A new Brooklyn Holocaust museum aims to take a different approach to remembering the Holocaust. As Cathryn J. Prince explains in the Times of Israel:
“Not only is the Kleinman center Brooklyn’s first Holocaust museum, it is the first in the US to portray the Shoah from an Orthodox Jewish perspective. The museum aims to change the ultra-Orthodox community’s approach to the subject as well.
Orthodox Jews accounted for between 50-70 percent of Holocaust victims. Yet, their story has been largely overlooked, museum director Rabbi Sholom Friedmann told The Times of Israel.
“Religious communities for the most part don’t visit existing museums and so their experience has been ignored in standard museums. The way the religious community experienced the Holocaust is different from the way non-religious experienced it,” Friedmann said. “We hope our museum will give people an opportunity to focus on the moral and ideological issues the Orthodox faced at the time, and the strength and courage it took to rebuild post-Holocaust.”
Read the full story here or better yet, visit the museum (though we recommend waiting until the new building is constructed). As an interesting note, since the museum plans to cater to charedi families, pictures of women with shaved or bared heads may be placed in a separate part of the museum.
The words of this author reflect his/her own opinions and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Orthodox Union.