Skokie as Sanctuary: Holocaust Survivor Leadership at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center

IN LATE 2017, THE ILLINOIS HOLOCAUST MUSEUM AND EDUCATION CENTER (IHMEC) in Skokie, a northwest Chicago suburb, launched its “Take a Stand” Center, which featured a first-of-its-kind interactive hologram exhibit that allowed museum visitors to interact virtually with Holocaust survivors. The cutting-edge exhibit, co-sponsored with the University of Southern California (USC) Shoah Foundation, received much media fanfare, including interviews with survivors whose likenesses were featured. Aaron Elster, a survivor and active member of the museum's board of directors, became the poster child of the new center's opening. “I think the technology puts this museum on a totally different level,” said Elster in an interview standing in front of his holographic proxy. Elster argued that the ability for future generations to engage with survivors themselves once living memory of the Holocaust has died would prevent the reduction of the Holocaust to “a sentence or at best a paragraph in World War II history.”1 Incidentally, Elster died only six months after this interview, on Yom Hashoah or Holocaust Day of Remembrance. In his obituary, the Chicago Sun-Times highlighted the role of Elster's hologram in asserting the perpetual relevance of his testimony.2Elster's conscious involvement in his own preservation exemplified a larger pattern characterizing the Illinois Holocaust Museum's development. A site that receives its heaviest traffic from school groups across the Midwest, the IHMEC owes much of its present success to the passage of the 1990 Illinois Mandate for Holocaust Education, which came about through the active lobbying from area survivors like Erna Gans, the first president of the IHMEC's parent organization, the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois (HMFI). It was founded by a core community of Jewish survivors who committed themselves to educating non-Jews about the Shoah and its lessons. The HMFI began as a grassroots organization composed entirely of Holocaust survivors and their immediate family members. After the 1990 mandate's enactment, the local survivor leadership recognized their need to extend authority to outside professionals to build an infrastructure capable of sustaining their organization's mission for subsequent generations. The most obvious element of growth centered on the relocation from a storefront on Main Street in Skokie to a larger and more comprehensive museum and education center in that suburb, which opened in 2009. While the museum's move to a larger facility brought outside voices to the table of Holocaust memory and education, the survivor lay leadership ensured that both their own narrative authority and their continued presence in decision-making would be maintained in the transition process.When viewed from a broader perspective, Holocaust commemoration often involves mediation between the collective or professional narrative and that of the eyewitness. In many studies of memory theory, this phenomenon has often been framed as a dichotomy between “official” memory and “vernacular” memory. Although a useful way of analyzing the politicization of memory at the nation-state level, the distinction becomes murky in situations where dispersed communities transmit their traumatic memory to the general public as a means to assert their own spiritual capital. The process of mediating eyewitness testimony—in this case, through a memorial museum and educational space—produces what may be termed a transmissive interplay between lay and professional arbiters of memory. The eyewitnesses to trauma may view themselves as the unmediated sources of the past, but their transmission of experiences to others through various communication modes necessitates a constant framing and contextualizing of personal narratives. The professional voices, whether trained scholars, educators, designers, business executives, or museum experts, make the narrative framing and contextualizing a more conscious part of the commemoration. By acting as guarantors of sacred memory, they also permit the eyewitnesses to be perceived as the true voices of authority.3With that in mind, the question of whether or not Holocaust survivors can truly claim authority as the “immediate” transmitters of direct memory is a moot point. What is more important is acknowledging that these eyewitnesses have viewed themselves as such and that this belief formed the impetus for creating memorial museums like the IHMEC. Whatever the degree of mediation through transmissive interplay, the HMFI/IHMEC from its beginning has based itself on the notion of survivor eyewitness interaction with the public as paramount. The recent incorporation of holography into the visitor experience has reinforced the belief that survivors will perpetuate their central status after death. Whether or not this holds true once all eyewitnesses have died remains to be