Queensborough Performing Arts Center Hillcrest Jewish Center August 25
Holocaust Resources Centre and Archives /
Courtesy of the Queensborough Customs College
For students and locals, historians and survivors, the recently opened Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Centre and Athenaeum is a valuable addition to New York'southward most ethnically various borough.
Atop a hill on the campus of Queensborough Community College in Bayside, Queens, adjacent to the administration offices, sits a building with an architectural design that stands out amidst those around it. The buildings surrounding the new structure are testaments to an older style, boxy rock piles imposing on their environment. The new construction, of steel, drinking glass and tan limestone, allows the globe around it in.
The walls facing y'all on arrival at the Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center and Archives are drinking glass; jagged panes in a cube to the correct, swell rows of panes to the left. From an outside balcony, the main exhibition space inside is conspicuously visible.
The only remnant of the building's past is a seam in the floor virtually the entrance, marking where a loading dock used to be; the presses from Queensborough Community College'southward one-time printing office have been replaced past paintings, sketches, artifacts, videotapes and books. The old space has constitute new life, disseminating knowledge of the Holocaust to New York's most ethnically diverse borough and beyond.
The new centre (718-281-5770; world wide web.qcc.cuny.edu), which was officially opened to the public in Oct 2009, is a far weep from its former dwelling in the basement of Queensborough's library. What started as a single class at the school in 1983 has expanded to include video and volume libraries, community and school programming and events, an internship program every bit well as semester-long art exhibits and a permanent exhibit on the Holocaust. Approximately 200 visitors walk through the doors each month, in improver to an equal number of students who come to the heart to do research for classes on and off campus.
After funding for the center was secured two and a one-half years ago, Queensborough's President Eduardo Marti asked Arthur Flug, executive managing director of the internship program, what he envisioned for the future of the center. "I want you to blueprint the Holocaust Center so when people say 'I'one thousand going to the Holocaust Center,' the [follow-upwardly question is] Washington or Bayside?"
The center's benefactors were residents of Queens. Kenneth Kupferberg, a physicist, worked with his twin brother, Max, on the Manhattan Projection. His wife, Harriet, was a retired teacher and a member of the QCC Fund Board. Together they were founding members of Temple Beth Sholom in Flushing. Kenneth died in 1993 and Harriet in 2008, i year after she donated $1 one thousand thousand to build the centre.
The newest part of the edifice, designed by Charles Thanhauser of Tek Architects, is a large enclosure that houses the centre's permanent showroom, a series of movable kiosks and wall-mounted video stations that chronicle the plight of Jews during Hitler's reign. The irregularly shaped glass panels of the walls evoke the shattered glass of Kristallnacht; the balcony outside and some of the within walls are Jerusalem stone, at Harriet Kupferberg's insistence. The centerpiece is a Torah from the town of Czestochowa in southern Poland, donated to the college in 1988. The Torah, itself a survivor of the Holocaust, serves equally a symbol of the indestructibility of the Jewish people, Flug says.
Images of life before the Holocaust are projected along one of the stone walls: family unit photos, portraits, street scenes of people shopping, a petty girl with a tiny sewing machine. The kiosks hold artifacts and tell stories of Jews in state of war-torn Europe, with diary entries, photographs, Jewish ritual objects and Nazi memorabilia. One kiosk includes an anecdote from Rabbi Fabian Schonfeld, of the nearby Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills, a story of small, kind acts in face up of neat terror. At the age of 14 in 1940, Schonfeld was getting gear up to board a train in Austria merely as a community officer searched his bags. The officer found his tefilin, a bar mitzva gift, and threw them in the garbage, telling him he won't need them anymore, and Schonfeld began to cry. Once he boarded the train, the usher approached him. Having seen Schonfeld crying, he realized how important they must exist and had dug the tefilin out of the trash to return them. Some other kiosk tells the story and displays the drawings of an American Jewish soldier, Nathan Hilu, assigned to guard Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg Trials in 1946.
