Memorializing the Holocaust in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

The experience with Oswiecim memorialization was fresh in my mind when I was called by the Jewish Community Center of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1992 to help with something of a social problem. In light of publicity given to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, a group of survivors that had lived for many years in Harrisburg pressed for a local memorial. Specifically, three survivors, all who had experience in public life, hatched the project to build a conspicuous memorial and museum to the Holocaust by the Jewish Community Center. The two oldest of the group had vivid memories of Auschwitz and were frequently called to talk to area students. The youngest was involved politically in the city. I was called because I seemed reasonable to the Community Center board; while board members were careful to honor the survivors, they generally found them unreasonably grand in their request. New resources for the community were scarce and the board had plans underway to renovate the Center. The rabbis in the city appeared cool to the project and their education initiatives were oriented toward Israel.

I soon realized the difficult situation I had agreed to. Board members appealed to my professional sense by making appointments and addressing me as Dr. Bronner, while survivors called me on the phone and hailed me as "Shimele," dimunitive, intimate form of my name in Yiddish, ordinarily used in discourse between a parent and child. I organized a committee with representation from the survivors and other segments of the Jewish community. The committee generated discussion of the meaning--its sense of being-- that the memorial held. For the survivors, the project legitimized their experience in the community. Yet it became clear that the group was not unified. One prominent survivor wanted to memorialize the Holocaust with educational activities, but she was overruled with the opinion that the memory of the event required a physical thing to spark remembrance. An orthodox rabbi hoped for an object of prayer, while younger members of the committee insisted on a public structure that spoke to the human lessons of the Holocaust beyond the impact on Jews. Representatives of the Yeshivah hoped for a museum or educational program aimed at youth. The survivors steered the committee toward a focus on the memorial idea to perpetuate their presence in Harrisburg as much as to educate about the Holocaust. The Center announced a competition for designs with a budget limit of $100,000.

The choice came down to a stark representation of concentration camp pillars and a more abstract design of silver shafts surrounded by barbed wire. The group was divided. The survivors and rabbi preferred the harshness of the pillars while younger members of the committee liked the abstraction of the Holocaust in the second design. The survivors wanted a place to mourn death and a lost world, while others hoped for a sign of life and progress. As chair of the group, I suggested alterations of the second design to include historical information and the remembrance theme on the black stones surrounding the pillar. To compensate for this extra material, cascading water and eternal light dropped out to bring the project under budget. The idea narrowly passed and we had a design with multiple meanings. The artist's explanation of the sculpture's meaning failed to make an impression. In his words, "The element of 'Hope' is conveyed in the manner in which the stainless steel core reaches above the strangle hold of the Nazi 'snake.' It continues to grow and shows the redemptive hopes and the rebirth of the Jewish people through the establishment of the State of Israel, and the maintenance of 'Jewish Identity' and Jewish survival in the diaspora." To the contrary, the design seemed widely acceptable because of its lack of direct reference to Israel or Diaspora.

When the committee made inquiries to the city about a location for the monument, the response was to move the structure closer to downtown along the Susquehanna River where other memorials to fire fighters and war veterans stood. The mayor offered his support to the project as part of enhancing the attractiveness of the river view. He publicly opined, "The need for this memorial could not have been fulfilled were it placed at the Jewish Community Center or some other more private place. This is a memorial that must belong to all, should be seen by all, should be understood by all. From this park, we can see upon a river, a river that has been a constant thread, a common link, from generation to generation, from one era to the next." His statement raised additional discussion within the Jewish community about the public component of the project.

The Board became more enthusiastic about a project that would make the community more visible within the city. The survivors weren't so sure, and they had something to point to when hearings at City Hall raised objections that spilled over into the letters to the editor of the city daily. Gay rights advocates protested that the memorial left out persecution of homosexuals, and some African-American spokespersons used the occasion to complain of the lack of historic markers honoring African Americans in the city. In response, designers of the memorial shifted the justification for the memorial to honoring survivors of the Holocaust who had settled in the city, much as the nearby war memorials honored soldiers from Harrisburg. The wording also changed to recognize that Jews were the "primary" victims and the intent of the memorial was to warn against "racism and prejudice" wherever it is found. At that point, Kurt Moses, the leader of the survivors group called for a reconsideration of Jewish Community Center support for the memorial, but the president of the Community Center continued to press for the memorial as a civic project. The survivors complained to me that they had lost control not just of the location of the memorial, but the representation of their experience.

A serious threat to construction of the memorial occurred when environmentalists questioned whether more memorials belonged on the riverside. They opposed the project in Council, complaining that the river, a natural wonder, was becoming obstructed by too many memorials. The natural space in their view had become industrialized by memorials rather than factories. The City Council agreed to halt permits for memorials after the Holocaust structure was completed. Publicly relieved that the city supported the project, representatives of the memorial project privately fretted about undertones of anti-Semitism in opposition to the project.

A site was eventually prepared north of existing memorials, a location that placed it closest to city synagogues and away from the city center. The rabbis became more involved as plans were made for the groundbreaking. "A Song for Ascents," Psalm 121, became the theme for the event and the closing was a cantor's rendition of "God Bless America." The keynote speech was given by the Mayor. While survivors were given seats of honor toward the front, they were not accorded time at the podium. After the event, Kurt Moses complained to the Holocaust Education Committee about the management of the program, especially when press releases issued for the event did not recognize the survivors' involvement in the original concept of the memorial. As the structure came closer to completion, survivors hoped to give the site a sense of the sacred and offer themselves a moment to be heard. The Holocaust Education Committee arranged for a more elaborate ceremony to consecrate the structure. Two rabbis were given time to give remarks, followed by a statement from Kurt Moses. The survivors then stepped en masse to the sculpture to unveil it much as one would uncover a gravestone in Jewish tradition. The ceremony closed with a cantor's rendition of "El Molay Rahamim" (God Full of Mercy).

