PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A design incorporating granite columns and simulated railroad tracks has been selected for a Holocaust memorial planned for Rhode Island’s capital, and the Jewish group overseeing its construction is beginning a fundraising campaign to make the monument a reality.
Herb Stern, chairman of the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island’s memorial committee, said the design for the memorial — to be located alongside ones for World Wars I and II at Market Square in Providence — was chosen from among about a dozen submitted.
The design by Providence sculptor Jonathan Bonner includes six black granite columns, in honor of the 6 million Jews killed, and a round white stone known as the “life stone” that he says is meant to represent the future.
It also contains a pathway inlaid with a pattern meant to suggest railroad tracks, reminiscent of the railways that carried Jews to the Nazi concentration camps across Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. It becomes narrower as it progresses, to represent the diminishing ranks of the Jewish population.
Stern, who estimates there are fewer than 20 Holocaust survivors remaining in Rhode Island, said Bonner’s contemplative, cerebral design was chosen over others that provoked far more visceral reactions.
“If it’s going to mean something, it’s going to have to come through the head,” Stern said he came to realize after debate by members of the memorial committee.
The design plans are set to be unveiled at an event at Brown University on Thursday evening designed to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day.
Alice Goldstein, of Warwick, who sits on the memorial design committee, was 7 when her father and two grandfathers were forced from their southwestern Germany village to the Dachau concentration camp. Her uncles were sent to Buchenwald.
“I remember being told to get off the streets because Jews pollute the streets,” she said, recalling how her father’s household goods store was forced to shut down because the Nazis called for a boycott of Jewish-owned shops.
Her grandfathers were deemed too old to work in the camps, and her father was released after six weeks following pleas from her mother. He was let go, she said, because the family had applied for visas to leave the country, as the Nazis wanted Jews out of Germany.
“It’s really important to have a physical reminder of what happened, because this is really the last generation of young people who will be able to actually speak with survivors,” Goldstein, now 80, said of the planned Rhode Island Holocaust memorial. “We are not going to be around another 10 or 15 years. It’s really important to plan for the future.”
The Jewish Alliance aims to raise about $800,000 for the memorial. Stern said he hopes the monument will be completed by this time next year.
Two stones serving as a kind of gateway to the memorial will be inscribed with text about the Holocaust. The hope is they could be embedded with chips to allow visitors with smartphones to access information digitally as well, Stern said.
Bonner, who teaches part-time at the Rhode Island School of Design, said he was prompted to get involved in the project in large part because he was moved by stories of the Holocaust he heard from two late neighbors. One was in a Jewish ghetto in Latvia, the other in Lithuania.
“It’s unfathomable, the horror of it,” he said.
While one could not
generalize for any Individual, it would be instead possible to define with
precision the features of every culture. This is because each person reacts
differently in regard to the culture of the Country in which is born (some
totally embracing it some even rejecting it). So you could not say that each
Jew behaves the same or all English act alike, for example, but you could know
exactly what their cultures are about and what they teach their own people.
They originate from local traditions that have evolved over thousand of years
in their particular historical environment and geographical climate. In Time
they have become what they are today.
It would seem that
societies closer to the cold temperature of North and South poles favor the use
of Reason more than those near the hot equator which are instead inclined
toward Instinct and the rule of Strength.
One Instinct which
moves with passion across the colorful land of the palm trees.
One Reason, or
collection of thoughts, that remains stable and freezes over the land of the
contemplative icebergs.
Among many, the Jewish
culture is the one with the largest mixture of Reason and Instinct.
Instinct is awakened
from the geographical location of Israel.
Reason instead comes
from one exchange of cultures acquired in the many Countries where the Jews
have lived for centuries before they reunited in Israel.
On one hand, the
distinction between cultures and people is here because each of us could be
born in any part of the World and that makes us not responsible for what we
have been taught.
In relation to that,
how could one “Muslim terrorist” or an “Israeli settler” be guilty of
anything if born today in a certain part of the World where they are all taught
to hate anyone else who is different than their own people?
To be born there was
not an Individual choice.
On the other hand, if
what is taught is been also the motive for constant conflicts over the
centuries then it is such teaching or culture that needs to be addressed.
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