Walking. Gossip. Travel.

Tag: Holocaust Memorial

  • New Orleans – Holocaust Memorial

    New Orleans – Holocaust Memorial

    [I originally posted this in July 2018 about a visit in January 2018, but I’ve reposted it to fix the broken image links]

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    The New Orleans Holocaust Memorial is located on the banks of the Mississippi River in a prominent location along the riverwalk.

    The memorial was designed by Yaacov Agam, an Israeli sculptor and artist who has designed some large structures, including the Hanukkah Menorah in New York.

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    The memorial was unveiled in June 2003 and was part-funded by the Goldring Family Foundation. It’s located in a place that visitors to the city might not expect to find a memorial to the Holocaust, but that does perhaps make it rather more thought provoking.

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    Visiting at night doesn’t really do the memorial justice, as these panels have themes relating to the Jewish community. The location was cause of some local upset in 2017 when a fried chicken festival used the memorial as a staff rest area. They promptly made it worse by saying that this was deliberately planned, although they’ve pledged to make changes for the 2018 event.

  • Bucharest – Holocaust Memorial

    Bucharest – Holocaust Memorial

    There were something like 350,000 Jews in Romania before the outbreak of the Second World War, today it’s something like 3,500. A large number of Romanian Jews who survived the war went to live in Israel, with Romanians forming their second largest population. Anyway, all of this meant that the Jewish population was somewhat forgotten about and there was no memorial to those who lost their lives during the Second World War. It was only in recent years that the Romanian Government accepted that some of the country’s own people were complicit in what happened to the Jews during the Second World War.

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    This Holocaust Memorial building was completed in 2009, at a cost then of around £5 million. It’s quite a brutalist design, although that stark look is what the designers were looking for.

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    These are grave stones from Odessa Cemetery which were part of a consignment of 24 railroad cars being sold as construction material. Some of these stones were salvaged by the Romanian Federation of Jewish Communities and were kept safe. There was another display of grave stones saved from the Bucharest Jewish Cemetery, but the glass in front of them was so dirty that it neither possible to see them clearly, nor take a photo. That probably needs fixing, as the memorial was otherwise beautifully maintained with the exception of one small piece of graffiti on a sign.

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    This symbolises the Roma wheel, a community who also faced the hate of the Nazis.

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    These stones represent those who lost their lives after being taken by rail to concentration camps.

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    And the Jewish symbol. It’s a rather different memorial and there’s a limited amount of information for visitors to read to understand what happened during the Second World War. However, the memorial is a bold statement that those who died won’t be forgotten. After many years of delay, the Government announced in the last few weeks that the city is going to get a Holocaust Museum, which is expected to open in around 2024 and will be at the Banloc-Goodrich building in Bucharest.