Wiesenthal Center : Work Starts on Museum of Tolerance

“They killed my parents, my family, my child,” said Regina Lorber, recalling the horror of Nazi Germany, a nightmare that has left an indelible mark.

“It will hurt until I die,” she said.

Lorber and about 200 other survivors of the slaughter of millions of Jews during World War II gathered Sunday in a muddy vacant lot in West Los Angeles to remember the dead and to express the hope that the construction of a Museum of Tolerance on the site will help to prevent such atrocities from occurring again.

“The killing continues. . . . In the Middle East, in El Salvador,” Lorber added. “But we must continue to hope.”

As several hundred people attending ground-breaking ceremonies for the new complex that is to house the museum looked on, the Holocaust survivors--mostly elderly men and women--silently placed a bit of soil from the World War II death camps in the ground where the museum tracing the roots of prejudice and intolerance is to be built.

Scheduled for completion in August, 1988, the $24-million, 78,000 square-foot Simon Wiesenthal Center complex will house the Beit HaShoah (or House of the Holocaust) Museum of Tolerance, billed as the largest exhibit in the world to document man’s intolerance to man and its culmination in the Holocaust.

“We are at a historic turning point,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Wiesenthal Center, explained before the ground breaking. “The biological clock of those with firsthand experience is coming to a (stop). . . . Soon there will be no firsthand witnesses. So we need institutions like these as vivid reminders to coming generations. Anyone who concludes that such events cannot happen again is very naive.”

A similar conviction has led in recent years to proposals for other museums focusing on the Holocaust, including a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. When ground-breaking ceremonies were held a year ago at a site overlooking the Washington Memorial, organizers had raised about half of an anticipated $100 million in contributions.

The Los Angeles museum will be built through more than $13 million in private contributions and $5 million in state funds. Center representatives said they hope to raise an additional $6 million in contributions before the museum opens at the corner of Pico Boulevard and Roxbury Drive.

Architect Maxwell Starkman has designed an imposing granite and glass structure with four above-ground levels. Besides the museum, the complex will have an auditorium, seminar rooms, a research library and archive and a film and video studio. The complex also will incorporate radio and computer technology giving it access to a communications satellite network to monitor human rights violations around the world.

And, in a departure from the “static” design of traditional museums’ artifact displays, Wiesenthal Center Director Gerald Margolis said the Museum of Tolerance will use a variety of vehicles on the “cutting edge of technological advances”--three-dimensional dioramas, computers, audio and video displays--to re-create historical scenes and provide a “full sensory involvement” on the part of visitors.

Center’s Archives

The exhibits will draw on the center’s existing archives, which include more than 20,000 volumes and 40,000 photographs devoted to the Holocaust and the study of contemporary anti-Semitism, several hundred hours of videotaped firsthand accounts by Holocaust survivors, liberators, and sworn statements made by war criminals, Margolis said.

One part of the 36,000-square-foot museum will be devoted to tracing the history of intolerance in the United States, with vivid portrayals of such episodes as the Salem witch hunts, the Civil War, the reactionary response to new immigrant ethnic groups and the real estate covenants that excluded minorities from purchasing homes in white areas, according to Belzberg.

Another part of the exhibit will deal with the history of the Holocaust, tracing the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany to a stark and somber re-creation of the concentration camps and other Nazi atrocities.

Margolis, who will also be the museum’s director, emphasized that the exhibits will “not be presented as a house of horrors.” He noted that it will also include portrayals of heroic action and spiritual resistance, as well as the triumph of Holocaust survivors who pieced together their broken lives and flourished.

Social Statement

The intent of museum organizers is to provide a social statement of such importance that it will serve not only as an educational instrument for schoolchildren but captivate older viewers through its innovative design, Margolis said.

One section of the exhibit, for instance, is formulated to challenge the assumptions and prejudices of visitors.

“This is the only museum we know of that begins with the premise of combatting intolerance, racism, prejudice and man’s injustice to man,” said Frances Belzberg, head of the museum’s design committee. Her husband, financier Samuel Belzberg, is chairman of the center’s board and has helped finance the project.

“We don’t intend to regurgitate history, rather to involve the visitor in situations we would hope they would care about. We want to get the visitor to react . . . with outrage and anger,” Belzberg said. “If it makes a person aware of similar contemporary situations and moves them to take action, then we’ve succeeded.”

Although the museum will no doubt release a flood of dark memories, especially among those who lived through the Holocaust, many at the center’s ground breaking said they planned to visit the museum when it opens.

“I will be there,” one elderly woman said. “We must remember. We must never forget.”