Zachor, “Remember,” reads a Holocaust memorial on a wall at Beth Meyer Synagogue in Raleigh. Remembering the Six Million has been not just a once-a-year day of observance—Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, falls May 6 this year—but a memorial preserved for posterity in monuments.
North Carolina’s memorials have now taken their place in this global remembrance.
The International Survey of Jewish Monuments (ISJM) has partnered with the Center for Jewish Art of the Hebrew University and Miller Center of the University of Miami, in the creation of an international database that documents Holocaust memorials around the world. Recently, Sam Gruber, ISJM president, toured North Carolina on a preliminary scouting trip to identify memorials to add to the international list. So far, he has added three state sites.
The Raleigh Zachor memorial, designed by renowned Israeli artist Mosh Zabari, is located in the synagogue foyer. A wooden case frames a Star of David made from overlapping gilded sheets of battered metal. Cut into the star in Hebrew is the word Zachor, backlit by red light, evoking an Eternal Lamp (Ner Tamid), Gruber notes. An inscription in Hebrew and English below cites Jeremiah 50:46, “And the cry is heard among the nations.”
Samuel D. Gruber
At Beth David Synagogue in Greensboro an obelisk stands in the lobby as a Holocaust memorial. Truncated, to suggest life cut short, the five-sided column, made by artist Paul Winthrop Wood and installed circa 1982, outlines in colored mosaic five figures, four of whom are marked with yellow stars. A row of tiles weaves across the panels with starbursts, linking the figures and evoking barbed wire, Gruber notes. A plaque quotes Israeli poet Abba Kovner, partisan leader of the Vilna ghetto: “To remember the past, to live the present, to trust the future.”
Samuel D. Gruber
A more recent monument, installed this past year in downtown Greensboro’s LeBauer Park, is the Women’s Holocaust Memorial. Designed by local sculptor Victoria Carlin Milstein, “She Wouldn’t Take Off Her Boots” is a bronze life-sized sculpture that depicts five huddled women, one of whom is a child, dressed only in their undergarments. Explanatory panels surrounding the sculpture include the photograph which inspired the sculpture. Taken in Latvia in 1941 by a Nazi photographer, the photograph depicted the women prior to their execution. A bronze camera on a tripod placed before the sculpture allows the viewer to bear witness.
“We now have about 850 memorial monuments described, photographed, and entered” in the database, Gruber notes. “There are thousands more.”
Samuel D. Gruber
Among the “more” is the Charlotte Holocaust Memorial. Originally erected in 1979 in Holocaust Square, the stone monument was relocated in 1998 to Marshall Park near the Martin Luther King memorial. On its slanted top, a plaque reads, “During the period 1939 to 1945 eleven million human beings, amongst them six million Jews, one third of the Jewish people, were tragically slaughtered by the Nazis and their collaborators. We dedicate this Square to their memory and to our belief that a reminder is necessary so history dare not repeat itself.” The base is inscribed, “Holocaust Square: The Voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. Genesis IV:10.”
In Charlotte’s Shalom Park is the Margaret and Lou Schwartz Butterfly Garden Holocaust Memorial at the entrance of the Blumenthal Education Building. The Butterfly Project is a worldwide program, founded in 2006, to craft one painted butterfly to honor each of the 1.5 million children murdered in the Holocaust. Since 2008, schoolchildren and Jewish and faith-based community members have created 58,601 ceramic butterflies to affix to the memorial.
Foundation of Shalom Park
The Holocaust Monument and Memorial Database can be accessed at https://cja.huji.ac.il/hmm/browser.php?mode=main.
