A High-Tech Walk Down the Corridors of Bigotry : Museum: L.A.’s Wiesenthal Center adopts provocative strategy to document and teach lessons from Holocaust.

The huge man in a three-piece suit seems friendly enough as he welcomes you to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. He can tell by looking at you that you’re above average, he says, not prejudiced at all-- his kind of people.

“Why isn’t everybody open-minded like us?” the man, whose body is displayed on a 10-foot-tall stack of video monitors, says warmly. “But, of course, we do have our limits. . . . Like you’re at the convenience store, right? And . . . the guy behind the counter can’t speak English. . . . You’re thinking: ‘For God sake, just learn the language, will ya?’ ”

But seriously, the museum’s official greeter adds with a grin, “I love foreign people! We all do!”

Founded to confront bigotry and illustrate the contemporary relevance of the Holocaust, the new museum, due to open Feb. 9, could easily have adopted a preachy tone. Instead, the remarkable $50-million educational complex--also called Beit Hashoah, or “House of the Holocaust”--is in-your-face irreverent.

From its smarmy, Joe Isuzu-like greeter to its Whisper Tunnel, where visitors are bombarded by racial, ethnic and sexist epithets, from its interactive exhibit on the Los Angeles riots to its nearly life-size replica of the gates of Auschwitz, the museum reaches out and grabs its visitors. Both in its subject and its style--not to mention its use of computer technology--people say it is a place like no other.

“This is a catalogue of human incapacity to love. It’s a mini-walk through a maxi-problem,” said the Rev. Cecil (Chip) Murray, pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in South-Central Los Angeles, who added that he plans to lead his congregation on tours of the museum. “It should be required viewing for anyone who has a moral imperative that pulls them through life.”

Because ideas, not artifacts, form its backbone, the museum succeeds in using the example of the Holocaust not merely as sorrowful documentation of the past, but also as a prelude to the future--an inspiration for action.

“Instead of saying: ‘We’ve got a collection to show,’ they’ve started from: ‘We’ve got people to change.’ Museums have not traditionally done that,” said Robert Sullivan, associate director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, who worked as a consultant on the project. “Getting people to face reality without giving up hope--that’s the line that’s walked so successfully here.”

During the past week, more than five years after planning began, billboards and bus shelter ads for the museum in the 9000 block of West Pico Boulevard went up throughout the city. “Hate,” they proclaim, “has finally been put in its place.”

Dozens of people, including some of the world’s best-known museum designers, were involved in creating the place--a collaborative and sometimes contentious process that forced its participants to wrangle with some of the most politically charged issues of our time. Often, the museum’s creators had to chart a precarious path between provocativeness and bad taste.

“It was sort of like walking on eggs,” said Karl Katz, a consultant to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and a leader of the design team. Particularly on an emotional subject such as the Holocaust, he said, “you can’t rankle people--the moment they feel off-put or ill at ease, then you’ve absolutely ruined the possibility of making it a learning experience. But if you’re overly cautious, you’re too bland.”

So from the outset, the museum’s primary goal was to engage the visitor, using surprise and even humor to promote discussion of themes many people work hard to avoid. Aware that the attention of museum-goers tends to wander, and that abstract subjects such as ethics and morality make them wander all the more, the designers strived to create constant change. Every detail--the color of the carpeting, the texture of the walls, the height of the ceilings and the maze-like, non-linear layout--was intended to stimulate.

“We tried to manipulate the palette. Every dimension was considered,” said Martin Pyant, design director at the James Gardner Studio in London, where plans for much of the museum came to life. By reaching for the unexpected, “hopefully we’ve caught the cynics and the people whose interest may have waned.”

That desire to cast a wider net, to reach people who are not particularly interested in the Holocaust and its legacy, is one of the museum’s central missions. Created primarily for younger audiences, who are more likely to view the Nazis’ campaign to exterminate Jews as an aberration from a distant era, the 28,000-square-foot installation seeks to show the connections between modern-day bigotry and the horrors of half a century ago.

The museum’s first section, the brightly lighted, cacophonous Tolerance Workshop, explores the phenomenon of prejudice through interactive exhibits with names such as “Me . . . a Bigot?” Following that, a walk through the history of the Holocaust--down a prewar Berlin street and, eventually, through the gates of a Nazi death camp--displays the same phenomenon taken to its worst extreme.

“We didn’t want to present the Holocaust unaccompanied by other lessons,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Wiesenthal Center and the driving force behind the museum. “This museum says: ‘You may not be Jewish and you may not be a Nazi, but you have a stake in this.’ Because hatred was not banished (with) Adolf Hitler--it outlived him.”

From the moment you step inside the museum, passing through either a red door marked “Prejudiced” or a green “Unprejudiced” door--you can see, hear and experience divisiveness for yourself. At a television monitor in one corner, visitors eavesdrop on a videotaped cocktail party, ducking in and out of several conversations.

“Those people. . . . “ says an Anglo woman.

“You know what they’re like,” says an Asian man.

“Always living off our taxes,” says another Anglo woman, this one elderly.

“Always bragging about their fancy families,” says a Latino teen-ager.

“Let ‘em go back where they came from,” says a black woman.

“But don’t say anything,” says an American Indian man.

“I wouldn’t want people thinking I’m prejudiced,” says the first Anglo woman.

A few steps away, at the Other America exhibit, a large map charts the locations, state by state, of America’s 250 hate groups. By touching a computer screen, visitors can learn about each group in detail--its beliefs, its history, how fast it is growing.

