Beit Terezin
 Beit Terezin, exterior view, right the rotunda |
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| Data | |
|---|---|
| place |
Givat Chaim (Ihud) 
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| Art |
Holocaust memorial and educational institution
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| architect | Albin Glaser |
| opening | 1975 |
| operator |
Association in memory of the martyrs of Theresienstadt
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| management |
Tami Kinberg
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| Website | |
Beit Terezin or Beit Theresienstadt ( German : Haus Theresienstadt ) is a research and educational institution opened in 1975 in the Kibbutz Givat Chaim (Ihud) , a museum and a place of remembrance of the victims of National Socialist persecution of the Theresienstadt concentration camp .
founding
In May 1955 the first informal meeting of survivors of the Theresienstadt concentration camp took place in Israel , and the participants decided to found an educational institution. In 1966 the Association was established in memory of the Martyrs of Theresienstadt , whose members were former prisoners of the Theresienstadt concentration camp living in Israel, including former members of Zionist youth organizations. The association not only aimed to meet the survivors, but also to set up an educational institution. This facility was intended to keep the memory of the murdered alive, especially the victims of the Hechaluz and their leading member Jacob Edelstein , the first Jewish elder of the Theresienstadt ghetto.
One of the motivation for setting up Beit Terezin was to avoid Holocaust remembrance by the communist government of Czechoslovakia. The Small Fortress Theresienstadt became a national memorial for the victims of fascism , but neither here nor on the memorial plaque in the city were the murdered Jews explicitly mentioned. The Pinkas Synagogue in Prague , which served as the national memorial for the murdered Jews of Czechoslovakia from 1960 to 1968, has not been accessible since the Prague Spring of 1968.
In its first meeting, the preparatory committee dealt with fundamental questions, such as opening up the association to all survivors of the Theresienstadt concentration camp or only to members of the Hechaluz. Another question was whether only the victims should be commemorated in this place, who died in Theresienstadt, or also those who were murdered in other camps after being imprisoned in Theresienstadt. In 1966, when the Association in Memory of the Martyrs of Theresienstadt was formally recognized, the members still met in cafes or in the offices of members who had access to suitable rooms due to their professional activities. It was agreed that there was an urgent need for space for meetings, for memorial services and for the storage of documents and research papers.
In the mid-1960s, many survivors of the Theresienstadt concentration camp lived in Kibbutz Givat Chaim (Ihud) . In addition, among the founders of the kibbutz were many Jews from Germany and Austria and members of the Zionist youth organizations who had often lost relatives in Theresienstadt. This group of people was benevolent towards the establishment of a memorial or educational institution on the land of the kibbutz. In addition, it was the wish of the association that Beit Terezin would be built in the midst of a lively community and not far from public life. The choice of kibbutz Givat Chaim (Ihud) was also favored by its central location - at that time only a few of the members of the association, which were scattered all over Israel, had a motor vehicle, most of them relied on public transport. After all, Jakob Edelstein, who was generally revered and murdered in Auschwitz, wanted to settle in the then undivided kibbutz Givat Chaim after his emigration to Palestine . Also because the kibbutz was to use rooms in Beit Terezin for its own cultural events from the start, the association was assigned a building site in the middle of the kibbutz.
The founding members of the association were the Israeli journalist and translator Ruth Bondy from the Czech Republic , a survivor of the Holocaust and a former prisoner of the Theresienstadt concentration camp and several other concentration camps, and the diplomat Zeev Shek , also a survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and the Kaufering subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp . Shek later became the Israeli ambassador to Austria .
The foundation stone was laid in 1969 and the building was erected with the support of Zionist youth organizations. Beit Terezin was opened in early May 1975 on the 30th anniversary of the liberation of the Theresienstadt concentration camp by the Red Army . At this point in time, the setup was far from complete. The interior of the memorial hall consisted only of the floor mosaic and a Torah , the walls were bare. There were proposals for a modern audiovisual presentation of the history of the ghetto, but the financial resources available made this impossible. Following a suggestion by Albin Glaser, backlit image foils with accompanying texts were attached to the walls to illustrate the development of the ghetto. It took until 1974 to realize the exhibition as intended.
building
The planning of Beit Terezin had to take into account the limited financial resources of the Association for the Memory of the Martyrs of Theresienstadt . The design of the facility was developed by the architect Albin Glaser , himself a survivor of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. His design is a facility in simple architecture, the rooms of which allow a variety of uses. The central element is the twelve-sided rotunda made of red-brown bricks, the layout and material of which is intended to be reminiscent of the Theresienstadt Fortress and which originally served as a memorial hall and place of remembrance. Today it is the main room of the Beit Theresienstadt Museum and with its permanent exhibition the core of Beit Terezin.