"The permanent exhibit leads you from the showtime to the present," said Jane Keibel, a survivor who came to the Usa on the S.S. St. Louis in 1940 and currently serves as a docent at the centre. "I don't know of anything [exterior a museum] that does that, and it'southward washed with real people, people who accept a proper name."
In improver to showing visitors effectually the exhibits, Keibel talks to groups about the Holocaust. "It'due south of import for people to know what happened, when so many people are denying it," she said. "Queensborough students are very various, and so many come from countries where genocide took place."
Flug is quick to point out that the new middle's success is due in great part to the survivors, like Keibel, living in the customs, who give of their time and themselves for the program.
Earlier the centre opened to the public, Flug brought a grouping of survivors in for a preview. Construction was still incomplete. "They were a bunch of little old men and women in hardhats," Flug said. "And when they got to the primary exhibition space, they started crying." They shed tears of joy for the beauty of the edifice, for the time to come of the project and for the effect calorie-free creates pouring through the drinking glass walls, he recalled. Many of these aforementioned survivors are featured in the permanent exhibit, telling pieces of their stories in video.
In August 2009, when the renovations to the building were complete and the vast inventory of 1,200 DVDs and 5,000 books was fix to be moved from the library basement, Flug entered the old storage room to find ii women, in their eighties and nineties, scrubbing down the shelving units with vinegar, non wanting to bring the dust of the old into the low-cal of the new.
Survivors play many important roles in the center, not the least of which are featured artists. The center is not merely of history but of fine art as well. While by exhibits take ranged from "American Cartoonists: Nazi Germany and the Holocaust" to "The Nanjing Massacre: Genocide and Denial"—with catalogs and traveling exhibits bachelor to any organization for the cost of aircraft—the latest exhibit on brandish is a series of works by Samuel Bak, who was a 6-year-former in Vilna when World War Two began. His work, on loan from the Crease Gallery in Boston through February 1, is a mix of charcoal drawings, pencil sketches, mixed media and watercolor. Those on view "explore landscape, object and person through Bak's themes of loss and the Jewish dictate of tikkun olam," co-ordinate to the exhibit catalog prepared by Ayala Tamir, the middle'south assistant manager, who also curated the showroom. One charcoal drawing, Panori, shows a barren state with a Magen David-shaped chasm. A series of watercolors depicts tattered and broken teddy bears.
The woodcuts and paintings of some other artist, Rosemarie Koczy, who survived Auschwitz, are also on brandish. Subsequently her death in 2007, her husband donated her haunting works, depicting baldheaded, genderless people cramped in long and narrow spaces.
The center'south arts initiative too creates programming open up to the wider community, teaching about the Holocaust and social issues through flick, music and performing arts. Until five years ago, Queens had no borough-broad commemoration of Kristallnacht. This twelvemonth, the center marked the day with a concert by Motyl, a group of v female Juilliard graduates, who played music created by survivors and victims. Cantor Moti Fuchs also performed, forth with the Hebrew school student and teen choirs from Temple Beth Sholom of Flushing.
"The music comes with the lesson," Tamir said. "Nosotros look at it every bit a way to bear witness our delivery, to attract students and an audience beyond the campus."
The heart is defended to serving its customs of survivors and preventing, through education, such tragedies from repeating themselves. In addition to a "Bagels and Talk" program the center has hosted for four years, a Second Generation group, Yiddish film and Passover Seder programs, the center provides an internship for students to interview Holocaust survivors.
"Nosotros have to come up with an approach so [students] look at it as more than history," Flug said. To do this, students in the internship plan, most of whom are not Jewish, are paired with a survivor. Some, like a Sri Lankan student two years ago, have never heard of the Holocaust before arriving at the school. Students meet with Tamir, who teaches them well-nigh the Holocaust and the art of interviewing. The students approach it initially equally reporters, getting the bones information beginning, leading up to the difficult parts. "Nosotros tell them to stop looking at the old guy, to come across the boy in front of you," Flug added.
The survivors are really broken-hearted to tell their stories, according to Flug, since many fright without them, knowledge of the Holocaust will dissipate with future generations.
