Ours to Fight For: American Jews in the Second World War

Winner of the grand prize in the 2004 Excellence in Exhibitions competition of the American Association of Museums, Ours to Fight For invites visitors to explore and relive the experiences of Jewish men and women who joined the American war effort on and off the battlefield. The story is told almost exclusively in the first person, using quotations from the more than 400 interviews conducted by the Museum. It powerfully illustrates what it was like to serve as an American and a Jew in this greatest of human conflicts.

The voices of the soldiers and sailors, airmen and marines, WACs and WAVEs appear in seven videos, two audio programs, and dozens of written “labels” that narrate the exhibition and animate the artifacts, documents, military paraphernalia, and images.

Among the more than 200 artifacts is a Jewish prayerbook of Staff Sgt. Jacob Eines who was hit by shrapnel but not fatally wounded because of the prayerbook in his breast pocket; the accordion Hermann Goering gave to the Jewish GI who interrogated him after his surrender; and a Torah scroll used by Chaplain Rabbi David Max Eichhorn at the first Jewish service conducted at Dachau after the camp were liberated (together with the film taken at that service).

Computer stations at the end of the exhibit allow visitors to explore the experiences of other groups who served in the military during World War II, including African Americans, Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Soviet Jews.

The exhibition concludes with a “wall of honor,” on which photos of veterans from your city can be shown.

Borrowing venues are encouraged to add material to the exhibition by soliciting artifacts and photographs from veterans and their families in the local community.

Visit the companion website for Ours to Fight For

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Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust

During the Holocaust, Jews throughout Europe, through individual and collective acts of resistance, sought to undermind the Nazi goal of the annihilation of the Jewish people. Jews engaged in a range of resistance activities with the aim of preserving Jewish life and dignity despite unimaginable difficulties. Their efforts powerfully refute the popular perception that Jews were passive victims. Whether praying clandestinely, documenting the experiences of Jews in the ghettos, or taking up arms to fight, these responses took many forms, but each and every one was a courageous act of resistance.

Honored in the 2008 Excellence in Exhibitions competition of the American Association of Museums, Daring to Resist uses a multimedia approach to help visitors understand the dilemmas that Jews faced under impossible circumstances. Films intersperse archival footage and photographs with powerfully narrated mamoirs and present day interviews with survivors.

Artifact highlights include the shirt of Tuvia Bielski, partisan commander of the Bielski Family Camp; smuggling bag of Kalman Farber, which he filled with food obtained during forced labor and smuggled into the Vilna Ghetto by stuffing it down a pants leg; and a Passover haggadah handwritten by Dina Krauss from memory in the Unterlüss labor camp and used at the secret Passover seder she held for the women in her camp barrack.

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Sosúa: A Refuge for Jews in the Dominican Republic

Sosúa: Un Refugio de Judíos en la República Dominicana

In the late 1930s few countries were willing to accept Jewish refugees. One nation – the Dominican Republic – opened its doors to the Jews. Working with the Dominican government, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee provided passage and support to establish a small agricultural settlement at Sosúa, an abandoned banana plantation on the northeastern shore of the Dominican Republic. The Jewish settlers, with the help of their Dominican neighbors, began to cultivate the land and built a thriving town that still exists today.

Created in cooperation with the Sosúa Jewish Museum, this bilingual exhibition in English and Spanish explains how the settlers were recruited, how they came to Sosúa, what awaited them there, how the settlement grew, and the ultimate fate that awaited this small Jewish community.

Sosúa settlers provide the main voice of the exhibition. They are heard in three exhibition films and their words appear as texts throughout. David Kahane remembered that, “there were two barracks and a few shacks, no electric light, and the mosquitoes were humming,” and Viennese urbanite Edith Gersten said of her new home, “So we stared at the cows. What happens next? Does one get a hold of the tail and pump until somehow milk comes out?”

These and many other excerpts animate the more than 55 artifacts and 30 images in the exhibition. Most of the artifacts have never before been seen outside the Dominican Republic. Highlights include the community’s original telephone switchboard, a movie projector from the town’s movie theater, and items from the farms. 

Visit the companion website for Sosúa: A Refuge for Jews in the Dominican Republic.

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Scream the Truth at the World - Emanuel Ringelblum and the Hidden Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto

Recognizing that the events unfolding around him in Europe in the fall of 1939 were unprecedented, and that they would require careful documentation, Warsaw historian Emanuel Ringelblum gathered a few dozen writers, historians, rabbis, teachers, and welfare workers to form a group code-named Oyneg Shabbes [Joy of Sabbath]. The mission of Oyneg Shabbes was to document Jewish life in Nazi-occupied Poland. Reports on the deportation and murders of Jews, as well as ghetto artifacts, photographs, children’s school essays, and ghetto art were collected by the clandestine group in Warsaw from September 1939 until January 1943.

As the Nazis began liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto, members of Oyneg Shabbes buried the archive in several containers. Less than a handful of the group’s members survived the war. On September 18, 1946, the first cache was pulled from the ghetto’s rubble; a second cache was found in 1950; the last cache has never been discovered. The Ringelblum Archive, as the materials came to be known, is the most important source for, and the most poignant testimony to, the destruction of Polish Jewry.

High quality reproductions of approximately 50 artifacts from the archives of the Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw and a short film showing the recovery of the hidden archive make up this exhibition.

Visit the companion website for Scream the Truth at the World.

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A Young Girl at Ghetto Terezin: 1941-1944
Drawings by Helga Weissová Hosková

Helga Weissová (now Helga Weissová Hoskova) was deported from Prague, Czechoslovkia to the Terezin Ghetto in 1941 together with her parents. When Helga’s father saw a picture of a snowman that Helga had drawn, he told her, “Draw what you see.” From them onward, Helga drew pictures documenting her life in the ghetto. During an exhibit of children’s works in Terezin, Helga was told to throw her drawings away because they were too truthful and accurate, but Helga refused. When she and her mother were to be deported to Auschwitz in September 1944, Helga entrusted her drawings to her uncle, who hid them until liberation, and then took them back to Prague. Helga and her mother survived and returned to Prague after the war.

Photographic reproductions of ten of Helga’s drawings make up this exhibition. Accompanying the drawings are excerpts from Helga’s diary that convey Helga’s view of life in the Terezin ghetto.

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