A library with reading room and a small room for lectures and cultural events were built for use by the kibbutz. For Beit Terezin itself, an archive, a reading room and a lecture hall are part of the complex.
Glaser's original plan also included a building to house those documents about the Theresienstadt concentration camp that Zeev Shek had compiled in Prague on behalf of the Jewish Agency for Israel and brought to Israel immediately after the Second World War . These documents were initially housed in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for years and were to form the basis of the Beit Terezin archive. At the instigation of the then Israeli foreign minister, Moshe Sharet , whose secretary was Zeev Shek at the time, the documents on the Holocaust were not to be distributed among many small institutions, but were to be kept centrally. Therefore, Shek handed the documents over to Yad Vashem . The resulting waiver of a documentation and study center led to disputes within the association. Ultimately, smaller rooms were created to house the archive without competing in any way with Yad Vashem or other large institutions.
A second conflict about the design of Beit Terezin concerned the floor mosaic of the rotunda planned by Glaser. The design depicted the road network and buildings of the Theresienstadt ghetto, and it cost 100,000 Israeli pounds to build . Within the association, the costs were criticized; some members saw the amount better invested in education and research. In addition to the financial aspect, it was stated that the pictorial representation would only be understood by the survivors of the ghetto; other members were convinced that the detailed representation of the streets, paths and buildings of the ghetto would preserve the atmosphere of oppression for future generations. Eventually the mosaics were made according to Glaser's design in Kibbutz Givat HaShlosha , and the design is generally accepted.
Exhibitions
The theme of the permanent exhibition is the occupation of the Czech Republic by National Socialist Germany from 1939 to 1945, in particular the history of the Jews in the Theresienstadt ghetto from November 1941 to May 1945. Works by artists from the ghetto are shown in other exhibitions.
In 2009, a special exhibition on the Theresienstadt football league was prepared under the title Liga Terezín . Oded Breda, head of Beit Terezin at the time, supported director Michael Schwartz and cameraman Avi Kanner in the production of their 2013 documentary, Liga Terezín , in which they describe the history of football in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Also with the support of Beit Terezin, part of the permanent exhibition in the German Football Museum, opened in 2015, was designed in memory of the Theresienstadt football league and Julius Hirsch and other persecuted and murdered Jewish footballers.
Beit Terezin has developed two exhibitions that are particularly aimed at children and young people. The first exhibition deals with the title They called him "Freund", the children's magazine "Kamarád" of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, in which articles written or drawn by children about their everyday experiences with hunger, death, illness, dirt and overcrowding in the camp were published. In addition to the description of the magazine with exhibits, the fate of the authors up to their murder in Auschwitz is presented. A second exhibition is entitled "Sport and Youth in Theresienstadt". It is dedicated to the diverse sporting activities of the children and adolescents in the concentration camp and makes particular reference to the importance of sport for the education and values of the young prisoners.
In 2011, Beit Terezin was accredited as the 54th museum and the third Holocaust museum of the State of Israel .
Education Centre
The education center of Beit Terezin was opened in 1993 and serves to research and document the Holocaust. For this purpose, events and seminars are offered for schoolchildren of all ages. Further seminars are aimed at students of various disciplines, members of the Israel Defense Forces , teachers and other multipliers and retirees.
The topics dealt with in the events include the history and fate of Central European Jewry, the measures to establish the ghetto and the "final solution", internal resistance, the function of sport in the camp, the maintenance of educational institutions under the most difficult circumstances, art as a means for survival and more.
With the Annual Hanna Greenfield Writing Competition, Beit Terezin organizes a writing competition for young people every year, which is named after Hanna Greenfield , an Israeli writer and survivor of the Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps .
archive
The archives of Beit Terezin, along with the archives of Yad Vashem, the Jewish Museum in Prague and the archives of the Theresienstadt Memorial, are among the four most important archives with material on the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Numerous archive materials come from the private collection of survivors, including diaries, photographs, materials for school lessons in the concentration camp, pictures and other works of art.