"Our survivors are not worried nearly dying, they're worried almost being forgotten," Flug said.
One time the stories have been documented, students learn how such bigotry is taking place even today. Students are given information about a instance of discrimination and asked to mark its place in history. Leaving out primal facts nearly race, ethnicity and location, they are related this story: Four men are driving in a car when two men in another car cutting them off. The ii then go out of their machine to face the men in the first car, yelling "Go back where you came from." Virtually students judge that the outcome took place during the Holocaust. In fact, it took identify in Queens in 2006.
So that the Holocaust remains relevant to students no matter their course of study, the heart has taken an interdisciplinary approach to disseminating data, Flug said. In addition to classes specifically didactics the Holocaust, the eye works every bit a supplemental resource for other departments, whether it'southward providing a biography for an English class examining the man reaction to stressful and unsafe situations; finding inquiry fabric for nursing classes on medicine and ethics in the Holocaust; exhibiting art as an expression of defiance; or dissecting the economic science of the Holocaust, how business was run in Nazi Germany and how the Nazis turned a profit.
Vincent Wheeler, a 22-year-old business administration student and former intern at the heart, has been a frequent company to the middle since the opening. He brings friends periodically, showing it off.
"I only think it's astonishing, the look, the ambiance, the technology," he said. "Information technology'due south absolutely cute." His favorite part? "The [interactive] timeline. When you touch it, it tells you what happened that twelvemonth, with photos and video." He also shows friends the video of him in the interns' reaction display, and the video of the survivor he interviewed, Eddie Weinstein. "My friends, they're enlightened and flabbergasted. They say, 'I can't believe we accept this at our college.'"
To keep students enlightened of the dangers of discrimination in modern life—plaques in one of the center's coming together rooms chronicle genocide from Armenia to Darfur—the center is also involved in creating a curriculum for the New York Department of Education's Hate Crime Initiative. "Nosotros don't teach the Holocaust as a lesson in history," Flug said. "We teach [information technology] as the greatest detest criminal offense ever committed, on a scale never seen before or since."
The curriculum was conceived after a Sikh student in Queens was attacked in 2007. The attackers pulled off his turban and cut off his hair. A press conference was called, and Flug spoke of the need for tolerance, comparison the incident to a photo he showed of an Orthodox man in Poland praying as Nazis cut off his payes.
"I said, 'Permit'southward practice something,'" he recalled. "I came upwardly with 'What Exercise Y'all Do If You're a Victim of a Detest Offense?'" The plan, which will offer resources for victims to turn to for assist and ideas for prevention, is existence created in partnership with the New York State Commission on Hate Crimes, New York State Division of Human being Rights and New York Constabulary Department. The curriculum will launch afterward this yr and will somewhen be used in schools statewide.
In the meantime, the Kupferberg Centre runs customs events to promote agreement. Later on Orthodox Jews harassed a gay pupil in Queens, Flug talked the student into going to the police force and and so approached community leaders to hash out how they wanted to respond. The resulting upshot, a screening of Trembling Before G-d, a documentary on the struggles of gay Orthodox Jews, at Hillcrest Jewish Centre, attracted 180 people.
For at present, the center is planning a new year of programming. Flug envisions a "Grandparents Mean solar day" in the spring, opening the center to intergenerational groups. He is also working to bring in loftier school students in demand of service credits, hoping to train them to be leaders in identifying detest crimes. Another partnership, with the college's theater program, will outcome in a new phase version of Anne Frank.
Upcoming exhibit ideas include music in the Holocaust, which would explore the power of music and how it was used. Tamir is currently working out how to incorporate unlike media with the concept.
Artworks for future display sit in the storeroom waiting to exist brought out in the light, for example, paintings by Seymour Kaftan, born in Vilnius, Poland, who in afterward life painted concentration camp scenes in oil. The storeroom shelves around Kaftan's piece of work go on to fill up with by and future exhibits, and goose egg is out of premises. "I never say 'No, that doesn't fit in our schedule,'" Flug said.
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Source: https://www.hadassahmagazine.org/2010/01/25/arts-memory-home-queens/