Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

Auschwitz Exhibit To Extend Run At Museum Of Jewish Heritage

A train car that shuttled Jews from ghettoes to concentration camps, artifacts from Anne Frank’s secret annex and a shofar that was blown at Auschwitz — all of these objects are now on view at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. You now have more time to see them.

The museum announced October 24 that its exhibit “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.” is receiving an eight-month extension, with a new closing date of August 30, 2020. The museum states that, since the exhibit began in May, over 106,000 people have visited it, including more than 36,000 students. The hope is that extending the show will allow more visitors, young and old, to absorb its message.

“In recent years and recent months even, we have seen a surge in anti-Semitic rhetoric, hate crimes, and a weaponized nationalism both here in the United States and abroad,” Bruce C. Ratner, chairman of the museum’s board of trustees said in a statement. “We are extending this exhibition at our Museum because it offers clear, moral lessons that resonate powerfully today and from which visitors want to learn.”

Since the exhibit opened, the already-extensive collection, curated by Spanish exhibition designer Musealia, has added a number of artifacts from the museum’s own collection and even from visitors.

Ratner told the Forward in January that the museum planned to introduce the concept of “Spiritual resistance” for its version of the show by including the parachute of Hungarian resistance fighter Hanah Szenes and religious objects hidden away at Auschwitz. A visitor to the exhibitionrecently loaned the museum a shofar which sounded at Auschwitz III-Monowitz during the high holidays, underlining the theme of religious defiance.

“I don’t think that there is a more important exhibition presented in New York at the moment,” Piotr M. A. Cywiński, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, said in a statement. “This one about Auschwitz explores the essence of mankind, analyzes the limits of what is human, and asks important questions about our contemporary responsibility. I am glad people will be able to see it there longer.”

PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture fellow. He can be reached at [email protected].

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.