Numerous documents ended up in the Beit Terezin archive as part of larger donations. Thanks to his good contacts, Zeev Shek was able to obtain a copy of an index with the data of more than 162,000 Jewish prisoners of the Theresienstadt concentration camp from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark and other European countries. The index was drawn up in Prague immediately after the Second World War . This index was invaluable during the Cold War, especially as the government of Czechoslovakia, like all Eastern Bloc countries, severed diplomatic relations and severely restricted the exchange of information after Israel's victory in the Six Day War in 1967. This index forms the core of the Beit Terezin archive and information about the fate of missing people is still available today on request from relatives.
In addition to the index mentioned, Shek managed to take the archive of Hechaluz Theresienstadt with him to Palestine. He first handed the material over to the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People , from where most of it was given to Yad Vashem in 1976. Extensive picture material from this stock is in the archive of Beit Terezin.
staff
In the early years, almost all of the work, from the construction work for the construction of Beit Terezin, the administration, the guided tours through the exhibition to the implementation of the educational events, was done by volunteers. In most cases these were survivors of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and to a lesser extent residents of the kibbutz and other volunteers. The administration of Kibbutz Givat Chaim (Ihud) provided two members of the kibbutz and Theresienstadt survivors, Pinda Shefa (until 1982) and Aliza Schiller (until 1998), to lead Beit Terezin. The age and death of the members of the first generation and the steadily increasing workload made it necessary from 1998 to fill the management of Beit Terezin full-time. Today permanent employees are employed for various tasks in the museum, educational sector and archive.
Sponsoring association
Beit Terezin is still under the sponsorship of the Association in Memory of the Martyrs of Theresienstadt (Theresienstadt (Terezin) Martyrs Remembrance Association) . At the beginning the association was an association of survivors of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The association has gradually opened up, initially through the admission of the "second generation", children of survivors who were born after their parents were liberated. 1997 the representation of the "second generation" in all bodies of the association was established in the statutes of the association. Today anyone can become a member who is willing to support the work and goals of Beit Terezin.
Newsletter Dapei Kesher
Beit Terezin has been publishing the semi-annual newsletter Dapei Kesher since 1976 . The purpose of the publication is to maintain contact and the exchange of information about Beit Terezin between the members of the (Theresienstadt (Terezin) Martyrs Remembrance Association), who are distributed all over the world . Further content relates to the history of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, with information about meetings of survivors, congresses, exhibitions, cultural events, publications of books and media from all over the world. From the first edition, Dapei Kesher was edited by Ruth Bondy for more than 20 years.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Beit Terezin at www.gedenkstaetten-uebersicht.de, accessed on October 18, 2018.
- ↑ a b c d e f g The Founding of Beit Terezin , Beit Terezin website, accessed October 18, 2018.
- ↑ a b c d e Construction of the building , Beit Terezin website, accessed October 18, 2018.
- ^ German Football Museum - Liga Terezin corner , website of Liga Terezin, accessed on October 18, 2018.
- ^ Carignan, Marjorie E., Why Are There So Many Diverse Holocaust Museums? A Journey through the Holocaust Museums of Five Nations, Master thesis, State University of New York, Buffalo 2012, pp. 87-88, PDF 5.8 MB , accessed on October 18, 2018.
- ↑ a b c Development of Beit Terezin , Beit Terezin website, accessed October 18, 2018.
- ^ A b Education Center , Beit Terezin website, accessed October 18, 2018.
- ^ "Night Butterfly". The Annual Hanna Greenfield Writing Competition , invitation to the 2017 writing competition on the Beit Terezin website, PDF (227 kB), accessed on October 18, 2018.
- ↑ a b Tobias Blanke, Veerle Vanden Daelen, Michal Frankl, Conny Kristel, Kepa J. Rodriguez and Reto Speck: From Fragments to an Integrated European Holocaust Research Infrastructure. Pp. 157–177, PDF 2.0 MB , accessed on October 18, 2018.
- ↑ General Information , Beit Terezin website, accessed October 18, 2018.