‘Museum of Tolerance’ : Proposed $5-Million State Grant for Wiesenthal Facility Provokes Some Concern Over Church, State Separation

Photos of concentration camp prisoners line the walls of a darkened basement where a glass case displays a tattered, striped uniform and a Zyklon B gas cylinder used in Nazi death camps liberated 40 years ago.

The stark mementos are part of the museum of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, an institution that sprang from nothing eight years ago, funded largely by a wealthy Canadian family and bearing the name of the famed hunter of Nazi war criminals.

Under the leadership of Rabbi Marvin Hier, the center in West Los Angeles has become one of the most visible and vocal Jewish organizations in America.

In recent months it has spurred the U.S. and West German governments to intensify their search for Dr. Josef Mengele, the notorious “Angel of Death” of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

It has waged an energetic campaign to publicize the plight of Raoul Wallenberg, the heroic Swedish diplomat who fell into Russian hands, never to be heard from again, after rescuing thousands of Hungarian Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazis.

It has won an Academy Award for a documentary film titled “Genocide.”

And it has spoken out forcefully against anti-Semitism in the United States and abroad.

Now it is seeking a $5-million matching grant from the State of California to build a “world-class Museum of Tolerance” as part of a new $20-million complex to be constructed next to its existing facility on Pico Boulevard.

A bill authored by state Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) and co-sponsored by 80 other lawmakers to provide $5 million for the Museum of Tolerance appears headed toward passage in the Legislature.

But the idea of a state subsidy has struck a disquieting chord among some elements in the organized Jewish community and among a few state officials.

To some, the proposed grant seems to straddle the line separating church and state, largely because of the center’s close association with Yeshiva University of Los Angeles, which offers a mix of secular and Orthodox religious training. Hier heads both Yeshiva and the center, and the two institutions currently occupy the same building.

Until recently, the center was a division of Yeshiva, but partly at the suggestion of lawmakers, the center incorporated as a separate nonprofit institution. However, the center and the university still share the same board of trustees.

Center officials have emphasized in their testimony before state legislators that the center is not a religious institution and that the Museum of Tolerance would reflect “a preference not for the Jewish faith but for civilization.”

For example, they say, the museum would house an exhibit devoted to the mass killings of Armenians by Turks during World War I and might include a reference to the massacre of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.

Other critics of the proposed grant contend that the Wiesenthal Center’s wealthy board of trustees already has the resources to raise the $5 million without state funds.

But, says Hier: “We feel that (a museum about) tolerance, human dignity and what makes people intolerant is worthy of a state grant.”

The Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, an umbrella group that represents more than 500 organizations and has its own Holocaust museum at its Wilshire Boulevard headquarters, has been conspicuously silent about the proposed state grant. Its board of directors has declined to take a stand on the measure.

Some Privately Displeased

“May everybody go with God,” said Bruce I. Hochman, federation president, when asked for comment about his organization’s silence.

Despite their official reticence, some prominent members of the federation are privately displeased with the bid for state assistance.

“It’s an absolute shandeh (Yiddish for shame). There’s no Jewish community support (for the state grant),” one federation leader, who asked not to be identified, said with some exaggeration. “But nobody wants a fight with the Wiesenthal Center.”

Howard I. Friedman, a Los Angeles lawyer who is national president of the American Jewish Committee, a civil rights group formed in 1906, said he understands the reluctance of Jewish organizations to speak out against the grant.

‘Issues Transcend’

Such a debate, he said, could “create what might appear to be a fundamental kind of division in the Jewish community. But the important public policy issues transcend that, it appears to us.”

Friedman, speaking for the committee’s leadership, said the grant proposal “hurts the overall process of pluralism in this country, which relies on private groups having their own supplies of funding instead of going to the public trough.”

Alfred Wolf, senior rabbi at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, the city’s oldest Reform congregation, said he supports the goals of the new Wiesenthal museum.

“I am, however, wary of anything which might be interpreted as a breach of the separation of church and state,” he said, “such as the support of a purely religious project by public funds.

