16
Friday, September 7, 1984
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
0-1
This life-size replica of a section of the Warsaw Ghetto wall cost approximately $7,500 to produce and utilizes the same materials as the origina
Continued from preceding page
brary, is a series of eight enclosed car-
rels unlike any in the Detroit area.
Each carrel is outfitted with both a
computer terminal and a television
monitor. Students and researchers
will be able to tap into a central com-
puter through their desktop terminals
and obtain histories for any of 1,100
Jewish communities destroyed during
the Holocaust. The television
monitors, as well, will be hooked into a
central data bank, this one providing
access to hundreds of films, newsreels
and contemporary videotapes dealing
with virtually every aspect of the
Nazis' attempted annhilation of the
Jews.
The educational goals of the HMC
should be coupled with a strong com-
munity outreach program, Rabbi
Rosenzveig feels, adding that a com-
mittee has been formed to develop and
help implement such a program for the
center.
Schools throughout the state of
Michigan, as well as business, civic
and religious groups, have been in-
formed of the center's opening and will
be able to take special tours of the
facility. The HMC has trained a group
of 150 persons to serve as tour guides,
the rabbi said.
At what age children can handle
the complexities of the Holocaust was
one of the concerns tackled by the out-
reach committee. "My personal incli-
nation is to begin educating children
about the Holocaust around the time
they reach the eighth grade," Rabbi
Rosenzveig said, indicating that some
younger groups may still visit the cen-
ter.
The Holocaust Memorial Center
will offer students, whether they come
from a Hebrew day school of an inner-
city public school, "a basic approach to
dealing with, and learning about the
Holocaust," according to the rabbi. "If
the students are motivated, we offer
facilities that will allow them to con-
tinue on their own. This is not an in-
stitution that can be exhausted in one
visit."
High-tech wizardry and exquisite
emotional imagery aside, there are
those in the Detroit Jewish commu-
nity and elsewhere who feel that the
Holocaust Memorial Center could
have been planned better, built faster
and realized for less than its $2.5 mil-
lion price tag (which doesn't include a
just-started $4 million capital endow-
ment fund drive).
Even Rabbi Rosenzveig, whose
childhood battle for survival in war-
torn Ostrowiecz, Poland saw both his
father and his brother perish in the
camps, will admit that not everything
has gone smoothly and that in the
push to make the HMC a reality he has
alienated some people associated with
the project. But critics will acknowl-
edge that if it weren't for the rabbi's
tenaciousness, the center might still,
after all this time, be nothing more
than a series of blueprints and pro-
posals.
The 20-year history behind the
HMC, the director allows, includes a
number of false starts and scrapped
proposals. It was the mid-1960s before
most Holocaust survivors, including
those who had emigrated to the De-
troit area, were ready to open their
minds and hearts to the experiences of
the Holocaust. The rabbi feels this is
one of the reasons why a city like New
York, "which had more Jews in 1950
than Israel had when Yad Vashem
was established in 1948, never did
anything about memorializing the
Holocaust until recently."
Finally, in 1964, a group of
Shaarit Haplaytah members, headed
by Rabbi Rosenzveig, raised $14,000 to
purchase a 5.5 acre parcel of land near
the Southfield Rd.-11 Mile Rd. interse-
ction for a modest Holocaust Memorial
Center. It was then that the state of
Michigan stepped in, appropriating
the land for the soon-to-be-built 1-696
expressway (which, ironically, like the
Holocaust Memorial Center, has
taken some two decades to get any-
where near the completion stage). The
state however, took nearly ten years
before it refunded the purchase price of
the land to Shaarit Haplaytah.
With the refunded money, and
additional funds that were raised in
the intervening years, a 14-acre site at
Farmington Road and 13 Mile Road in
Farmington Hills was purchased in
1975. At that point, Louis G. Redstone
Associates, the first architectural firm
to work on the center, was contracted
to design a facility and some $250,000
in improvements were put into the
site.
The second site shift, and the one that
is still being debated, was the move
to the HMC's current spot, on land
owned by United Jewish Charities
adjacent to the JCC.
ti
The second site shift, and the one
that is still being debated, was the
move to the HMC's current spot, on
land owned by United Jewish
Charities (and therefore given to the
Holocaust Memorial Center at no
charge) adjacent to the JCC. This site,
a number of Jewish communal leaders
argued, would provide the HMC with a
ready-made audience and greatly re-
duce the need for land improvements
(such as a parking lot). It was also felt
that security would be less of a con-
cern. So, the Farmington Hills prop-
erty was sold in 1981 and ground was
broken for the Holocaust Memorial
Center at its third and final site.
Some people, including members
of the museum's own board of direc-
tors, remain less than thrilled with the
move. According to one source close to
the HMC, they fear a loss of indepen-
dence for the project and, more impor-
tantly, that the JCC site will be less
advantageous in terms of educating
the general public about the horrors of
the Holocaust.
There are those who feel that the
abandoned Farmington Hills location
was ideal for the HMC — closer to the
geographic center of the Jewish com-
munity and easily accessible to the
metropoltan area's general popula-
tion. There is a strong belief among
several people connected with the
project that the education of the non-
Jewish public to the atrocities of the
Holocaust should have taken prece-
dence over convenience for the Jewish
community in selecting a site.
And while Detroit's Holocaust
Memorial Center may live up to Rabbi
Rosenzveig's claim, heralding it as
"the most technologically advanced
structure of its kind in the United
States," it is also, outside of the feder-
ally financed memorial to be built in
the nation's capital, the most expen-
sive of the dozen or so Holocaust