Down the hall, a multimedia film on the civil rights movement splices the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with images of what he struggled against. A 1963 headline reports that a bomb blast in an Alabama church has killed four black children. Video footage shows a little black girl in a frilly dress walking up the steps of her newly desegregated school. A National Guardsman is at her side.

As you move through the Tolerance wing, you’ll likely be interrupted by a booming voice--oddly familiar--that competes for your attention.

“Since when was there a law against not liking certain people? It’s a right, right?” says the syrupy-sounding man, the museum’s greeter, whose smirking face peers down from several television monitors mounted overhead.

“You’re already a good person! What do you need with all of this?” he croons. Suddenly, his face disappears and is replaced by a printed message: “THINK!”

Next comes the history of the Holocaust, where visitors are asked to witness one of the most horrific examples of man’s inhumanity to man. Unlike the Tolerance section, where visitors are free to wander from exhibit to exhibit, this is a forced tour that takes people back in time--to 1920s Germany--then walks them forward at a preset pace.

At the beginning, each visitor receives a photo passport of a child who was caught up in the Holocaust. Midway through the tour, visitors insert the passports into a computer to learn more about the child. Not until the end is the child’s fate revealed.

Museum designers tried to anticipate the questions that visitors would have about the Holocaust, and they created an innovative way to ask and have them answered. At several points, visitors peer into a museum researcher’s office where a discussion of the material is under way. The researcher, a designer and a historian ask each other questions--how could people be hoodwinked by a zealot like Hitler? If things were so bad in Europe, why didn’t more Jews try to flee?

In this museum-within-a-museum format, visitors are reminded that history is interpretive. Once again, they are encouraged to think for themselves.

The museum saves the most powerful section for last: a walk into the Warsaw Ghetto and through the barbed gates of a concentration camp. Again, visitors are asked to pick a door--either “Able-bodied” or “Children and Others.”

But no matter which they choose, all end up in the same bunker-like room. Eight television monitors are mounted on the stark, gray walls, where visitors can see and hear the stories of Holocaust survivors. In the brochures, this room is called the Hall of Testimony. But many people will be reminded of a gas chamber.

At the exit, a sign on the wall asks: “Who Was Responsible?” A rotating series of photos identifies the guilty: henchmen, racists, blind followers, world leaders--and ordinary people.

None of this would be possible without the help of synchronized computers, which keep the slide projectors whirring, the videotapes looping and the soundtracks blaring in unison. Computers are also put to use in the museum’s Multimedia Learning Center, an 8,400-square-foot research laboratory upstairs. There, by touching a full-color computer screen, visitors can access rare photographs, films, maps, documents and music related to the Holocaust, World War II and anti-Semitism.

Compared to many museums, especially those that deal with the Holocaust, the Museum of Tolerance is unusually high-tech. And that has not escaped the notice of some critics. In her 1990 book “One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust,” Judith Miller writes that some people have accused Hier, the dean of the Wiesenthal Center, of attempting to make a “sound and light” show out of the Holocaust.

Miller quotes Gary Rosenblatt, editor of the Baltimore Jewish Times, calling Hier “half yeshiva, half Disneyland.” Miller paints Hier as a publicity hound. And, noting the Wiesenthal Center’s proximity to Hollywood and its star-studded list of financial backers, she suggests that its Museum of Tolerance (which was not built when she penned her critique) will push beyond the bounds of propriety, degrading the Holocaust in the name of commemorating it.

Its “high-tech approach to an almost unimaginable horror has appalled many Holocaust scholars, Jews, and non-Jews alike,” Miller writes. “Call it vulgarization of the Holocaust, or simply bad taste.”

Hier is not cagey about Miller’s criticisms. In fact, it is he who suggests that reporters read them. Miller is entitled to her opinion, he says. He simply does not agree.

“This is not Auschwitz,” he said. “If this were Auschwitz, here in West L.A., I would be the first to say it would be inappropriate. . . . But where are your kids now? They’re at the computer and after that they’re going to watch television. That’s the kids of America. This museum wants to speak to that generation. We have to use the medium of the age.”

Hier admits that part of the reason he and his colleagues were stung by Miller’s words is that she touched on sensitive issues of taste, of emphasis, that they had spent hours debating.

“There was an argument on everything,” he said. “How graphic are we going to get? Are we really going to tell those horrible stories? Should we avoid it and be more inspirational? Some people said: ‘It’s too much.’ Some people said: ‘It’s too little.’ ”

There were countless discussions about what to include. Some people wanted Vietnam to be part of the genocide film, but others said the war did not meet the strict definition of genocide. At first, ethnic slurs were peppered throughout the museum. Ultimately, what museum officials began to call the “big no-no words” were confined to a few select areas.

An early suggestion to design the museum as a cineplex, with several theaters addressing separate issues such as “justice” or “stereotypes,” was discarded for offering too passive an experience. There were squabbles over how much time visitors could be expected to stay (the current tour can take up to three hours) and about how they would react.

The Hall of Testimony, where television monitors show footage of gas chambers in a room that resembles one, sparked much discussion.

“I said to everyone: ‘When people look at this footage, they’re going to think that’s where they are.’ It’s logical,” Hier said. “But it was not our intention to re-create a gas chamber. . . . That evocative feeling is fine. But we don’t want to take it to its extreme.”

It has been a long haul. Hier admits that in addition to being excited about the museum’s unveiling, officials at the Wiesenthal Center are also feeling a touch of anxiety. They have taken risks, pushing the envelope while trying to strike a balance. Now, they can only hope the public will agree with their choices and respond.

“There comes a point where you make your statement and you hold it there. You don’t go beyond it,” Hier said. “We think we’ve found that point.”