“It appears to me that the line is a very thin line separating the proposed museum from something that is denominationally religious.”

Letter to Davis

Wolf made those points in a letter to state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Valencia), adding that he would favor a museum operated by a state-appointed commission representing the general population.

Another criticism comes from Fred Diament, president of The 1939 Club, a group of concentration camp survivors that helped establish the Martyrs’ Memorial at the Jewish Federation Council’s headquarters. Its modest exhibit of photographs, text and models of concentration camps is strikingly similar to the display in the basement museum of the Wiesenthal Center.

Diament, speaking for himself, said that Hier is a publicity seeker who has exploited the Holocaust issue.

“As a survivor, what aggravates me is that they collect lots of money in the name of the Holocaust,” he said. “And they’re using lots of it for publicizing their center and also for certain sensationalist things.”

Duplicated Efforts?

He cited the center’s widely quoted statements about Mengele and other Nazis, saying they duplicated the efforts of other groups.

“The style of the Wiesenthal Center aggravates me,” Diament said. “They’re too commercial. You cannot package the Holocaust. It’s an insult to the memory of our parents and brothers and sisters.”

If there is any financial aid from the state for a Holocaust museum, he said, it should go to an organization representative of the entire Jewish community. The Wiesenthal Center is not a member of the Jewish Federation Council.

One survivors’ group--the American Congress of Jews From Poland and Survivors of Concentration Camps--has endorsed the proposed state grant.

“Everything must be done to educate as many people as possible to the tragic consequences of prejudice, bigotry and hatred which culminated in the greatest tragedy mankind has known,” said Otto Schirn, president of the group.

But most others--including The 1939 Club--have followed the lead of the Jewish Federation Council and declined to comment.

No Organized Opposition

Despite these reservations, there has been no move by the organized Jewish community to oppose the measure in Sacramento. It sailed through the state Senate on a 36-1 vote in March, and last month it was approved by the Assembly Governmental Operations Committee. The next hearing is before Assembly Ways and Means Committee.

Hier says that envy is behind some of the opposition to him in the Jewish community. “When we started in 1977, I must confess to you, I never imagined that in the short amount of time to 1985 the center would grow that rapidly,” he said in an interview. “That’s the price you pay if you’re successful.”

The primary financial backers of the Wiesenthal Center are brothers Samuel and William Belzberg, whose family owns a vast financial empire of oil, gas, bank and real estate holdings in Canada and the United States. The Belzbergs have been associated with Texas oilman and corporate raider T. Boone Pickens.

Celebrities on Board

In addition to the Belzbergs, the center’s board of trustees includes entertainers Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor, Hollywood producer and agent Jerry Weintraub, Las Vegas newspaper publisher Hank Greenspun, Wall Street financier Ivan Boesky and Alan Casden of Beverly Hills, one of the most successful home builders in the United States.

Some members of the Wiesenthal Center also are major contributors to the Jewish Federation Council.

Hier’s voice bristles with indignation when he is asked to respond to suggestions by others in the Jewish community that his group is not representative.

“We represent the community. . . . We have a huge membership,” he said. The center, which has an operating budget of $6.3 million a year, claims 273,000 contributing members throughout the world, 47,000 of them in California.

In addition, center officials say, the museum now attracts more than 25,000 visitors annually, and thousands more are reached through its speaker bureau, which sends concentration camp survivors to talk to schoolchildren.

Oscar for Documentary

In 1982, the center won an Oscar for the documentary “Genocide.” It currently is involved in videotaping the reminiscences of concentration camp survivors. The center also provides still photographs, motion picture footage and research materials for television and movie productions.

It sponsors a radio program, “Page One,” which includes interviews and news about Holocaust research and current events. The program airs on KMGG in Los Angeles and on stations in 50 other cities.

And the center has published two collections of scholarly essays on the Holocaust.

