N.Y. Museum Focuses on Jews, Holocaust

The Museum of Jewish Heritage--A Living Memorial to the Holocaust is scheduled to open in New York’s Battery Park City on Sept. 15 with a twin mission of documenting the Holocaust and also 20th century Jewish life in general.

The new 30,000-square-foot structure, designed with six sides to symbolize the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, is dwarfed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (265,000 square feet) opened in 1993 in Washington, D.C. But it has some distinctive features.

Two dozen short documentaries on everything from Sabbath observances to anti-Jewish book burnings in Germany were created for the museum by New York-based Rainmaker Productions, incorporating video interviews with Holocaust survivors provided by movie director Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Museum entrance will be via timed and dated tickets through Ticketmaster (800) 307-4007. Adult tickets are $7, plus charges of $2.50 per ticket and $1.25 per order. The museum will be closed on Saturdays and Jewish holidays.

Meanwhile, in downtown Denver this month, another door to Jewish history opened--literally. The duplex where a teenage Golda Meir lived with her sister and brother-in-law in 1912-13--when she became involved in Zionism and met her future husband--has opened as a museum at the Auraria Higher Education Center. Tours are 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays only. Admission is free. Information: (303) 556-3291.