seen. Until then, the study of how survivors retained their authority in the professionalization of their sites of memory can promote understanding of the process of memory transmission.The origin story of this local organization of survivors in the greater Chicago area occurred in a larger framework of survivor activism that gained momentum beginning in the 1970s. In the context of the United States, which received the largest proportion of postwar European Jewish immigration apart from Israel/Palestine, Holocaust survivors began speaking out about their experiences as a consequence of reactions to the Civil Rights Movement, the Arab/Israeli conflicts, and ethnic awareness movements of the 1960s. Up until the widely publicized capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, most public discourse regarding World War II's destructiveness centered on Nazi perpetrators and their overall crimes against humanity rather than on targeted victims. The idea of “the Holocaust”/Shoah as a distinctive event, namely the ideologically motivated, systematic annihilation of European Jewry, had yet to solidify.Historian Peter Novick attributed the surge of conversation about the Holocaust to Jewish American political groups who used Jewish victimhood to advocate a pro-Israel agenda for the US government, especially in response to the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars. Additionally, Novick argued that the rise of identity politics encouraged American Jews to define their historical identity within a Holocaust framework. Having the distinction of being selected for extinction by the Nazis, Jews believed they needed to assert themselves to end the silence surrounding genocide and oppression and viewed their position as not unlike that of African Americans. Even with Novick's heavy-handed cynicism, his observations during the height of Holocaust national awareness in the 1990s reminded readers that Holocaust memory did not sprout in a vacuum and could not be looked upon as apolitical.4Novick's cynical outlook on national memory, however, overemphasized its political nature at the expense of bypassing the ways local spaces fostered patterns of memory within grassroots communities. While loosely conversant with national trends, the Illinois survivors’ own mobilization stemmed from specific, local events involving a proposed march by the National Socialist Party of America (NSPA) through Skokie. Multiple detailed accounts of this episode in US legal history have already been published in books and TV documentaries, but a synopsis of the events, provided below, explains the reasons Skokie in particular emerged as powerful place of memory for survivor activists.Originally part of Niles Center, the “Village” of Skokie first developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with predominantly German settlers. Following World War II, Skokie experienced a rapid population increase after the village planning commission advocated for the construction of single-family residences. In its first thirty postwar years, Skokie attracted large numbers of Jewish families composed of both Chicago migrants and recent immigrants from Europe and Palestine. The growth of the Jewish population in Skokie and surrounding environs enabled them to have sizable influence in local politics and the built environment. This included Skokie's passage of a Fair Housing Act in 1967—the first municipality in greater Chicago to do so.5By the 1970s, Skokie had grown into a robust community of seventy thousand, with roughly 40 to 60 percent of its population being Jewish. According to most accounts, around six or seven thousand Holocaust survivors lived in Skokie—a per capita proportion outmatched only by Jerusalem.6 Needless to say, Skokie had developed as a powerful space for American Jewish identity within a generation after World War II. This pattern of Jewish development between the 1950s and 1970s could be situated within phenomena described by Henri LeFebvre and Dolores Hayden: namely, the relationship between the urban landscape and social production. For Jews moving to Chicago's North Side, Skokie, and surrounding suburbs, the creation of synagogues, community centers, and other Jewish organizations facilitated social reproduction of Jewish spaces and with that, the shaping of a collective memory that bridged a Jewish past with the present.7When NSPA member Frank Collin and some twenty-five neo-Nazi followers requested a demonstration permit through Skokie in 1976, many in the local government believed that ignoring them would be the best course of action. A previous attempt by Collin's neo-Nazis to demonstrate in Marquette Park on Chicago's South Side had already been foiled, yet the NSPA decided that rallying in a Jewish-heavy North Shore suburb would inflame more anti-Semitic supporters. Initially, Skokie's mayor, Albert Smith, together with local rabbis and representatives of the Anti-Defamation League, agreed that a “quarantine policy”—namely, refusing