Jewish Heritage Report
Vol. I, No. 2 / Summer 1997
Holocaust Sites, Memorials & Art
HOLOCAUST SITES, MEMORIALS & ART
BERLIN HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL STILL
STALLED
The money for the project is in place, but plans for the Berlin
Holocaust Memorial are at an impasse. No agreement has been reached on
the exact location for the monument, whether it should be dedicated only
to the Jewish victims of Nazi terror or even what it should look like.
A design by Christine Jacob Marks initially adopted by the organizers called
for putting a huge, black concrete plate on the site, on which all known
names of the Jewish victims of the Nazis would be engraved. But the idea
of the slab, which critics said could be as big as a soccer field, was
dropped after protests by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and others, who
called the project "megalomania."
Earlier this year, the organizers said the memorial should be chosen from
the other nine proposals that won awards in a design competition. One proposal
calls for building a bus station at the memorial site, with tickets sold
and services offered to take visitors to the various concentration and
death camps in Europe. Others have called for a new design competition.
Lea Rosh, the journalist who launched the idea of a central memorial, said,
"Let's stop debating and start with the work right away." Taking
another tact, American cultural critic James Young, author of The Texture
of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, 1993), the only
non-German on the memorial jury, wrote in the The Forward (June
20, 1997) "The question remains: Will this memorial perpetuate the
memory of six million Jews murdered at the hands of the Nazi regime, or
will it serve only to bury this era altogether so that a reunified Germany
can move freely into the future, unencumbered by its past?" Recognizing
that the drawn out, often acrimonious debate on the Berlin memorials is
the healthiest aspect of the entire project, Prof. Young goes on to say
that "[the memorial] must not displace all other Holocaust memorials
dotting the landscape; nor should it hide the impossible questions driving
Germany’s memorial debate. Let it instead reflect the terms of the debate
itself, the insufficiency of memorials, the contemporary generation’s skeptical
view of official memory and its self-aggrandizing ways. Since every nation
remembers the Holocaust according to its own experiences at the time, its
national myths, self-idealizations, and current political needs, let Germany’s
official memorial also reflect its suitably tortured relationship to the
genocide of Europe’s Jews."
ARGENTINA DEDICATION
In Buenos Aires, Argentina, in April, a Holocaust memorial was
dedicated in one of the chapels of the National Cathedral by the Cardinal
Primate of Argentina, Antonio Quarracino. According to a JTA report, Quarracino
said during the ceremony that discriminating against Jews is a sin against
the Law of man and against the Law of God. "Our Lord Jesus was born
among the Jews, and the Apostles He chose were Jewish." ISJM knows
of no precedent of a Holocaust memorial placed inside a cathedral. The
memorial consists of a panel of glass framed in solid silver. Behind the
glass are preserved pages of Jewish books destroyed during the Holocaust.
To one side of the silver frame, a small plaque states that the memorial
is dedicated to "our Jewish brothers killed during the Holocaust and
of the martyrs of the bombings of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and
of AMIA." The plaque is signed by Quarracino.
While commemorating the Holocaust, the monument was erected in the current
atmosphere of unease and insecurity for Argentina’s Jewish community. The
March 17, 1992 car-bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires killed
29 people and left more than 100 injured. The July 18, 1994 bombing of
the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Association, also known as AMIA, left 86
dead and more than 300 wounded. The Argentine government has been unable
to find those responsible for either bombing.
AUSCHWITZ PRESERVATION ACCORD
Jewish and Polish leaders have formally approved a plan to preserve
the site of the concentration and death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau while
helping the adjacent town of Oswiecim to develop. Under the $100 million
dollar plan -- to which the Poles will contribute 57% -- the camps will
be linked as a single entity and will have a 500-year exclusion zone, where
no commercial buildings can be erected. (source: WJC Dateline
World Jewry, April 1997)
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