California Governor Gavin Newsom visited the Museum of Tolerance on Oct. 6 to announce the launch of the Governor’s Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education.
The council — which will be comprised of state elected officials, academics, advocates and community organizations — will be tasked with educating students about the Holocaust and other acts of genocide and equipping young people with tools to combat antisemitism and other forms of hate and bigotry.
Statewide elected officials were in attendance, including Assemblymembers Richard Bloom and Jesse Gabriel and Senator Henry Stern, who serve on the California Legislative Jewish Caucus and worked with Newsom to secure millions of dollars for Holocaust and genocide education in this year’s budget.
Allocations in the budget include $10 million for the Museum of Tolerance to create a new exhibit on antisemitism; $2.5 million for the expansion of the Holocaust Museum Los Angeles at Pan Pacific Park; and $1 million for the renovation of the Tauber Holocaust Library and Archives, housed at the Jewish Family and Children’s Services Holocaust Center in San Francisco.
Delivering remarks in the courtyard of the museum, the governor noted that this was his first visit to the Museum of Tolerance.
“This had a much deeper impact on me than I had expected and that will carry over in profound ways and meaningful ways.”
– Governor Gavin Newsom
“This had a much deeper impact on me than I had expected and that will carry over in profound ways and meaningful ways,” he said.
Upon Newsom’s arrival around 9:30 a.m., Simon Wiesenthal Center Dean and Founder Rabbi Marvin Hier took Newsom on a tour and showed him an original 1919 letter written by Adolf Hitler. In it, the future Nazi Party leader expresses his desire for the legal removal of Jews from Germany.
Afterwards, Newsom and other elected officials and community leaders offered statements about their commitment to increasing knowledge about the Holocaust among students in California schools, with Stern citing a recent study by the Claims Conference that found, the study said, “significant gaps in knowledge about the Holocaust,” particularly among millennials.
In an interview, Newsom addressed antisemitism and anti-Zionism on college campuses, saying more needs to be done to combat the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
“I proudly stand in strong solidarity and support with the State of Israel,” he said.
Newsom’s visit came one day after reports of vandalism at Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which preserves the site of the former German Nazi Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp in Poland. According to a statement from the organization, signs of vandalism, including antisemitic spray-painted inscriptions, were discovered on nine wooden barracks at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau site.
“Such [an] incident – an offense against the Memorial Site – is, above all, an outrageous attack on the symbol of one of the greatest tragedies in human history and an extremely painful blow to the memory of all the victims of the German Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau camp,” the statement said.
While the vandalism of Auschwitz-Birkenau did not come up during Newsom’s visit to the Museum of Tolerance, the governor emphasized how the museum is a reminder of the need to stand up against hatred.
“Being here at this remarkable center, this remarkable Museum of Tolerance, where in some ways even tolerance doesn’t do justice to our need to celebrate, not just tolerate, our diversity, is something to me that is foundational to all the work we need to do,” he said. “And so this notion of pluralism, being a universal state, celebrating all of our interesting differences but uniting around the things that bind us together, we have a lot of work to do in that space.”
