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Our goal is to maintain each person's dignity. a PFGEhiT PLUS at gent ofreel ofilksi 'Bloomfield 4460 Orchard Lake Road 248-683-1010 • Are you battling with your child over food? • Is your child sneaking food? • Is your child gaining too much weight? • Do weight problems run in your family? Center for Childhood Weight Management 2 /19 1999 Let the professional staff of The Center for Childhood Weight Management help you and your child. For more information about classes and locations, call: (248) 661-6625 "Healthy Kids Are Happy Kids" 12 Detroit Jewish News Dr. Steven Grant, president of the Holocaust Memorial Center, HMC executive director Rabbi Charles Rosenzveig, and Robert Slatkin, president of the United Jewish. Foundation, sign an agreement allowing the center to expand on the JCC campus, which the foundation owns. has proposed for the Holocaust Memorial Center in West Bloomfield, which he heads. The expansion will change the attitudes of the people who visit and "show the richness before, the darkness during, and the light after" the Holocaust, he said. The Holocaust museum phenome- non of the last 15 years is "an attempt to provide a location where the mes- sage of the Holocaust could be trans- mitted to a generation that was not there," said Dr. Michael Berenbaum, president and CEO of the Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles. Berenbaum, who served as former project director of the creation of the Washington museum, noted that with the exception of Detroit, where the leadership from that was Rabbi Rosenzveig, who himself was a sur- vivor, the interpretive task has fallen to the next generation." The Holocaust "becomes the cor- nerstone from which we teach a whole range of values," he said. The mission of the museums, he continued, is negating the values that led to the creation of the perpetration of the Holocaust and affirming the values that could prevent this occurrence." The resurgence of interest in the Holocaust within the past 15 years springs from other reasons too, the experts said. Many victims simply found it too painful to speak about it, and there was little interest in others hearing their stories, Cooper said. "They were told, It must have been really terrible for you, now you're a greener here, so learn the language, get married, get a job and raise kids and forget about it."' But a series of events starting about 20 years ago — the NBC mini-series, "The Holocaust," the appearance of those who deny the Holocaust hap- pened and the neo-Nazi march in (( Skokie, Illinois in 1979, among others — awakened old memories, he said. "The survivors are now in the last phases of their lives," he said. They are responding to the Shoah Foundation and other local efforts to make sure that the martyrdom of their family's and their personal suffering is not lost." Rosenzveig agrees. Calling the immediate post- Holocaust period so "overwhelming," C C he said that few could come to terms with what they witnessed. "It took years to come to an ability to recall it," he said. Linenthal said the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War had a "tremen- dous effect to energize a distinct Jewish identity and a sense among many peo- ple that this could happen again." The Holocaust deniers, seen by many people as murderers of the memory of the Holocaust on one side, and the distinctively Jewish voice of Elie Wiesel, who has become an iconic feature in American culture, on the other side also has helped. According to Berenbaum, interest in the Holocaust seems to grow the more distant people are from the event. "Part of that has to do with the philosophical issue that the Holocaust is about atrocity not tragedy," he said. "There is no lesson that balances the price that was paid for that lesson. "When we created the Holocaust museum, people were worried that nobody was interested. On the con- trary, what we see is an explosion of interest precisely because people can draw the connection between their life, their world, their experience in the Holocaust. Sometimes they draw it correctly, sometimes they draw it incorrectly, but they draw it. "What all of these museums are attempting to do is to salvage from the ashes at least a lesson, and at least a call, a cry, a shout."