The site has since only been used for an annual ceremony sponsored by the Jewish community on Yom Hashoah, a Jewish day of remembrance for the Holocaust in April. It attracts little notice in the press and has not become a center for reflection its designers had hoped for. It nonetheless turns a few head from passersby in any day, more so from my observation than nearby statues for firefighters and soldiers. Park officials often have to chase skateboarders from the site, and other passersby use its seats to view the river. Its significance has been greatest to the survivors who gained recognition for their participation in their adopted community. Many in the survivors group still felt dissatisfaction with the memorial standing away from the Jewish community, and partly in response, Kurt Moses helped organize an annual Kristalnacht commemoration by the survivor group in November featuring the lighting of candles at the Jewish Community Center.

Memorials to the Holocaust have become especially symbolic of resolving the meaning of survival from guilt to triumph, from the unfathomable to the comprehensible. It is part of the reason that many Holocaust memorials offer more resistance to our senses than other monuments in the landscape of remembrance. It is also a reason why designing the meanings to be imparted presents more of a challenge for viewers and creators; there seem to be few givens beyond some recurrent motifs of barbed wire and Jerusalem stone.

Ritualizing and Traditionalizing Memorials

The appeal to sacred tradition in Oswiecim's graveyard memorial debatably created a collective, if private, understanding of its meaning, although its distance created a problem of alienation from the action of mourning centered on a site. The memorial in Harrisburg lacked this communal aspect, but it provided a backdrop for occasional performance of identity in a multiethnic city. Indeed, Harrisburg's memorial needed signs to inform what it was about; it needed confirmation of its Holocaust reference. Oswiecim's did not; it relied on memory of response to a long series of past tragedies. Harrisburg's reinforced the singularity of an event in organizing the future. In fact, it took on more organizational ways of creating the object, whereas Oswiecim's was more communal, and in many cases personalized. The tales of these two cities, and their memorials, are sketches of the varieties of Holocaust landscapes that have emerged with increasing frequency during the 1990s.

Why so many Holocaust memorials during the 1990s? The period is the great decade of memorials for the events of World War II. With the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, a milestone has been passed that prompted many institutions to reflect on history. In the wake of Vietnam, and the rise of human rights rhetoric, a new sensitivity within America is evident in memorialization that recognizes victims. The thinning of Holocaust survivor ranks added an emotional element to the proceedings. The memorials were their preview of their own funerals and markers that their struggle to overcome adversity and come to the United State mattered. Many of the memorials reflect less on the past than the announcement of triumph over history. The future-directed spires and upward reaching hands are among the most common symbols of public vindication, but I suspect that efforts will increasingly turn from markers to museums.

The realization of multiple, contested meanings of the monuments for the survivors, American-born Jews, environmentalists, homosexuals, and politicians has caused some shift from the emphasis of memorialization to museums and education programs that leave less of the lessons open to interpretation. One strongly worded editorial in the New Jersey Standard in 1998 called memorials and museums the "latest Jewish Battlegrounds." It asked whether the "craze" toward memorialization "isn't . . . a bit of idol worship with big-giver egomania thrown in for good measure?" (Tobin 1998, 49) It argued, "Rather than looking to monuments or statues to commemorate the Holocaust or to celebrate our community history, let us instead invest in our children and their education." If we must choose--as I fear we must--between schools and museums, then let the choice be for Jewish education." (Tobin 1998, 49)

The monument-building will continue while a need is felt to tangibly provide an inspiring edifice to bridge the distance between the socially troubled present and hidden atrocious past, to lay to rest through ritual and tradition the memory of many ancestors not given burial, and to belatedly announce the arrival and triumph of survivors. Moving from private to public purpose, traditionalizing of memorials has widened the meaning of Holocaust markers for a late-twentieth-century social vision. During the 1990s, the Holocaust memorials have been instrumental in bringing out before the public the wider discourse of human rights and ethnic pluralism set against the integrity of nation-states. Harrisburg's memorial had this meaning ascribed to it, but it arguably was not successful in having this message conveyed, maybe because the public traditions surrounding it were not convincing. The invention of Oswiecim's memorial invoked more continuity with the historical precedent of Jewish tradition, but the loss of community made it inaccessible as a ritual location.

As types of parables, objects made and used are not meant to be understood by all. The morals of the objects may come from connection to other objects and persons, and its perceived location in tradition. The marker is artificial, fictional and true like the parable, and equally designed to persuade and hold emotional as well as practical meaning. It is formed from customary modes of life we may analyze and compare as praxis. It has a presence that causes response and resistance. It announces its meaning in the ways that people act toward it and the manner in which it is performed, traditionalized, and ritualized. The degree of influence people bring to object or that objects hold over people in these scenes may be less the issue than the process of transformation that turns ideas into icons.

REFERENCES

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Tobin, Jonathan S. 1998. "Getting Lost in History: Museums are the Latest Jewish Battlegrounds." New Jersey Standard (March 13): 5, 49.

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_______. ed. 1994. The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History. New York: Jewish Museum.

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