3 Perspectives on the Holocaust : Jewish history: With two museums and a monument set to open in L.A. within a year, critics worry about duplication.

By TERRY PRISTIN

June 12, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

A 165,000-square-foot domed granite-and-glass structure has risen on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles next to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Less than three miles away, workers soon will be installing exhibits in a converted bank office alongside the Jewish Federation Council headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard.

And just 1.8 miles to the northeast of that building, six 24-foot-high columns--each to be topped by a gas-fueled flame--are awaiting completion in the midst of a monument in a Fairfax district park.

What these projects have in common is that all three are memorials to the Holocaust--a $50-million Museum of Tolerance, a far more modest $1-million Martyrs Memorial and Museum of the Holocaust, and a $2.5-million Los Angeles Holocaust Monument in Pan Pacific Park. All are scheduled to open within a year.

The projects have sparked debate within the Los Angeles Jewish community as some rabbis and others wonder if it would not be more appropriate to have one memorial instead of three, and whether some of the money could be better spent on pressing social needs, including Jewish education and the resettlement of Soviet immigrants.

“Does L.A. need three memorials?” asked a recent article in the Jewish Journal, a local weekly newspaper.

In addition to financial considerations, the argument has a philosophical dimension. Across the country, 75 Holocaust memorials or centers have opened or are in the works, including multimillion-dollar projects in Washington and New York, according to the Assn. of Holocaust Organizations. Some scholars have questioned whether there is an overemphasis on the horror of the death camps while the more positive aspects of Jewish identity and tradition are being neglected.

“Memory is vital,” said Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller of UCLA’s Hillel Council, noting that he is not opposed to the concept of a Holocaust memorial. “It’s at that point where memory turns into obsession that I feel we’re in danger.”

In Los Angeles, Jewish values, beliefs and contributions will not be neglected. They will be the focus of yet another ambitious project--the $55-million Skirball Cultural Center, a complex of buildings designed by Israeli architect Moshe Safdie. The center is being built by Hebrew Union College, a training institute for Reform rabbis, on a hillside just below Mulholland Drive, west of the San Diego Freeway.

While many people believe that the cultural center--the largest facility of its kind in North America--will provide needed balance to the Holocaust museums, some critics have expressed uneasiness about its cost.

Most of the attention has focused on the multiplicity of Holocaust projects. That there are three reflects the rivalries and competing interests in Los Angeles’ 600,000-member Jewish community, second-largest in the country after New York.

The impetus for both the Martyrs Museum, scheduled to open in July, and the Pan Pacific Park monument, expected to open in September, came from Holocaust survivors, who began planning these projects about 20 years ago.

For nearly two decades after World War II, survivors in Los Angeles and elsewhere were reluctant to call attention to their experiences. Many wanted to put the past behind them. As some began forming plans for memorials, they found themselves isolated. Jewish organizations were hesitant to rally behind the survivors’ cause.

“There was psychological shame in encountering a period of time in which Jews were so helpless,” said Michael Nutkiewicz, director of the Martyrs Museum.

Israel’s sudden victory in the Six-Day War changed all that, as journalist Judith Miller writes in her recent book, “One by One by One.” As terror turned to pride, American Jews no longer felt vulnerable. “After the ’67 war, the Jews were finally safe,” Miller quotes Nutkiewicz as saying. “It became ‘safe’ to talk about the Holocaust.”

Nevertheless, it was more than a decade before a smaller version of the Martyrs Museum opened on the 12th floor of the Jewish Community Building, the federation’s headquarters.

When 6,000 square feet of more accessible space became available four years ago, backers of the museum jumped at the chance to double its size and make it more visible.

In 1977, meanwhile, the enterprising Rabbi Marvin Hier moved to Los Angeles from Vancouver and, with funding from the Belzberg family of Canada, opened his Simon Wiesenthal Center. An international Jewish defense agency that claims 380,000 members, it is proud of its independence from established Jewish organizations, including the federation.

The federation, an umbrella organization for Jewish groups, is dominated by Reform and Conservative Jews. Hier was not only an outsider but an Orthodox one at that--”an upstart who happens to wear a yarmulke,” as he put it. It is one sign of the tension between the organizations that in more than 12 years, the Wiesenthal Center and the Martyrs Museum have co-sponsored only one program.

Had he been aware of the federation’s museum plans when he decided to build his project, Hier said, “we wouldn’t have started.”

