Holocaust Museum aims to educate, safeguard

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In the basement of the Bronx High School of Science sits one of the nation’s few high-school museums of its kind – a Holocaust museum, a reminder of the atrocities of the past and an effort to safeguard the future.

The Holocaust Museum and Study Center has more than 1,000 artifacts, including uniforms Jews were forced to wear at concentration camps, a poison-gas can used at a concentration camp, a fragment of a Torah mantle burned during Kristallnacht. There is also an anti-Nazi poster made by General Electric in 1942, as a reminder to Americans that Nazism could happen here as well.

For juniors Alanna Ross and Mary Hripcsak, the most powerful exhibit is a Torah cover woven with gold thread by Holocaust survivors at the Bergen-Belsen camp for displaced persons.

“[They] had no family, no money and hardly any belongings, but they pooled together what they could to create this beautiful Torah cover,” Alanna, an 11th grader who is also a museum tour guide, said in an email. “It represents the determination of the Jewish people and their ability to hold onto their faith no matter what.”

In Mary’s view, the items represented the survivors’ moving on from the horrors they faced and their hope for a better future, she said in an email.

“I’d never really learned about it in detail before so I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity especially because my school has a museum dedicated to it, which is something most other schools don’t have,” she said.

Jean Donahue, the school’s principal and a 1977 Bronx Science graduate, said the museum and the classes it offers draw a diverse group of students.

“One of the things that has struck me going down there, when I go to class or I see the students giving tours is that these are students from many different backgrounds,” she said. “They’re not even primarily Jewish students that are down there. They’ve learned so much from this and they want to share what they’ve learned with their fellow students or with visitors.”

The two juniors are a demonstration of that: Alanna is Jewish, and Mary is not.

The museum also offers a leadership course. Students can take the course repeatedly, each time with a new curriculum, and while they receive no academic credit, those who have taken the course at least twice can become museum guides.

“The longer a student is in the program, the more of a leadership role they take in the running and the teaching of the course,” said assistant principal David Colchamiro.

The goal is to educate students about the Holocaust – but not only that.

“One of the things that students will do is they’ll do research on other genocides or attempted genocides, other slaughters and human rights atrocities, kind of, to see what kind of lessons were learned or that they failed to learn,” Mr. Colchamiro said. “It’s good that they can see that this isn’t something that just happened in the 1930s and the 1940s. It happened in the 1990s in Bosnia. It happened in Rwanda. It happened to the Armenians.”

The Bronx High School of Science is best-known as the alma mater of several Nobel Prize winners.

“Our focus is on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, but we’re also a school that tries to give our students a full appreciation of history, English, foreign languages and foreign cultures,” Ms. Donahue, the principal, said.

The makings of the museum began when the school’s social studies teacher Stuart Elenko, who taught from 1964 to 1993, created a course that focused on the Holocaust in the late 1970s. Mr. Elenko, who died in 2009, had collected artifacts, and Bronx Science alumni donated more to help his efforts. Before the museum reopened in 2013, the school kept its artifacts in a small room next to the library, as well as at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan.

“We are very special, in so far, that we have a Holocaust Museum, here which is really unusual for a high school,” Ms. Donahue said.

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For more information on the Holocaust Museum, email: holocaustmuseum@bxscience.edu.

Holocaust Museum, Stuart Elenko, Bronx High School of Science, The Holocaust Museum and Study Center

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