Remembering the Holocaust and ensuring future generations never forget

Since its inception, the Museum of Jewish Heritage has served as an institute of remembrance and education – inviting over 60,000 students alone yearly to view its exhibitions on the Holocaust.

This coming fall, all of New York City’s 8th graders will visit the museum as part of a privately funded partnership with the Department of Education. Aimed at growing the scope of Holocaust education, the initiative will reach 85,000 8th grade public school students across three years. Among exhibitions tailored to a younger audience, “Courage to Act: Rescue in Denmark” details the rescue of Danish Jews during the Holocaust, featuring interactive storytelling tools that engage with viewers aged 9 and up. 

Also in November the museum will launch a new video installation using artificial intelligence titled Survivor Stories: An Interactive Dialog. Fusing digital, interactive testimonies of ten Holocaust survivors through AI, the exhibition facilitates an immersive conversational experience. The new exhibition aims to broaden the scope of individual testimonies to build a collective storytelling effort that reflects the diversity of Holocaust survivors’ experiences. The participating survivors, who were all children during the Holocaust, belong to the very last generation of Holocaust survivors. 

New York Nonprofit Media caught up with the museum’s president and CEO Jack Kliger about his own personal experience with the Holocaust and the importance of expanding Holocaust education to combat misinformation and antisemitism. 

How does your personal connection to the Holocaust influence your work?

Both of my parents were survivors. My father was much less willing to talk about his experience than my mother growing up, but that changed when I became about 13, 14. But I did get to learn a lot about the Holocaust, from the experiences and the lens of the people who had been through it, their friends and family connections. In my adult years, when I had my own children, I remember very clearly two things happening. One, my daughter had gotten her bat mitzvah and she had an incredible resemblance, physically, to my mother. I had a picture of my mother at 14 in the Budapest ghetto wearing a Jewish star. And the physical resemblance between the two of them was striking. But my mother had grown up trying to survive the war, while my daughter had grown up in a very comfortable and secure life. And it made me realize that I was now in a position to maybe do something more about that, particularly for kids my daughter's age. [Later] when they were starting to build the Museum of Jewish Heritage, they asked me to come on as an advisor, and then later as a board member. So that really was the period where I decided, that after having had a family of my own, I thought about what that legacy would be – my daughter and her children would be the last to maybe know a Holocaust survivor, but what about those who don't? At the time, we didn't think, frankly, that we would have an ongoing fight against antisemitism. We thought it was a memorial institution designed to teach history during a time of waning antisemitism. Well we were wrong. Now what we have seen is that the mission is to learn the lessons of history and to combat hate and antisemitism, not only in traditional forms, but in all contemporary forms as well. 

What motivated the museum to create the FAQ, antisemitism document? 

It was interesting, because we always had a very strong footprint in education. Our twin pillars are remembrance and education. And we always focused particularly on high school, when they were taught that part of history. What we saw was that it wasn't just a question of getting students to learn and come to the museum, but that there was a lot of inconsistency in how teachers were taught how to teach the Holocaust. There was no organized curriculum throughout the school system, in both private schools and public schools, so we decided to give them some basic rounding on facts that seemed to not have been well understood on many levels. So we decided to address these questions by providing the right information in the light of so much wrong information. So it was designed to give teachers a tool to help the DOE if someone just asked for some basic information about historical antisemitism.

And why is such a document so necessary now, in today’s day and age?

Well, I think in general, the soul, the whole concept of civics as an educational platform is not very well done. And I think there's also been very clear impacts from both new media, social media, as well as traditional media that have helped distort and not learn history in accurate form. I don't know if that's by plan, or by just circumstance, but we think that the lack of understanding of history is very major right now. And with the advancement of all these new forms of communication, with people reading and learning all sorts of stuff, we felt that we had to expand the audience so that we could get middle schoolers to understand more about history and critical thinking. So we broadened our demographic target and we also added a lot of more historical context – from before, during and since the Holocaust, and not just the Holocaust itself, that there was a contextual framework around how people developed the philosophies that led to this terrible occurrence during World War II.

What led to this initiative to invite all of the city’s 8th graders to the museum? 

