By Jillian Chambers
After 25 years at the Mandell JCC of Greater Hartford, a Holocaust memorial exhibit is moving to the University of Hartford thanks to efforts by Mandell JCC executive director David Jacobs, Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford executive director Estelle Kafer, and Professor of Modern Jewish History and Director of the Museum of Jewish Civilization Avinoam Patt.
The Museum for Jewish Civilization at the University of Hartford will become the new home for the Holocaust memorial exhibit. It contains descriptions of Jewish life in Europe pre-World War II, during the Holocaust and after the war. There is also a display of artifacts and documents provided by local survivors who settled in Hartford. According to the Connecticut Jewish Ledger article “Hartford Remembers the Holocaust,” school groups often visited the room, where they had the opportunity to meet with survivors. Some artifacts and documents were returned to the survivors and their descendants, but the rest was incorporated into a new exhibit titled “Hartford Remembers the Holocaust.”
The new exhibit opened at the Greenberg Center’s annual Holocaust Educators Workshop on Oct. 31, guided by the theme “Teach for the Future: Holocaust Education in the 21st Century.” The workshop featured a panel discussion of six Greater-Hartford survivors, who are also very involved in local Holocaust education. In the near feature, the exhibit will feature video testimonies from survivors who came to the community but are no longer with us. Most of these video testimonies are from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University.
Professor Patt told the Jewish Ledger that this exhibit will allow them to “provide the local connection for students and community members to understand that this is not just something that happened long ago in a faraway place, but still continues to have an impact on people who live in our community and on their descendants – who are committed to teaching about the Holocaust to make sure that it never happens again.”
A project titled “In Their Own Words” featuring interactive videos conducted by the Greenberg Center and Voices of Hope will also be incorporated into the exhibit. The opening of “Hartford Remembers the Holocaust” was on Wednesday, November 9 at the Museum of Jewish Civilization at the University of Hartford. The original article featured in this story can be found here.