to engage with any NSPA demonstration—could thwart the press attention Collin so craved.Such a stance provoked Holocaust survivors to speak out publicly about their personal experiences to their neighbors—many for the first time. Within synagogue congregations and other meeting forums, these survivors, chief among them former Lithuanian freedom fighter Sol Goldstein and Plaszow concentration camp survivor Erna Gans, challenged the wisdom of remaining silent in the face of hate speech. Their testimony soon convinced the Catholic Mayor Smith and other municipal leaders to deny the NSPA a demonstration permit in April 1977. In response, Collin garnered an alliance with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to protest the constitutionality of the denied permit request. Over the next year, a series of court battles and proposed counterdemonstrations with both Jewish and gentile groups ensued, culminating in a landmark Supreme Court case, NSPA v. Village of Skokie, which upheld the NSPA's right to free speech under the First Amendment. The decision and subsequently denied appeals came at great disappointment to the survivors and their allies, but the NSPA's legal victory also came at great cost. Depleted of both energy and any support he once had, Collin abandoned the uphill effort to demonstrate in Skokie and held a rally in Chicago's Federal Plaza, where he met fierce counter-protests by Jewish, Christian, and nonsectarian groups.8Much of the existing literature on the Skokie controversy has concerned the debates around free speech protection, yet such a mode of analysis has isolated those events from the larger drama of memory and community action. By way of comparison, few have written about the development of the local survivors’ organization in the long aftermath of the Supreme Court cases. As mentioned earlier, Skokie's Jewish community had participated in politics long before the NSPA's attempted march, but the legal battles of 1976–1978 catalyzed a sense of self-consciousness among Chicago-area survivors. Although historians like Novick would later argue American Jewish fears of anti-Semitic speech were overhyped and overpoliticized, for Holocaust survivors in Chicagoland, the events of 1976–1978 became the lynchpin for group identity and activism.9Historian Deborah Lipstadt would describe this psychological shift as a change of identity from “victim” to “survivor.” Prodded in part by their baby-boomer children who came of age when marginalized Americans began to demand redress for past injustices and silences, Holocaust survivors decided to redirect their trauma from a shameful stigma to a productive vehicle for social mobilization.10 “When we came to America,” said Gans in a later interview, “we talked to each other, but not to the public.” The visibility of anti-Semitism in her new American home changed her perspective. “People are willing to listen, but our people are getting older . . . we cannot allow history to forget.”11In response to the apparent apathy of their non-Jewish neighbors toward the neo-Nazis, many Jewish activists decided the core problem was a lack of Holocaust education among non-Jews. At the time, the main avenues for Jewish political advocacy included the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress, yet survivors did not play a central role in them. By 1980, the Skokie survivors found their inspiration in Jack Eisner, a New York-based survivor and philanthropist who, with help from his daughter Shirley, had founded a Holocaust Survivors Memorial Foundation following the 1978 NBC broadcast of the miniseries Holocaust.Even prior to Skokie's neo-Nazi scare, Eisner had privately discussed the desire to educate gentiles about the Holocaust with David Figman of Skokie, whom he knew as a fellow freedom fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and as a fellow inmate at Flossenbürg concentration camp. Figman's personal friendship with Eisner helped bring Skokie activists into a larger network focused on Holocaust education and using Holocaust memory to instill American democratic values.12 Meeting by invitation at the home of Erna Gans in Northbrook, Shirley Eisner spoke with local survivors about the possibility of creating a Midwest chapter of the Holocaust Survivors Memorial Foundation, the purpose being to reach out to gentiles through school curricula, university courses, and media programs. “Scholars must be attentive to survivors,” Eisner told this local steering committee. In Gans's home, the participants agreed to establish and develop an organization driven by local survivors themselves. This group of individuals also embraced a targeted mission to use eyewitness perspectives, what they believed to be unmediated sources, for classroom education and “not only for research and documentation” purposes.13By spring 1981, this group of survivors and their families galvanized enough support to establish the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois (HMFI), with