Beit Terezin

In May 1955, a first informal meeting of survivors of the Theresienstadt concentration camp took place in Israel, the participants of which decided to found an educational institution.

This institution was to keep the memory of the murdered alive, especially that of the victims of the HeHalutz and their leading member Jacob Edelstein, the first Judenrat of the Theresienstadt ghetto.

Therefore the Theresienstadt Small Fortress became a national memorial for the victims of fascism, but neither here nor on the commemorative plaque in the city were the murdered Jews explicitly mentioned.

[2] In its first meetings, the preparatory committee dealt with fundamental questions such as the opening of the association for all survivors of the Theresienstadt concentration camp or only for the members of Hechaluz.

In addition, many Jews from Germany and Austria and members of the Zionist youth organisations, who had often lost relatives in Theresienstadt, were among the founders of the Kibbutz.

The choice of the Kibbutz Givat Haim (Ihud) was additionally favoured by its central location - at that time only a few of the members of the association scattered all over Israel had a motor vehicle, most of them relying on public transportation.

After all, Jakob Edelstein, who was generally revered and murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp, wanted to settle in the then undivided Kibbutz Givat Haim after emigrating to Palestine.

Following a suggestion by Albin Glaser, backlit transparencies with accompanying texts were attached to the walls to illustrate the development of the ghetto.

The central element is the twelve-sided rotunda made of reddish-brown bricks, whose ground plan and material are intended to remind us of the Theresienstadt fortress, which originally served as a memorial hall and place of remembrance.

At the instigation of the then Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, whose secretary was Zeev Shek at the time, the documents on the Holocaust were not to be distributed among many small institutions, but stored centrally.

[3] The theme of the permanent exhibition is the occupation of the Czech Republic by National Socialist Germany from 1939 to 1945, in particular the history of the Jews in the Theresienstadt Ghetto from November 1941 to May 1945.

[6] The topics dealt with in the events include the history and fate of Central European Jewry, the measures to establish the ghetto and the "final solution", the internal resistance, the function of sport in the camp, the maintenance of educational institutions under the most difficult circumstances, art as a means of survival and more.

Thanks to his good contacts, Zeev Shek was able to obtain a copy of an index containing the data of more than 162,000 Jewish prisoners of the Theresienstadt concentration camp from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark and other European countries.

This index forms the core of Beit Terezin's archive and information about the fate of missing persons is still provided to their relatives upon request.

[8] In the early years almost all the work, from the construction of Beit Terezin, the administration, the guided tours through the exhibition to the educational events, was carried out by volunteers.

The age and deaths of the members of the first generation and the steadily increasing workload made it necessary to fill the management of Beit Terezin full-time from 1998.

Further contents refer to the history of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, with information on meetings of survivors, congresses, exhibitions, cultural events, publications of books and media from all over the world.