It
is a fitting tribute to the many Jews who perished in the
Holocaust that they are remembered through the many memorials that
have been erected over the past decades throughout the world, that their names often
have been etched in stone in order to commemorate in perpetuity their
lives and the existence of the towns they once called home.
Memorials have been erected
in many different types of locations. Jewish
cemeteries throughout the world hold many of these
memorials, though a memorial may take the form
of a plaque that has been affixed to the wall of a synagogue
or former ghetto, or on a marker at the site of a mass grave or "killing
field."
Each memorial is dedicated to
either a town that lost its Jewish population to the Nazi
regime and its collaborators, or to the many Jews themselves
who once inhabited these towns and were brutally killed. These
were our landslayt, our ancestors who were cruelly
denied a full life and then ultimately a proper Jewish
burial. For them, there are few extant markers or gravestones
in their native land that say "I lived." By erecting
memorials, we hope to remind those who might visit them today
and in the years ahead of the millions who lost their lives
before their time. We say to our ancestors that we know you
lived, and we honor you. We rescue them from the recesses of
our collective consciousness in the hopes that we can ensure
that such horrors will never be forgotten. By erecting such
memorials, we recognize those who perished in some tangible
and permanent way, while at the same time creating an
awareness, as well as an opportunity to educate those who have, to
this point, an inadequate knowledge of what had occurred many
decades ago.
The Museum has one of the
finest, if not the finest, online collection of Holocaust
memorial photographs from throughout the world. This
exhibition could not have come to fruition without the
generous contributions of photographs from supporters of this
Museum. For this generosity and good will, we are grateful. |