Good for you

Thousands gathered in Skokie on this rainy Sunday morning to celebrate the opening of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, which is expected to be one of the last Holocaust memorials to be built in collaboration with actual survivors.

The theme of the celebration can be summed up in the short motto displayed on the museum’s web Site, “Remember the past, transform the future.”

It’s a motto whose difficult execution was made painfully clear by the Neo-Nazi protest of the museum that took place just outside its new campus.

The event featured many speakers; some internationally known and others whose fame may not extend past their own communities.  Each had something relevant to say about how a museum like this - one that is so closely tied to the past - can do much for our future.

Below is a review of what speakers like Bill Clinton, Elie Wiesel, and museum president Samuel Harris had to say.

Rabbi Herman Schaalman, head of the Emanuel Congregation in Chicago, delivered the Invocation.

Schaalman’s speech focused on the importance of remembering the loss of the Holocaust.

“We are not here only to dedicate,” said Rabbi Schaalman.  “We seek to comprehend who died, how they died, but no matter how hard we ponder and research, no matter how many articles and books we read, we are still overwhelmed by incomprehension of this evil.”

He said, “We know with profound certainty that we must be their witnesses; their voices.”

Skokie Mayor George Van Dusen asked a question when he took the stage; why Skokie?

“My answer is this: bashert — it was meant to be.”

Van Dusen explained that in the late 1970’s Skokie boasted the largest number of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel.  This particularity made the village a target of the American Nazi Party when they sought permission to march in Skokie in 1977 and 1978.

Van Dusen said the community fought the political group as a way to “never again be silent in the face of evil.”

Dr. Steven Nasatir, president of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, noted that the day of the opening, April 19, 2009, marked the 66th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

Governor Pat Quinn spoke of the lessons that will be taught in the museum’s Education Center.

Quinn said the center would serve “to educate all of us to evil and what we can do to stand against it.”

But the governor also expressed his belief in the heroes of the Holocaust.

“There are people on this earth who do the right thing,” he said.

Museum president Samuel Harris approached the lectern to a standing ovation.  He is a Holocaust survivor who was still a boy when he was sent to the Czestochowa concentration camp in Poland.

Master of ceremonies J.B. Pritzker introduced Harris by telling the story of the time a young Harris narrowly escaped death at the hands of a Nazi soldier while on a mission to find food for himself and his friends in the concentration camp.

“We survivors know first hand Hitler’s unprecedented evil bestowed on us,” Harris said.

Harris expressed his desire that his experience and those experiences recorded in the rooms of the museum will serve to prevent other genocides from happening.

His faith is still unwavering as he repeats Mayor Van Dusen’s sentiments earlier in the program.

“This was bashert,” Harris said, repeating Van Dusen’s earlier.

Next on the program was a video address from President Obama.

“Countless visitors will walk through the rooms of this museum and be reminded of a truth that speaks not just to our past but to our present and our future,” Obama said.

“There is no greater obligation than to confront acts of inhumanity from the concentration camps of Europe to the villages of Darfur.”

Klaus Scharioth, German ambassador to the U.S., followed Obama with a speech that spoke of the revitalization of the Jewish community and Jewish German relations.

“Today what matters most is not what has separated us in the past but what unites us in the future,” he said.

Israeli President Simon Peres also spoke in a video address in which he expressed Israel’s support of the new museum.

The last survivor to speak at the event was Nobel laureate and author Elie Wiesel.  Wiesel was 15 years old when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz, an experience that he recorded in his memoir, Night.

An active human rights advocate, Wiesel took the stage on Sunday to thunderous applause from the crowd.  And then he asked another question.

“Has the world learned the lesson?” he asked - to which he replied, “Sadly, I confess the answer is no.”

For Wiesel, the lesson is clear.

“We must learn now certain simple lessons that whatever happens to one community effects several communities.”

Wiesel called on the crowd to keep one thing in mind as they tour the new museum.

“Remember that life is not made of years but of moments,” he said.  “We must think of living.”

Finally, the keynote speaker of the day took the stage.

Former President Bill Clinton said he thought Skokie was a fine location for a new Holocaust museum.

“I think its important that this place of remembrance and learning is here not only because of what happened in Skokie three decades ago,” Clinton said, “but because it is in the heartland of the country.”

Clinton also spoke of an encounter in 1993 in which fellow headliner Elie Wiesel had urged him to do something about the Bosnian genocide.

Clinton acknowledged that he was late in acting against the killings in Bosnia.

“We acted more quickly in Kosovo but far too late in Rwanda,” he said.

Genocide is rooted in insecurity, Clinton said. “People have been dying because of who they are for a very long time.”

Clinton was the only speaker to speak in depth about the ways in which the lessons of the past can be applied to the present situation in Israel.  He implored the crowd to “think of the challenges facing Israel today.”

“How can you keep moving forward peace with the Palestinians who still believe in the promise of peace?” he asked.

“What do you do when you are trying to prevent the conditions which could create a future genocide for the survivors of the last one?”

Unlike Wiesel or Van Dusen, Clinton couldn’t answer his own questions.

It is perhaps intentional that he left the crowd with that thought; in hopes that the new museum and its teaching might lead us to the answer.