Expanded Holocaust Memorial Completed
An expansion of Philadelphia’s existing Holocaust memorial was opened to the public today with tremendous respect and admiration. A new downtown plaza centered around the profound “Monument to Six Million Jewish Martyrs,” a Nathan Rapoport sculpture, opened on Monday, fifty-four years after the sculpture was put in place in 1964. Additions to the memorial include artifacts from the time period during which the Holocaust took place, as well as the recorded voices of Jewish survivors, some of whom are native to the Philadelphia area.
Featured in the plaza are three sections of train rail from the Treblinka concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. The track segments are 4 to 6 feet long and have been embedded in the pavement, so that observers can step on the same rails that transported countless prisoners to death camps. Utilizing a free app, smartphone users can hear the spoken testimony of those people who were imprisoned in the camps. According to the New York Times:
The plaza also features a sapling from a silver maple tree that was planted and cared for by children in the Theresienstadt camp in the former Czechoslovakia before many of them were killed at Auschwitz.
Eszter Kutas, who is the acting director of the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation, reflected on the importance of the tree, noting that the words of survivors include stories from some of the survivors who nurtured that tree. The Foundation conceptualized the idea of expanding the memorial and created the endowment to build and maintain it, which came to around $13 million.
The Foundation says that the memorial is more than just a testament to the past – it is a reminder to us that we must reject totalitarianism and fight against those who would seek to undermine the Constitution and the freedom it gives every man, woman, and child in the United States. David Adelman, the foundation’s chairman, stated that, if we don’t guard ourselves, lessons of the past can be repeated – a statement that seems especially salient in America today.
