning was a win for District 4 and for the entire city,” Councilman LaBonge said. “The museum that will be built will be a significant cultural institution free and accessible to all. It will add needed facilities to Pan Pacific Park, and it will improve understanding among all our citizens.” The Agreement provides for a 50 year lease of a small patch of under-utilized space on the Park’s western edge, below the U.S. Post Office, in Councilman LaBonge’s district. LAMH plans to build a 15,000 square foot building occupying less than 1% of the entire park. The agreement mandates LAMH provide public rest room facilities, additional parking, and other provisions. Plans for the building, designed by renowned architect Hagy Belzberg, create a facility revolutionary in its ability to increase green space and to integrate a dual message of tragedy and hope about the events of the Holocaust. “Yesterday the council brought us a giant step closer to achieving our long-held dream of a facility worthy of our city and of our commitment to remembering and teaching about the Holocaust,” said Mark Rothman, Executive Director of LAMH. In its approval, the city expects the building to cost $6 million. LAMH will shortly launch a capital campaign for the new building and for an operating fund endowment. It has already received pledges and commitments for almost all of the construction estimate. Holocaust survivors founded LAMH in the early 1960s as a permanent repository for their personal artifacts from the Holocaust and the world the Nazis destroyed. Today the Museum hosts docent-led school tours, survivor lectures, exhibitions on the Holocaust, and numerous special events.