Gans appointed the inaugural president and board of directors’ chairperson. The HMFI distinguished itself from other Holocaust remembrance groups in its active desire to teach gentiles, and while most local Jews supported its creation, some conservative survivor groups such as the Zionist-oriented Sheérit HaPleitah (Hebrew for “surviving remnant”) were skeptical of sharing what they perceived to be private, sacred memory with the goyim.14 For the first generation after the Holocaust, talking about a past collective trauma, especially to outsiders, was considered shameful. Up to that point, most Jewish communities had confined Holocaust commemoration to Yom Hashoah with intimate, solemn services held in synagogues. In addition, for many American Jews, to acknowledge the experience of the Holocaust with outsiders seemed to undermine long-term efforts to assimilate into mainstream American culture and reap the benefits of a white cultural majority.15However, for a more educational-minded organization like the HMFI, creating and physically housing a new forum for Holocaust survivors to share their testimonies with non-Jews as well as to bond with one another marked a new direction, distinct from previous patterns of commemoration. As an example of what Pierre Nora would later describe as the passage from milieux de mémoire (environments of memory) to lieux de mémoire (sites of memory), the HMFI's creation rested on the notion that the people needed to be taught to remember the Holocaust by a specific organization at a specific location at the expense of forgetting. Given this viewpoint, the transmission of Jewish memory through the medium of an educational foundation might have been perceived as a secularization of memory that reduced the unknowable “mystery” of the Holocaust into a societal (i.e., non-Jewish) tool with a homogenous meaning.16With a new organization established, the HMFI board under Gans's leadership hoped to spearhead an educational movement that gave agency to their identity as eyewitnesses. In the first years, the Foundation members based their operations in David Figman's basement, but they soon set out to purchase a building in Skokie that could serve as an office space and small museum. In the 1980s, the idea of a “memorial museum” had not yet entered the American cultural lexicon, so in some measure, these local organizers found themselves with a pioneering task. A national Holocaust museum did not yet exist, and the only model available in America during this time was a small museum near Detroit—the first freestanding American Holocaust memorial center, established in 1984.17That same year, Figman found a small storefront building for sale located at 4255 West Main Street, which the HMFI board decided to purchase for $290,000.18 As tenants still occupied parts of the building during the immediate purchase phase, the moving process remained low-profile, and passersby could easily miss the structure if not looking for it. Nevertheless, the news of a Holocaust remembrance organization opening its own museum on a suburban street earned some negative reaction from Lerner Newspapers executive Charles Mouratides, who published an editorial criticizing the HMFI for what appeared an ill use of money that could have gone to other causes. Mouratides received immediate backlash from multiple survivors and HMFI affiliates, including Gans herself, who called his piece “incredibly ignorant.” Rabbi Lawrence Montrose of Skokie Central Traditional Congregation, located near the new building, went as far as to argue, “The suggestion of the editorial to give these funds to another cause, or to house the Museum in a public building that is multi-purpose is tantamount to a denial of the Holocaust!”19The passion imbued in these rebuttals revealed an underlying issue at stake: could and should Holocaust memory be embodied within a specific site or location, or should it manifest as “living memory” within existing Yom Hashoah and other rituals? The concerns raised by the defenders of a physical museum articulated the need for Holocaust education to operate in a concrete, dedicated space to preserve its integrity as a Jewish experience.20 Ultimately, the Main Street storefront move-in went forward, and the HMFI's museum opened its doors in June 1985.21Within the foundation building on Main Street, local survivors and their families created an intimate space to both socialize among themselves and interact with the outside public. In these early years, the HMFI's governance remained almost exclusively in the hands of lay leaders with firsthand experience of the Holocaust, as opposed to outside professionals trained in museum and nonprofit administration. Gans had previously operated a package labeling company with her late husband, and her strong personality had earned her respect during the NSPA v. Village of Skokie controversy.22 While the HMFI's board of directors engaged in lively discussions on the best initiatives to serve its educational