A place to remember
Daniel Eisenstadt '91 helps create a Jewish education center near Auschwitz
By Judith Jaeger
Daniel Eisenstadt '91 knows that there are no easy answers to questions about how victims of the Holocaust should be memorialized. But as executive director and vice president of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, Eisenstadt is working to ensure that future generations remember and learn from what is considered to be the 20th century's largest human tragedy.
The Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, established in 1995, is creating a Jewish cultural and educational center in Oswiecim, Poland, where the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp is located. The center, Eisenstadt explains, is a place where Jewish and non-Jewish visitors to Auschwitz "can decompress and understand their experience."
Located a mile-and-a-half away from the concentration camp, the center consists of a restored synagogue‹the only synagogue in Oswiecim to survive World War II‹and an adjacent house once owned by Jews. The synagogue, which opened on Sept. 12, 2000, includes a place for worship, classrooms, an exhibit about pre-War Jewish life in Oswiecim, genealogy resources and a screening room for viewing testimonies of Holocaust survivors from Oswiecim provided by Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation. The adjoining house, which will be renovated over the next two years, will contain more classrooms, expanded exhibits and a Kosher cafeteria. The foundation also hopes to offer educational programs and to invite graduate students to serve as guides and educators.
Visit becomes turning point
Eisenstadt saw a need for a Jewish educational center in Oswiecim after his first visit to Auschwitz in 1990, while on a student exchange program in Poland. The only Jewish person in the tour group, Eisenstadt felt alone in his experience and joined a group of Israeli high school students for the rest of his visit at the concentration camp. When he shared this with his Polish host, she refused to believe he was Jewish, further illustrating the obliteration of Jewish life and culture in Oswiecim.
"I was probably the first Jewish person she had met," Eisenstadt says. "It was a very jarring experience, and in a way, it was a big turning point in my life."
After graduating from Clark, Eisenstadt worked as a research assistant and paralegal for Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz and spent a year studying at Hebrew University in Jerusalem as a Raoul Wallenberg Fellow. While there, he met Fred Schwartz, a prominent New York City businessman and philanthropist who had an idea for a Jewish education center in Oswiecim. Eisenstadt offered his help.
He began work on the project in law school at the University of Virginia (UVA). With a fellowship from UVA, Eisenstadt and an architecture student spent a summer in Poland meeting with local leaders, studying the town and the museum at the concentration camp and researching the possibility of buying back Jewish property to house the center. On the basis of that report, Schwartz and Eisenstadt established the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, which gained the title to the synagogue in 1997.
A sensitive place
"It's definitely the most challenging thing I've ever done," Eisenstadt says, with most of the challenges embedded in the place itself. "This is one of the more sensitive places on earth to be working."
Religious symbols and memorials at the concentration camp site, for example, are a point of contention between Jews and Christians, most notably the placement of crosses at the camp. Because of this sensitivity, Eisenstadt says, it was important to locate the center away from the concentration camp.
Another challenge, he explains, is rooted in Poland's communist past. Under communism, he says, most Poles thought of Auschwitz as a place of Polish martyrdom. "The understanding that Poles and Jews bring to the place is radically different."
These and other cultural differences made a slow planning process vital to the success of the center, Eisenstadt says. He made 35 trips to Poland during the planning phase. He got to know the bishops in the Catholic church there and earned the endorsement of residents and local leaders. The international relations major says his Clark education was perfect training for working with such diverse groups and opinions.
"The international community at Clark and the diversity of the student body were an enormous benefit to me in what I'm doing now. It helped me learn how to open up a conversation with someone who has a different background than me," Eisenstadt says.
A surreal experience
The opening of the synagogue was attended by Holocaust survivors, U.S. and Polish officials, Prince Hassan of Jordan and representatives of the Catholic church. Eisenstadt described the opening as "a bit surreal, as all big moments are."
"There was a sense of giving birth to something after being involved with it for so many years. But with that comes a sense of enormous responsibility for what we still need to do," says Eisenstadt, who shared the opening day with his sister and parents. His mother and grandparents are survivors of the Holocaust.
Since its opening, the partially completed Auschwitz Jewish Center has attracted approximately 800 visitors each week, Eisenstadt says. About half are non-Jewish Polish and German visitors, and the other half are Jews from around the world.
|
 |
|
Clarknews Winter 2001
|
|
|
|
