Exhibits
The first exhibit recreates the atmosphere of the Dachau concentration camp. Visitors can either walk through with a tour book or wear a head set and be guided by the voice of Holocaust survivor, Jay Ipson. Ipson was six years old when his family was taken to Kovno Ghetto, and he is now the Executive Director of the museum.
The next exhibit is set in the city of Frankfurt, Germany, and features a radio announcement of "Kristallnacht". Subsequently visitors come to a ghetto exhibit that they can "escape" from by crawling through a tunnel. This escape route recreates the actual experience of the Ipson family.
Other exhibits include a cattle car, used for transporting Jews, a shower/gas chamber, a crematory, and an exhibition of the ship Exodus 1947, the ship that helped launch the nation of Israel. Finally, there is a synagogue, which is a replica of the famous choral synagogue in Lithuania.
In front of the museum is a freight car, which also serves as room of remembrance. This car was endowed to the museum within in project of a German school by a friend of Alex Lebenstein.
In 2007 the Virginia Holocaust Museums celebrated the 10th anniversary. On Yom HaShoah in April 2008 Governor Tim Kaine opened the only originally rebuilt Nuremberg Courtroom ("Palace of Justice") in the United States as new part of the Virginia Holocaust Museum. On November 9, 2009 the documentation "Kristallnacht and Beyond" was showen to the public.
The museum features tours, programs, lectures, films and other events, and many of the emphasized stories are about the experiences of Holocaust survivors that reside or had resided in Richmond. The museum is one of many organizations worldwide where young Austrians can serve their Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service (Gedenkdienst).
Read more about this topic: Virginia Holocaust Museum
Famous quotes containing the word exhibits:
“After all the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)