mission, Gans, along with her adjutant and fellow survivor Judy Lachman, assumed the largest executive powers.23 In terms of facility operations, the HMFI relied on a coterie of volunteers and a barebones staff to handle production of print materials, exhibit installation, housekeeping, and event planning, among other needs. Volunteer activities had a social element, and it was not uncommon for survivors to arrive unannounced, if only to help out with day-to-day tasks or have a cup of coffee.24 Erna Gans also initiated a sustained and successful effort to record oral testimonies of both survivors and American GI liberators and urged survivors to donate Holocaust memorabilia to the new museum.Now having a designated space to share their testimonies on their own terms, the survivors also served as the default interpreters and curators of the small museum. For a kick-start exhibit, the HMFI secured an agreement with private collectors Milton and Janet Kohn who, although not survivors, loaned part of their Holocaust “memorabilia” collection. This eclectic assortment ranged from the inspiring (a megillah scroll) to the macabre (human remains) and served more as a conversation starter for survivors to comment on than a polished, grand narrative. For example, when the museum opened in June 1985, one reporter noted that as Kohn began describing the artifacts from his collection, survivor and HMFI vice president Allen Zendel “anxiously interrupted” Kohn to emphasize his own experiences under the Nazi regime and to insist on the truth of that history.25From the foundation's inception, direct interactions with survivors remained paramount to any visitor experience. Eyewitnesses gave tours of their museum long before non-survivor docents. Beyond their presence as interpreters of exhibits, survivors also contributed through a robust Speakers’ Bureau. Even before the purchase of the foundation building on Main Street, the HMFI had emphasized the role of survivors as unmediated educators in the classroom. Several of the early board members, including Judy Lachman, Mark Weinberg, and recording secretary Bela Korn, regularly visited high schools and universities to share their testimonies.26 The Bureau added new survivor speakers on a rolling basis to accommodate the high demand from schools and community groups. Speakers’ Bureau participants, including both survivors and liberators, would go on to share their experiences with tens of thousands of listeners in the Greater Chicago area and beyond.In collaboration with Roosevelt University professor Dr. Leon Stein, several survivors helped to create the HMFI's first major book publication, Voices: Memories of Chicago Area Holocaust Survivors in 1984. The ongoing partnership with Dr. Elliot Lefkovitz of Loyola University Chicago led to the creation of several notable Holocaust documentary films in conjunction with Loyola featuring survivor testimonies. Leon Stein, along with his wife, Dr. Judy Stein, a high school social studies teacher and department head, enabled survivors to consult in the development of teaching resources and curriculum for teachers.27In a short time, these efforts developed into a campaign to make Holocaust education a mandatory unit in the Illinois state curriculum. In 1987, a couple isolated cases of anti-Semitic vandalism in Skokie targeting Jewish-run businesses intensified desires to influence state legislators to create a Holocaust education mandate. While authorities never identified the perpetrators or any connection with Frank Collin's NSPA, the memory of the 1976–1978 ordeal heightened a sense of urgency to reclaim Skokie as a place of resistance against hatred. A key means to do so was to place the new organization in the forefront of Holocaust education mandate advocacy.Over the next couple years, Gans, Figman, Lisa Derman, Judy Lachman, Barbara Steiner, and Leon Stein served as the primary lobbyists and traveled to Springfield for visits with state representative Lee Preston, state senator Arthur Berman, other state legislators, and governor James Thompson.28 As Figman later recollected, the campaign to pass a state educational mandate was strategic in that it would provide the HMFI with state funding to further its mission. Following initial meetings with government officials, the HMFI conducted a statewide survey on existing Holocaust education and teachers’ desires to insert Holocaust units into school curricula. After providing the survey results to the Illinois General Assembly's education committee, the HMFI won overwhelming support from both Governor Thompson and the legislature. On January 1, 1990, the governor signed the Illinois Mandate on Holocaust Education, which effectually required all public schools to teach a unit on the Holocaust at both elementary and secondary levels.29While the HMFI remained outward focused in its educational outreach and eventual 1990 mandate passage, that mission did not preclude double use of the museum as a memorial space. One of