South Florida's Holocaust Education Center Expanding
Posted February 05, 2015 12:45 pm
HOLLYWOOD,
FL – As the world marks the 70th anniversary of the
liberation of Nazi death camps in Europe, South
Florida's Holocaust Documentation and Education Center
is expanding while it continues gathering stories and
artifacts to document the horrors of the Holocaust.
Rositta Kenigsberg is the president of the Center in
Hollywood. She said the Sunshine State has become the
ideal setting for the collection.
"Florida, right now, has the second-largest survivor
population in North America and New York being first,"
Kenigsberg said. "So, we have a lot of liberators here
as well and having the first South Florida Holocaust
museum built here in South Florida is extraordinarily
important, significant and meaningful."
Although their ranks are dwindling quickly as they age,
it's estimated at least 10,000 survivors remain in the
state most of them retired in South Florida.
Rita Hofrichter, 86, was a teenager in Poland during the
war and lost nearly all of her large family in the death
camps. She now serves as a volunteer at the museum,
helping preserve the oral histories of survivors, giving
tours and recounting her story to students.
Unfortunately, Hofrichter said, the painful lessons of
the Holocaust still haven't been learned, even 70 years
later.
"We always thought after the Holocaust the world would
be so horrified by it that they would see it never
happens again to any people," she said. "Yet after World
War II ended, the Holocaust ended, there were a hundred
other genocides throughout the world."
Among the museum's most treasured artifacts are a
restored rail car once used to transport prisoners to
the death camp in Auschwitz, and a Torah recovered from
the wreckage of a Czechoslovakian synagogue destroyed
during the Nazi occupation in World War II.
Photos/graphics; links; added and updated by the Observer
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