In contrast to the other two Los Angeles Holocaust memorials, the Museum of Tolerance is not survivor-driven. Although he expects survivors to play a significant role in educational programs once his museum is open, Hier has not encouraged them to become involved in planning and fund raising. “That is not their strength,” he said.

Predicting that the three projects will complement one another, Nutkiewicz said, “Every Holocaust museum is going to have a different point of view.”

Hier acknowledges that critics are raising “a legitimate question” about the multiple memorials. “The public will decide the viability of the institutions involved,” he said.

To be sure, there are major differences among the three.

With flames visible from Beverly Boulevard in the heart of the Fairfax district, the 75-by-100-foot granite structure in Pan Pacific Park will be a very public memorial. Although the story of the Holocaust will be briefly told on panels making up the sides of the six tall columns--each representing 1 million Jews who perished--much of its message will be transmitted through symbolism, according to Joseph Young, the monument’s designer.

Young, who also designed the Triforium in the Los Angeles Civic Center, pointed to black-and-white marble steps, meant to evoke the railroad tracks leading to the death camps, and the semicircular bench, representing the Jewish ritual of mourning.

People whose loved ones were killed by the Nazis have no grave sites to visit, said Lidia Budgor, president of a survivors organization, explaining why she has worked to have the memorial built. “I want to touch that monument and feel I am with my parents,” she said.

Otto Schirn, co-chairman of the Pan Pacific memorial, said the monument and the Martyrs Museum will “serve different purposes.” The monument will make a statement to the entire Los Angeles populace, he said, while the museum will reach a narrower audience interested in learning about the tragic events in more detail.

Given its small size and operating budget--$170,000 a year--the Martyrs Museum has cast itself as a David of sorts, pitting wits and restraint against the flashier Wiesenthal Center’s Goliath. On Wilshire Boulevard, most of the exhibits will stem from primary source material--newspaper articles, photographs, diaries and the like. “It’s not meant to be high-tech,” said Nutkiewicz. “It’s meant to have a very documentary feel to it. . . . This is a museum that takes ideas very seriously.”

Officials of the Martyrs Museum and the Museum of Tolerance say their primary target audience will be the multiethnic junior and senior high school student population, which Hier believes can best be reached through the latest in technology. “If you want to interest them, you’d better use the vehicle they’re using,” he said.

So, for example, when a visitor enters the Holocaust section of the museum, a machine will issue him a card. On the card will be the name and photograph of a child of that period. Details of the child’s life will emerge as the card is inserted into other machines.

Only when he reaches the last machine will the visitor learn whether the child perished or survived.

As its English name suggests, the Museum of Tolerance also will deal with prejudice in general, including the treatment of blacks in the United States. Some skeptics have suggested that the Wiesenthal Center agreed to a broader scope in order to obtain $5 million in state funding--a charge Hier considers a “bum rap.” (The Hebrew name for the museum is Beit Hashoah--House of the Holocaust.)

Despite the vast differences among the three Holocaust memorials, there will be a striking degree of overlap. Like the Pan Pacific monument, the museums will set aside space for mourners. In the Martyrs Museum a hexagonal sculpture will be surrounded by benches; names of communities destroyed by the Nazis will be listed on a wall.

At the rear of the Museum of Tolerance will be a memorial garden with the names of concentration camps etched into a wall. A 20-foot-high stylized menorah, or ceremonial candleholder, will carry a gas-lit flame.

All three projects will rely on symbolism as well as information. “What the (Martyrs) Museum will do in a subtle way is try to suggest that as the years went on, the choices for Jews became narrower and narrower,” Nutkiewicz said. “It will do that simply by changes in color schemes, in amount of space, in mood.”

A change in mood also will occur at the Museum of Tolerance, as visitors exit the open area dealing with prejudice. Entering the Holocaust section through a tunnel, they will view a series of exhibits in sequence. The idea is to give them the sensation of an unfolding crime, Hier said.

Young said he wants visitors to the Pan Pacific monument to feel “crowded--like there’s no way out” when they stand amid the six large columns.

Both museums will house recordings of oral testimonies. Both will make abundant use of family photographs brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau and left behind.

How they will display the photos, discovered in 1986 by photographer Ann Weiss during a visit to the death camp, seems to say a great deal about the style of the two museums. At the Museum of Tolerance, photographs of various sizes will be embedded into a 50-foot sculpture that will stand in the building’s rotunda. A laser beam may be used to give “the feeling of thousands of candles,” Hier said.

At the Martyrs Museum, visitors climbing to the second floor will see a selection of snapshot-size photographs displayed on the wall by the stairs. “We want it to feel like a European household,” Nutkiewicz said.