the foundation building's more standout features, the Book of Remembrance, served as a hybrid memorial and teaching artifact. The Book of Remembrance came about as a project begun by the Association of Children of Holocaust Survivors, a local partner organization that predated the HMFI. Memory books (Yiddish: yizkor bikher) emerged as typical expressions of Jewish mourning, often serving as surrogate graves for lost communities. According to the most recent interpretation, memory books located across the global Jewish diaspora also functioned as “sites of memory” that consciously asserted Jewish identity based on an inherited past and modernity.30The Book of Remembrance housed at the HMFI primarily contained loved ones’ names submitted by local survivors who arranged them by hometowns. Although placed in a small room separate from the museum space, visitors could still access the book. According to Lillian Gerstner, who served as the museum's devoted and effective executive director during most of the Main Street years, the book's placement encouraged visitors, especially non-Jews, to flip through the pages containing over two thousand names, recognize familiar first or last names, and thereby realize the personal, human nature of the Holocaust.31 As such, the Book of Remembrance, while representing the absence of victims, counterintuitively asserted both victims’ and survivors’ presence to visitors who engaged with the object.32In summary, Holocaust memory at the HMFI, because of its purposeful inclusion of gentile education as part of the memory process, took on a much different character than the strictly commemorative actions of the other main local organization, Sheérit HaPleitah. During the same period as the HMFI museum's opening on Main Street, Sheérit HaPleitah made its own mark in the landscape with a monument erected outside Skokie's public library and dedicated in May 1987. Despite Sheérit HaPleitah being an “umbrella” organization for Holocaust survivor groups, representatives from the HMFI were excluded from the unveiling ceremony since many board members were then at a speaking engagement in a Christian church in Janesville, Wisconsin.33Intergroup politics aside, the separate manifestations of memory revealed similar intentions yet contrasting perspectives. Both Sheérit HaPleitah's monument and the HMFI's museum asserted local Jewish resilience against would-be Holocaust deniers, and they both purported to exist for future generations, Jew and gentile alike. However, Sheérit HaPleitah's outdoor monument reduced the Holocaust's history to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the “six million” Jews, and the “six” corresponding extermination centers in Poland, leaving no room for ambiguity over the Holocaust's meaning or causes, let alone variances of experiences across Europe. Neither did it attempt to impart any lesson for an American context.In contrast, the HMFI, while also characterized by Polish Jewish leadership, took a more organic approach to memory by including education of gentiles as part of the process.34 The HMFI's existence did not negate the value of the insider-focused practices of other Holocaust memorial groups, but the foundation's approach more closely mirrored the future directions of Holocaust commemoration in the United States—namely, broadening its awareness and understanding with the general American public through educational outreach and mass media.35The HMFI's successful lobbying in Springfield and the passage of the 1990 Illinois Mandate for Holocaust Education served as a moment of pride for local survivor leadership, particularly for Gans and the other powerbrokers who had personally met with state government officials. The mandate also represented a pivot point for the organization's maturation. The fact of Illinois being the first state to pass such a law made the HMFI stand out among other Holocaust survivor organizations across the country. As such, school visits to the foundation building became a capstone feature in the new Holocaust educational units. Student visitation numbers had already been increasing prior to the 1990 mandate, but the newly mandated state curriculum intensified traffic to the storefront on Main Street. As the foundation building became more heavily visited in the 1990s, the survivors faced the dual challenge of acknowledging the need to bring in outside professional help and mortality among their own ranks.The HMFI was not the only organization of its kind to face the challenge of expansion and professionalization. Simultaneous with the growth of Holocaust museums in the US, African American museums also shared challenges of adapting professional infrastructure in order to transition from the margins to the mainstream without losing integrity with their constituents. For example, Detroit's International Afro-American Museum faced community ire and financial woes when the museum moved out of a house in a historically Black neighborhood to a larger museum