Holocaust museum focuses on faith and survival

NEW YORK — Faith and survival, not the machinery of death, are the central themes at an atypical Holocaust museum in Brooklyn.

The three-year-old Amud Aish Memorial Museum, located far from the tourist crowds at near the very edge of the borough, focuses on the experiences of Orthodox Jews during and after the Holocaust.

Its collection includes letters, diaries, photos and religious items, like a frayed prayer shawl worn secretly by a prisoner at Auschwitz.

Many were donated by Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews who had stashed the artifacts in basements and attics would not have given them to another museum, Amud Aish staffers said.

“Part of that is because their culture is different and they don’t patronize museums for the most part,” said Shoshana Greenwald, director of collections. “But here they felt this was a museum that would tell their story and understand where they are coming from.”

The collection includes the Warsaw Ghetto diary of Hillel Seidman, who wrote about Jews’ daily struggle to survive and to practice their religion in the face of horrific persecution.

“It’s a well-known diary,” said Dovid Reidel, the museum’s director of research. “This is the original.”

The family of Seidman, who survived the Holocaust and died in 1995, gave the diary to Amud Aish because they “felt other museums will just focus on his general story,” Reidel said. “They felt he wouldn’t be appreciated from his religious dimension as well.”

Currently housed in a temporary space downstairs from a home health care company, far from city subway lines, the Amud Aish Memorial Museum has long planned on moving to a more prominent location. When it opened in the remote Mill Basin neighborhood, there were plans to build an $11 million permanent museum in the borough’s Borough Park section, home to a huge and growing population of Orthodox Jews. Sholom Friedmann, the museum’s director and CEO, said there’s now no fixed date for a move.

An exhibit that officially opens at the museum later this month tells the little-known story of thousands of Jews who found refuge in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, China.

A group of teenage girls from a private Jewish school clustered around the vitrines during a recent visit and learned about the Walkin family, who fled Lithuania on the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1941, landing first in Kobe, Japan and then in Shanghai. Program coordinator Miryam Gordon pointed out sabbath candlesticks adorned with Chinese characters.

“Daily life continued,” she said. “Children were born. People got married.”