Some Jewish leaders think that the duplication of efforts is unfortunate. “It seems a bit of overkill--one that was likely motivated more by considerations of turf than substance,” said Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

Another critic, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, professor of religion at Dartmouth College, said the preoccupation with the Holocaust is misguided but understandable, “given that there was so much evaporation of Jewish consciousness in the next generation. The victimization of the Holocaust was rapidly and immediately accessible as a reminder of Jewish identity.”

All four building projects, including the Skirball Cultural Center, were planned during the flusher 1980s. Now, money is tight everywhere, and the Jewish community is no exception. “There are many community needs that we don’t have the resources to meet now,” said Marcia Antopol, project development director for the Jewish Community Foundation.

More money is needed for services to the elderly, disabled and mentally ill and for education, federation officials said.

In April, the federation-sponsored Commission on the Jewish Future of Los Angeles issued a $30-million wish list for Jewish education, calling for more competitive teaching salaries, lower tuition and more Jewish-run day-care centers.

Another pressing concern is Operation Exodus, the program to help Soviet Jews emigrate to Israel.

Loren Basch, campaign director for the United Jewish Fund and Operation Exodus, said contributors to capital building programs do not overlook other causes; instead “they don’t give us increases.”

Rabbi Alfred Wolf, director of the Skirball Institute, a research organization named for the same family as the cultural center, said he would prefer to see education given a higher priority than museum building.

“I sometimes feel our entire current civilization--and this is not limited to the Jewish community--is suffering from an edifice complex,” Wolf said.

Sponsors of the two largest edifices have had to fend off more specific complaints.

Hier’s critics have accused him of neglecting the boys’ school that he established alongside the center. So cramped are the quarters at Yeshiva of Los Angeles that some classes are held in trailers.

According to Hier and others, people who give to museums will not necessarily contribute to a school. “Believe me, we look for and don’t turn down any donors who want to support Yeshiva education,” Hier said. “They’re not easy to find.”

A star-studded benefit for the Museum of Tolerance is scheduled for Sunday at the Century Plaza hotel, with President Bush presenting the Wiesenthal Center’s National Leadership Award to actor-athlete Arnold Schwarzenegger.

At Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, fund raising for the Skirball center coincides with demoralizing belt-tightening at the institution’s four campuses in Los Angeles, Cincinnati, New York and Jerusalem. Faculty members have not received cost-of-living increases in several years, and recently have begun paying for part of their medical insurance.

“You should build a cultural center only once you have provided what is necessary to carry on the main task, which is the training of rabbis,” said Michael A. Meyer, chairman of the faculty senate at the college’s Cincinnati campus.

Rabbi Uri Herscher, executive vice president of Hebrew Union College and dean of the Los Angeles faculty, maintains that the project has strengthened fund raising by acquainting new donors with the college. Since the cultural center was launched, the campus “has received more grants than it ever has before from the Los Angeles community,” he said.

Rather than diverting funds from education purposes, the Skirball center will be “a contribution to Jewish education,” said Nancy Berman, director of the museum that will be at the heart of the cultural center. “I think it will make it more effective and more alive.”

She said the museum, by focusing on all of Jewish history, with a particular emphasis on the American experience, will provide a context within which the Holocaust museums can be better understood.

“I think we will complement each other,” she said.

Multiple Museums

A building boom is under way in the Jewish community, with three Holocaust memorials slated to open within a year , and a cultural center following soon after. Some critics within the community have asked if these memotials are needed and whether some of the money could have been better spent on social causes. Here are the four projects:

* Hebrew Union College Skirball Cultural Center, Sepulveda Pass, just south of Mulholland Drive.

Focus: Will explore the American Jewish experience against the backdrop of a 4,000-year-old religious, historical and cultural legacy.

Size: Complex of buildings totaling 130,000 square feet and situated on 15 hillside acres.

Cost: $55 million

Expected Opening: End of 1992.

* Los Angeles Holocaust Monument, Pan-Pacific Park

Focus: Columns will symbolize the 6 million who perished in the Holocaust and inscriptions will give a brief account of the history of the period.

Size: 75 feet by 100 feet, with 24-foot-high columns.

Cost: $2.5 million

Expected Opening: September

* Beit Hashoah/Museum of Tolerance, 9786 West Pico Blvd.

Focus: Will examine the dynamics of racism and prejudice and tell the story of the Holocaust through technologically advanced exhibits.