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Traveling Exhibit in Scottsdale

Winters are cold in Chicago, and so my parents spend those months in Scottsdale, AZ. The Board of Jewish Education of Greater Phoenix hosts an annual Holocaust Educators Conference, and it seemed to me to be to be an ideal opportunity to bring Hatikvah’s exhibit “A Reason to Remember” Roth, Germany 1933-1942” to Arizona.

The conference planners immediately saw the value of having the exhibit on display during the week of the annual conference. And they invited my father, whose family is one of the 5 families featured in the exhibit, to present a workshop. He was a bit hesitant, and so I offered to speak with him. And then it occurred to me that my 23 year old daughter, who was then in Phnom Penh, Cambodia working with survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide, could also be part of this workshop. We could discuss how three generations of one family were working with our Holocaust legacies in unique and varied ways.

The workshop, entitled “From Silence and Indifference to Education and Advocacy: Three Generations of One Family Respond to Their Holocaust Legacies” was very well received by more than 100 teachers and survivors. A number of teachers came up to us after our presentation and told us how moved they were by seeing my father, myself and my daughter on stage together. They commented on how our presentation helped them to see how legacies of war and genocide transcend generations. Participants were particularly interested in how Leah, the granddaughter of Holocaust refuges, applied her family history to a contemporary example of a people healing from genocide For me, it was very powerful to sit between my father and my daughter as we discussed our shared passion for identifying ways to use a painful and burdensome history to heal and to educate.

Note: Deborah Roth-Howe co-authored “A Reason to Remember”, the permanent exhibit at Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center in 2004. A duplicate version of the exhibit was created in 2007 and has been shown in a number of venues, including Scottsdale since that time.

“A Reason to Remember” is based on an exhibit created in Roth, Germany for a community rededication of the synagogue in March of 1998. That original exhibit was translated by Herb and Elsa Roth in 2002 and 2003.

Read the article from Scottsdale Reprinted by permission of Jewish News of Greater Phoenix

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