Midwest Center for Holocaust Education building additional community education around exhibit
Born in Budapest, Hungary, Judy Jacobs spent about six months in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as a 7-year-old. Three of her grandparents and some aunts, uncles and cousins died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Those experiences made it “almost devastatingly emotional” for her to even enter the exhibit, “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.”, at Union Station in Kansas City. Now 84 and a member of Congregation Beth Shalom, Jacobs attended a special viewing last month for Holocaust survivors the day before the exhibit opened to the public.
“It brought back all these horrible, horrible memories,” she said. “After I recover from the initial shock, I can go through these things, but the first few minutes are a question of choking back tears and reliving horrible memories — mine and then the things I know about my family who perished.”
Her initial reaction to the exhibition was not unique to her, she said.
“My question, which is everybody’s question, was: Where was the rest of the world? Why were they silent?”
She praised the exhibition and said it gave “an excellent historical perspective about Hitler’s goals to destroy the Jewry, which was basically exacerbated by all the political disappointments and economic hardships his people were experiencing. It was a wonderful situation for him to make the Jews the scapegoats.”
Jacobs immigrated to the U.S. in November 1946, first to the Washington, D.C., area. She went to college at the University of Michigan and got married in Ann Arbor. She moved to Kansas City in 1963.
Her late husband, Dr. David Jacobs, died last fall. She has two sons living in the Kansas City area, Tom Jacobs and Jonathan Jacobs.
Alice Lewinsohn of Overland Park also attended the private viewing for survivors. She is 86 and a member of The Temple, Congregation B’Nai Jehudah.
Lewinsohn was impressed by the exhibition itself and by seeing the other survivors viewing it, which “made me feel as though we were bonded and grateful for this opportunity.”
“I really could get an understanding of what those poor Auschwitz victims had to endure by viewing the artifacts on display there,” she said.
Lewinsohn was born in Hilchenbach, Germany. She was 3 years old in 1938 — when “things were just beginning” to take an ominous turn in Europe at the hands of the Nazis — when her family immigrated to New York City to live with relatives and later moved to Kansas City.
“My parents were aware of the possibility that this terrible person named Hitler was going to reign,” she said. “They decided the best thing for us was to leave.”
Lewinsohn’s husband, Tom Lewinsohn, and his family went to Shanghai, China, in 1941 “because that was the only place he and his family could go to,” she said. Her husband came to the U.S. in 1948. They met at the Orchid Room nightclub at 18th and Vine in 1955.
Their daughter, Debbie Lewinsohn, lives in the Kansas City area.
“Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.” is lauded as the most complete historical exhibition on Auschwitz and its role in the Holocaust ever presented in North America.
The exhibition, which opened June 14 and runs through January 2022 at Union Station, includes more than 700 original objects and 400 photographs from more than 20 institutions and museums worldwide, according to Union Station. It offers “an unparalleled opportunity to confront the singular face of human evil — one that arose not long ago and not far away.”
Kansas City is the exhibition’s second and final destination in the United States. The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City hosted it May 8, 2019, to May 2, 2021.
Musealia Entertainment, based in San Sebastián, Spain, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum conceived the exhibition. An international panel of experts curated it, including Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt, Dr. Michael Berenbaum, Paul Salmons, and historians and curators at the Research Center at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, led by Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz.
The Auschwitz exhibit presents a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to educate the public about the history and context of the Holocaust, said Jessica Rockhold, executive director of the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education in Overland Park.
“Most people are not going to be able in their lifetime to go to Auschwitz, and this is an opportunity for Auschwitz to come to them,” Rockhold told The Kansas City Jewish Chronicle. “It’s a different kind of learning than you will ever get from a book.”
Thus, the center is using the exhibit as a springboard to other learning opportunities.
The center has a speakers series with events scheduled through next January in conjunction with the Auschwitz exhibition. It also will provide teacher education through Nov. 16.
Since its inception, the center has emphasized teacher training because “if we reach one teacher, we reach hundreds or thousands of students,” Rockhold said.
The individual stories of the survivors add to that education.
Lewinsohn’s paternal grandfather lived with her family in Hilchenbach and decided to stay there, despite her father’s attempts to persuade him to come with them to New York.
“He said, ‘I can walk down the street and buy my own cigars here,’” she said. Her grandfather didn’t want to learn a new language or be dependent on her father.
Some non-Jewish people who took over her family’s home hid her grandfather from the Nazis. He survived the Holocaust and died of natural causes.
Lewinsohn’s mother’s family was not so fortunate. Lewinsohn’s maternal grandmother, and her mother’s sister and her family, all were killed in the Holocaust.
Jacobs knows that even stories like that can’t convince everyone that the Holocaust truly happened. “History doesn’t lie,” she said, “but historians sometimes do.”
The exhibition “shows us not only what happened but what can happen when humanity does not do what they’re supposed to do, what I think they should do,” she said.
“Optimistically, I like to say it can’t happen again,” she said. “But realistically, I can’t say that.”
As an antidote to the Holocaust, society should be taught about tolerance, acceptance, diversity and the value of human life and of everyone’s contributions, she said.
“Maybe, above all, speak up and do not be silent.