California Gov. Gavin Newsom has launched the Governor’s Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education as a way to help students and teachers “recognize and respond to on-campus instances of anti-Semitism and bigotry.” The council will develop a volunteer speaker’s bureau, which could involve Holocaust survivors, to guide lessons about genocide, as well as to host seminars for educators and students.

In a 50-state study of millennials and Generation Z in the U.S. last year, researchers found that 63% of respondents did not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and 48% could not name a single concentration camp.

The state’s budget has also allocated $10 million for the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles to create a new exhibit of antisemitism, $2.5 million to expand the Holocaust Museum LA, and $2 million to contract with nonprofits that teach about the Holocaust.

On Oct. 16, 2021, three years after 11 people were killed at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, a man jogs along the fencing outside the dormant building, decorated with artwork submitted by Pittsburgh area school students. Renowned architect Daniel Libeskind is among those working to transform the site to share space with the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh.                                                                AP Photo/Keith Srakocic

With an urgency to preserve memory and modernize as the remaining Holocaust survivors enter their 80s and 90s, at least half a dozen Holocaust museums are being built or plan to break ground, according to an article in The New York Times. 

Steven Spielberg’s U.S.C. Shoah Foundation, founded in 1994 to record survivors’ stories, is teaming with the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida to build a museum in Orlando that will showcase the foundation’s library of 55,000 survivor video testimonies and also have high-tech virtual installations to appeal to younger people. Seventy six years after Auschwitz was liberated, there are an estimated 350,000 living Holocaust survivors, and the Shoah Foundation is scrambling to record their stories.

Of the 16 Holocaust museums in the United States, some are teaming with the Shoah Foundation and also looking to delve into related topics like injustice and bigotry in order to reach wider non-Jewish audiences by tackling topics beyond the Holocaust.

Other museums partnering with the Shoah Foundation include the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum and the Holocaust Museum LA. Those expanding their mission include the Holocaust Museum Houston and the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. The City of Miami Beach and Greater Miami Jewish Federation aim to add to a Holocaust memorial, incorporating Shoah Foundation videos and an educational space.

People pray at the 80th anniversary memorial for victims of the 1941 Nazi massacre of Jews at Babi Yar Kyiv, Ukraine. Babi Yar is the site of Massacres carried out by Nazi Germany’s forces during its campaign against the Soviet Union in WWII. The first and best documented of the massacres took place on Sept. 29 and 30, 1941, killing approximately 33,771 Jews.                                                                                                                              AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky

Sharsheret, a national nonprofit organization that focuses on helping Jewish women and their families cope with breast and/or ovarian cancer, has planned a week’s worth of programs, including a Shabbat program, cooking class, family activity, panel conversation and an exercise program, among others, to provide valuable information  to women at-risk and their families. The programs will be offered online, from Friday, Oct. 8 through Saturday, Oct. 16.

For more information about viewing and participating in the programs, visit www.sharsheret.org/.

A decade-long dispute over a portrait of Max Liebermann’s wife, painted by the German Impressionist and confiscated by the Nazis from her home in Berlin in 1943, has been settled with a financial payment to the artist’s heirs, two great-granddaughters. In a joint statement with the heirs, the Georg Schäfer Foundation, which came to own the 1930 portrait and two other works from Liebermann’s collection, said an anonymous private donor had agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the heirs in compensation for the three works. The foundation agreed that the provenance of the works will be clearly displayed in the Georg Schäfer Museum in Schweinfurt in northern Bavaria, which houses the foundation’s collection.

Among other claimants seeking restitution from the foundation are the heirs of Therese Clara Kirstein. The heirs say that a drawing by Adolph Menzel and a Liebermann study, once owned by Kirstein, were sold under duress shortly before her death or, more likely, confiscated and sold shortly after, The New York Times reported.

The red-brick Georgian-style home on a tree-lined street at the heart of the University of South Carolina campus has no sign posted yet. For the moment, it is as anonymous as the red-brick Dutch townhouse
where Anne Frank hid with her family from German soldiers. 

Opened on the eve of Yom Kippur this year, the new Anne Frank Center is dedicated to studying the legacy of the German-Dutch writer whose famous diary chronicled the two years she spent hiding in a secret annex in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Frank is being memorialized in the heart of the South as part of an educational effort to stem not only hatred of Jews, but bigotry, discrimination and racism more broadly.

The center is the brainchild of Doyle Stevick, associate professor of educational leadership at the university and an expert on Holocaust education. The center’s 1,060 square feet of exhibition space is interspersed with photos, timelines and references to the segregated South. 

With the opening of the center, funded by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the university and private donations, Stevick hopes it cements the university’s commitment to inclusion and civil society.