Good Riddance

While 80,000 Holocaust survivors live(d) below the poverty line in Israel (impoverished by Israeli standards), American Jewry built museum after museum after center.

Jewish groups are fighting over who is more entitled to fundraise for their organizational projects in the name of the dead.

The Los Angeles Jewish community is particularly shameless and vile.

Gal Beckerman reports in the Forward,

There are now 16 Holocaust museums in the United States, from Albuquerque, N.M., to Houston, to Richmond, Va. And these are just the biggest of nearly 150 Holocaust centers all over the country.

The proliferation of museums detailing the story of what happened to European Jewry during World War II has been largely a phenomenon of the 1990s, part of the general increase in Holocaust awareness in the culture at large. But it has by no means slowed: The most recent museum, in Skokie, Ill., opened last spring, while construction continues on a second Los Angeles museum, to open in the summer of 2010.

With a substantial, federally-backed national museum in Washington, critics are increasingly wondering about the need for so many local museums. Even more important, the question of whether these institutions will be able to financially sustain themselves into the future — given the heavy costs of maintaining collections, and the dying off of the Holocaust survivors who founded them — is of great concern to museum directors.

The West Coast Holocaustians are fighting among themselves.

And still, the building of new museums continues. The latest is in Los Angeles. In a city that already has a Holocaust institution in the Museum of Tolerance, a new 30,000 square-foot building is being constructed for an older institution, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, now housed on the ground floor of the ORT building, on Wilshire Boulevard.

Mark Rothman, executive director, was unapologetic about the addition of yet another museum to the Holocaust landscape. The Museum of Tolerance, he said, was more generally focused on human rights — “It’s in the name,” he said — while his museum more narrowly tells the story of the Jewish experience of World War II.

Rothman sees hypocrisy in those who criticize the building of Holocaust museums while using the Holocaust to raise funds for other community needs, including for the local federation. “As soon as they can stop using the Holocaust in some way to raise money, I think that at that point it’s valid to say maybe it’s not reasonable to spend community resources on museums,” he said.

And the actual survivors in Israel? May are so poor…in 2007 it was reported,

A third of Holocaust survivors living in Israel are poor, the Holocaust Survivors’ Welfare Fund reported this week. According to the fund, some 80,000 of the 260,000 survivors in the country live under the poverty line.

The Holocaust Survivors Foundation website may be seen here. It isn’t as fancy a website as the museum websites, of course.

People complain about Holocaust jokes. But to me, focusing on museums when we have elderly survivors whose name our community speaks in and whose name they fundraise in for temporary exhibits, dinners, and grants, all promoting “tolerance” and all sorts of other vague platitudes while the actual survivors go without much needed medical care, well…that is the kind of disrespect I cannot approve of, and those are the kind of jokes that I don’t think are funny at all.