Exhibit Spotlights Cuban Jews in Holocaust

By JTA December 23, 2011

An exhibit focusing on the Cuban-Jewish experience of the Holocaust opened at a Havana synagogue.

“We Remember: The Holocaust and the Creation of a Living Community,” which opened Sunday at the Hebrew Sephardic Center, also looks at the small Jewish communities that still reside in Cuba.

Three Los Angeles-based organizations – the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Jewish Cuba Connection – partnered on the project. Conscious Display, a San Diego firm, designed the exhibit, which the partnering groups are calling the first of its kind in Cuba.

Multimedia aspects include video clips of refugees who arrived in Cuba to escape the Nazi regime and a one-hour video featuring testimonies of Holocaust survivors’ experiences during World War II.

The video testimonies, which span more than 56 countries and 32 languages, were pulled from the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s archive. In addition, The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s “Courage To Remember” exhibit provides narratives and photographs to “We Remember.”

“The Nazis sought to destroy Jewish lives and extinguish Jewish life,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “The honor of affixing a mezuzah on the entrance to this exhibit at Havana’s Sephardic Center and being able to declare Am Yisrael Chai together with young and old Cuban Jews is proof that Jewish solidarity and continuity will forever outlast the genocidal goals of the Nazis.”

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