Jerusalem — Half a dozen Israeli teens shouted like rock groupies and pressed up against the blue metal police railing in hopes of catching a glimpse of larger-than-life California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was in Jerusalem Sunday to attend the groundbreaking ceremony for the Museum of Tolerance\’s new $200 million museum here.
Southern California Jews and non-Jews marked Holocaust Remembrance Day together at numerous events, including one that saw German teenagers and Jewish and Hispanic schoolchildren under the same tent, listening to their peers recite the words of Anne Frank.
András Simonyi, Hungary\’s ambassador to the United States, made his first visit to the Museum of Tolerance Feb. 11 to plan a spring memorial marking this year\’s 60th anniversary of the Nazi deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1944.
This is the first time I have written a letter of this kind, but I felt it was time to express my feelings on paper.
Visitors to the Museum of Tolerance expect to encounter evidence of brutality and organized evil. The current third floor exhibit, built around a reconstruction of a slave factory with barbed wire, and featuring video testimonials from survivors, seems predictable enough.
Yet the events documented didn\’t happen in Eastern Europe during the 1940s. The victims were rescued by government authorities, and the illegal garment factory imprisoning 73 Thai workers was located in El Monte, California in the early 1990s.
Hundreds of people turned out for the Simon Weisenthal Center Museum of Tolerance\’s one-day symposium, \”A Call to Freedom.\” The conference, held last month, highlighted the plight of black slaves in Sudan and Mauritania, where today, \”tens of thousands of blacks are sold into slavery, raised like slaves and have the deadened expressions of men and women who know no other life but the life of a slave,\” said Sam Cotton, author of \”Silent Terror,\” a book describing his secret trip to Mauritania where he interviewed slaves.
Polish Jewry before the war is the subject of a powerfulphoto exhibit at the Museum of Tolerance
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.