We first started two years ago with an idea of an exhibition for 9 to 12 year olds, when we  traditionally always targeted high school students. And when we opened up this exhibit, we had not planned for it, obviously, but the timing was that it opened shortly after the events of October 7. Subsequently, it just was very well received by both teachers and children aged 9 through 12. We really worked hard to make an exhibit that could talk to the history for children, for kids that age, in a way that was not fear inducing, but informational. When October 7 and the following events happened, we also got the impetus to expand it to as many eighth grade students as possible. We've always had the goal of getting as many students in the New York City school system from all faiths, denominations and multicultural backgrounds. Our core exhibition on the Holocaust, “What hate can do” which we have a significant number of 8th and 10th graders go through, we have now added the “Courage to act”, which we think is relevant to 8th graders as well as others. And by September, we’ll be opening up a third exhibition on hate speech, called “Speaking up.” So we believe that between the three exhibitions, we will have sufficient areas of content that will accommodate a growing number of students. Our biggest worry was that [these exhibits] could be fear inducing. But if anything, [students] don't come out fearful, they come out informed, but also they’re more angry at the way people were being treated. And we think anger is better, because it shows that they have a sense of what's right and wrong, and that they see that they can’t just be bystanders but that they should be concerned with mutual aid and action. 

In teaching the history of the Holocaust, how do these exhibits help students develop critical thinking skills and confront prejudices?

For one thing, teaching the history of the Holocaust needs to start earlier than 1933. What we need to teach is the rise of antisemitism throughout history, but also particularly the 20th century framework in the context of the Holocaust. How it built on existing historical prejudices, and how information was manipulated, and disinformation pushed forth. I think the use of propaganda and media in the 20s and 30s is a very important lesson, particularly for young people to understand that just because something is on tiktok, that doesn't mean it's true. They should be given as much good information as possible, because they get so much bad information. One of our key techniques is to tell the stories of the Holocaust through individual characters, because I think young people identify more when they can identify with somebody who's sort of contemporary. Any of the Holocaust survivors alive today who speak to young people were teenagers during the Holocaust. And so oftentimes, it's very interesting for teenagers to be asked how they would have reacted or thought in circumstances like that. But I think having them understand the Holocaust, [through] vehicles like artifacts and objects, stories of people, individuals with names – it sort of humanizes what can be a very intimidating subject. 

How do these educational initiatives serve the overall mission of the museum?

When we started, we were predominantly an institute of remembrance and had education. We're now at a point in time where the Holocaust survivor community and their descendants are not necessarily able to speak for themselves as much. And we're looking at a future world in which we probably will not have too many, if any survivors left. And then we think that Holocaust denial and disinformation and misinformation will be even more active and aggressive. So what we've got to do is continue to pursue our educational goals and realize that we will not eliminate antisemitism. But that doesn't mean we're failing. We just have to try to succeed. But we're more committed than ever to teach the lessons of history to make our current and future generations better, more thoughtful citizens of an interconnected world. 

Among the older generation of Holocaust survivors, do you feel like there’s still a sense of survivor's guilt?

Without a question. Guilt. Why was I surviving? “Why did I survive” is present in many ways. And that’s still there. However, I would say that the arc of what survivors went through was really framed by two chronological frameworks. The first is that survivors, after they survived their singular mission, was to rebuild and renew. Rebuild their lives, renew their families, and be resilient and help rebuild the Jewish people in their own lives. Once they were able to help rebuild, then they started remembering and were willing to talk about it. Rebuilding meant that they felt a responsibility for having survived and to rebuild to the future, and I think that that sense of, I won't say guilt, but wonder as to how they survived when everything else was lost, is still there. And it will always be there. And I think it has an impact as well on second and third generations that there is shared impact, not the same impact, but shared intergenerational impacts of that experience.

What motivates you to continue doing this work?

I have a six year-old granddaughter. I hope to see her grow up and live a healthy, full vibrant life and be proud of what she does. I would hope that her granddaughter will be able to understand not only who she is but who she came from and, in turn, teach others to value all human lives and give respect to all human beings. So what keeps me motivated is to see these kids who come in. I don't think anyone is born to hate. I think you got to be taught, and so when I see a whole bunch of kids in the museum, when I see Orthodox Jewish kids next to inner city kids talking together, working together, existing together, it makes me feel very good.