The Zekelman Holocaust Center
Ground was broken for the Holocaust Memorial Center on the property of the Jewish Community Campus at Maple and Drake Roads in West Bloomfield, Michigan, on December 6, 1981.
[4] The Center's new design received front-page coverage in the Wall Street Journal, with a headline asking, "Should a Museum Look as Disturbing as What it Portrays?".
[8] In doing so, the Memorial Center engages in a number of community activities,[9] hosts tours for public schools, universities, institutions and interested tour groups,[10] curates an expansive library archive[11] and a gallery dedicated to art and historical exhibits,[12] hosts educational programs for different age groups, and curates eleven core exhibits across its vast space.
By focusing on survivor stories and the history of this struggle, the HC educates visitors so that they understand the historical context of the Holocaust and how it happened.
[12] The HC also does not use verbiage such as, "Jews killed," when referring to the victims of the Holocaust, and instead uses the phrasing, "murdered," as it emphasizes the violent and anti-Semitic intention of the perpetrators.
[13] The Eternal Flame is flanked on both sides by the Memorial Wall, which names the concentration and extermination camps that served as the unmarked graves of the innocents murdered in the Holocaust.
The wall reads "These do I remember and for them my soul weeps," listing Auschwitz, Babi Yar, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen, Breendonck, Buchenwald, Chelmno, Dachau, Drancy, Jasenovac, Klooga, Lwow-Janowska, Majdanek, Mauthausen, Ponary, and Ravensbruck.
It is the first exhibit that visitors will see as they enter, and stands to the immediate right of the entrance, accompanied by information which emphasizes the historical significance of the boxcar in the history of the Holocaust.
"[15] Surrounding the boxcar is architecture implemented to give the likeness of the Hannoverscher Bahnhof station in Hamburg, Germany, where victims would have been transported from.
[13] The visual and audio exhibit on the wall to the left describes the cobblestone streets of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Umschlagplatz, or transfer point, which Jews would be forced to gather on.
Beginning at the right and circling around is a catalog of global Jewish history, from 2000 BCE with the end of Sumerian power, to 2001 CE, with the second Intifada suicide bombing.
[citation needed] In addition to the Timeline, the history of European Jewish culture is documented through artwork, maps, photographs, audio-visual presentations and a shtetl replica.
The next exhibit leads the viewer down a long hallway of curated Nazi artifacts, headed with a large portrait of Adolf Hitler.
The hallway is dimly lit with black and red paint in stark comparison to the varying colors of the Jewish Heritage exhibit.
The exhibit includes the political and cultural structures which established anti-Semitism as a paradigm in Nazi Germany and its eventual annexed territories.
This final section also portrays the different forms of active resistance of Jewish and other persecuted groups against Nazi extermination across different nations and historical scenarios.
This exhibit displays an array of televisions portraying the video footage complied by Dwight D. Eisenhower's mandate which required civilian news media and military personnel to record the horrific conditions of the concentration and extermination camps.
[13] The exhibit consists of a long hallway with the video footage playing on the television array on the left side, and at the end a sculpture of a Jewish victim with a bunk typical to a camp at their back.
The Portraits of Honor reminds that despite genocide and wanton violence, Jewish people have fought, rebuilt, and created lives for themselves across the world.
In 2009, the HC was selected as one of the eleven sites in the United States to receive a sapling from the tree that grew outside of Anne Frank's hiding place in Amsterdam.
The tree blooms outside behind the exhibits signage which details the diary of Anne Frank and the contributions of her history to a larger understanding of the Holocaust.
Their collections include: Allied Response, Antisemitism, Art, Bibliography, Biography, Children, Concentration Camps,[18] Curricula,[19] Displaced Persons, Dissertations, European Jewish History, Genealogy,[20] Geographical Finding Aids, Ghettos, Jewish-Christian Relations, Judaica, Juvenile Literature,[21] Kindertransport,[22] Legislation, Liberation, Literature of the Holocaust, Medical Aspects, Memorial Books,[23] Memorial and Museums, Music,[24] National Socialism, Newspapers and Periodicals, Personal Narratives, Propaganda, Psychological Studies, Refugees, Registers, Relief Organizations, Rescue Efforts, Resistance, Revisionism, Righteous Gentiles, Second Generation, U.S. Role, War Crime Trials, and WWII Aftermath.
The current Board of Directors includes the Governance Committee, consisting of Gary Karp as President, Steve D. Grant as Chairman, Larry Kraft as Vice President, Adam Grant as Secretary, Alan Zekelman as Treasurer, Leo Eisenberg, Steven R. Weisberg, and Arthurt Jay Weiss.
Other Board Members include Frederick Blechman, Mindi Fynke, Kenneth Goss, Nelson Hersh, Lilly Jacobson, Barbary Kappy, Irvin Kappy, Shari Ferber Kaufman, Arie Leibovitz, Lainie Lipshultz, Edward Malinowski, Spencer Patrich, David Propis, Sam Shamie, Alex Shiffman, David Silbert, Charles Silow, Bubba Urdan, and Arthur A.