But its reputation for accuracy has been questioned on occasion. Last December, the center was attacked in an internal memorandum written by an official of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. The memo accused the center of making “inaccurate” and “exaggerated claims” about anti-Semitism in the United States and Europe in a fund-raising letter.

Defends Statements

Hier defended the statements and said that the center never debates other Jewish organizations publicly “over the seriousness of hate and anti-Semitism in our society.”

One of Hier’s strongest supporters is Wiesenthal himself, a concentration camp survivor who has devoted the last 40 years to tracking down Nazi war criminals.

In a telephone interview from his home offices in Vienna, Wiesenthal said that he initially intended to help the Jewish Federation Council set up its Holocaust museum but changed his mind after a visit from Hier and his backers in 1977.

Established organizations tend to work “on a basis of routine,” Wiesenthal said. But Hier and his associates “are very dynamic” and act quickly, he said.

Uses Wiesenthal Name

Hier and Wiesenthal reached an agreement under which Wiesenthal’s Vienna-based Documentation Center of the Federation of Jewish Victims of Nazism was to be paid $5,000 a month by Hier’s organization. In exchange, the Los Angeles center was allowed to use his name. The two centers swap information, and the Los Angeles group can call on Wiesenthal occasionally for speeches.

Wiesenthal said that when he dies, a duplicate set of his extensive archives will be sent to the Los Angeles center, located at the corner of Pico Boulevard and Roxbury Drive. Another set will go to Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

Ground-breaking ceremonies for the center have been set for later this year.

Seeking $20 Million

Sponsors are trying to raise $20 million to build and outfit the new facility and another $15 million as an endowment for future operations. The $5 million in matching state funds would be used for the Museum of Tolerance, Hier said.

About $10.5 million has been raised from private donations so far.

Although many of the Wiesenthal Center’s board members are wealthy, Weintraub, the Hollywood producer, said: “There’s just so much fund raising you can do. You just can’t go to the same people all the time.” That, he said, is why the center is seeking state funds.

Samuel Belzberg, chairman of the center’s board of directors, said that the new museum will be built with or without state support.

‘That Much Better’

“But with this additional money, if we get it, it would be that much better,” he said.

With that in mind, Hier and his associates have turned to Roberti for help in Sacramento. Endorsements for the measure have come from U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.); San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein; the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors; television personality Monty Hall; Martin S. Davis, chairman and chief executive officer of Gulf & Western Industries; the Armenian Assembly of America and the Armenian National Committee’s Western region.

Roberti, who wields great influence in the Legislature, has been a key factor in the measure’s success so far.

In an interview, Roberti said that the bill is No. 1 on his priority list because he feels that the state must counteract those who insist the Holocaust never took place.

“I think we have a duty to educate the people,” he said, “so that when the survivors die it will be clear that nobody can say these things never happened.”

In the Senate, the only negative vote was cast by Ralph C. Dills (D-Gardena).

‘Question of the Extent’

“It’s a question of the extent to which we should go as a state function to assist churches or synagogues or any religious group,” Dills said.

Dills, a veteran lawmaker, keeps a poster on his office wall that depicts Uncle Sam with a church in one hand and a Capitol building in the other. A caption below declares, “Keep Them Separate.”

The only member of the public to speak against the bill in Sacramento has been Hyman H. Haves, a one-time fund-raiser for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

‘Instrument for Fund Raising’

Haves, now retired and speaking as a private citizen, contends that the Wiesenthal Center is turning the Holocaust into an “instrument for fund raising for parochial interests,” meaning Yeshiva University.

In an interview, he pointed out that the proposed new center will contain a Torah ark and podium for Jewish prayers. But Hier said the sanctuary will not be in the museum itself and already has been paid for by the Belzberg family.

“I think, frankly, the center is set up to put the proper non-sectarian cast on the effort,” Roberti said, “both because of their membership list and their outreach to large numbers of people.”

Roberti rejected a suggestion by Haves and others that the state set up a museum of its own to tell the Holocaust story. “This is a unique horror that the state is not even remotely equipped to discuss,” he said.