The Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center, located at 10100 Jamison Ave. in the Klein JCC, is inviting the public to support its so-called “Legacy Project.”
The museum wants to film Holocaust survivors, liberators and resistors in the Philadelphia area to preserve their stories so they are not forgotten.
The recorded stories will be made available to educators, historians and family members.
Donations can be made by going to kickstarter.com and searching for “Creating Legacy Videos for Holocaust Survivors Now!”
As a launch to the campaign, the museum hosted Witnesses to History, a program on the afternoon of Jan. 19 that featured Holocaust survivor Ernie Gross and one of his liberators, Don Greenbaum.
Gross was born in 1929 in Romania. In April 1944, the Hungarian occupiers deported him and his family — his parents, five brothers and two sisters — to a ghetto for a few weeks before they were deported to Auschwitz. After several months, the Nazis forced Gross and thousands of other inmates on a death march toward Dachau and Kaufering in Germany. On April 29, 1945, the U.S. Army liberated Dachau, where Gross was being held. He came to the United States in 1947.
Greenbaum earned the Purple Heart after being wounded in Aachen, Germany, in November 1944. After being released from the hospital, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He was part of the team that liberated Gross and about 32,000 other prisoners at Dachau.
Among those in attendance at the program were state Sen. Anthony Williams and state Reps. Brendan Boyle and Ed Neilson.
Williams and Boyle spoke about their bills that would require the teaching of the Holocaust and genocide in Pennsylvania middle and high schools. New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Florida and California have similar laws.
Some in the Senate want to eliminate the mandate, and the local lawmakers are urging people to contact legislators across the state to lobby for the bill as it is written.
“I don’t think it’s a given that this passes,” said Williams, whose bill is in the Senate Education Committee.
This school year, the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center will make presentations in front of about 280 schools and organizations.
For more information, call 215–464–4701 or visit www.holocaustawarenessmuseum.org ••
