Event Spotlights Mission of US Holocaust Museum

A program called, “Jewish Refugees: Journeys to America,” on the evening of March 20 was an opportunity to highlight the continuing value of and urgent need to support the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

The program featured a conversation with USHMM curator and historian Edna Friedberg and Atlanta attorney and author Ted Blum, whose book about his family’s journey to safety in the U.S. was published in 2022. Both Friedberg and Blum are children of Holocaust survivors.

The invitation-only event was held at the home of Kevin and Cindy Abel. Kevin Abel is one of 10 individuals appointed by President Joe Biden to serve on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the governing body that oversees the work of the museum.

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According to Blum, a managing shareholder at the Greenberg Traurig law firm, his book is titled, “Calculated Risks,” because his mother’s father, Martin Mandl, a metallurgist and chemist in Budapest, was a risktaker. When the situation became dire for Hungarian Jews in the late 1930s, Martin understood that the family needed to leave Europe. Despite the near insurmountable difficulties of getting out, he was able to obtain a tourist visa, along with his brother, to go to the United States, telling authorities they planned to attend the world’s fair in Queens, but in reality, the goal was to figure out how to get his family out of Europe.

Kevin Abel, who serves on United States Holocaust Memorial Council, and his wife, Cindy Abel, hosted the “Jewish Refugees: Journeys to America” program.

Two years later he did. And after a perilous journey, the family he left behind – Blum’s grandmother, Elizabeth, and her children (Blum’s then 3-year-old mother Eva and her 9-year-old sister Georgine) joined Martin in America in 1941.

Blum began his family research during the pandemic, uncovering documents and artifacts, including the yellow star his great-grandfather was forced to wear in Hungary. During research, he had utilized USHMM’s resource-rich website, but Blum had never been to the museum until just recently, in advance of this program.

“I’d been to Yad Vashem many times and knew I was a child of a survivor, and I had done research and thought I knew enough. But when I got to Washington and went into the Memorial Museum, I started going into the inch-by-inch, non-inevitable history of what happened – moment by moment – how we slipped into the Holocaust,” he said. “I was entranced because we know the punchline. We know what happened, how many people died, the scale of the war, and the scale of the devastation. We know all those things. But when you go into the museum … you just get sucked into the abyss step by step. And it was really powerful.”

Now at 32 years, USHMM will soon welcome its 50 millionth visitor. Its funding varies somewhat each year, according to Robert Tanen, USHMM’s Southeast regional director, but approximately 40 percent comes from congressional appropriations and 60 percent is privately raised.

Said Tanen: “Amid the sharp rise of antisemitism, conspiracy theories, and Holocaust distortion, it is critical that we support the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s mission to uphold and preserve the legacy and lessons of the Holocaust.” The museum seeks to be both accessible and innovative in its reach. In addition to its permanent exhibition in Washington, Friedberg described the traveling version of its exhibition, “Americans and the Holocaust,” which has so far visited 50 public and university libraries in smaller cities that typically have less access to Holocaust resources. The exhibit was displayed at the Athens-Clarke County Public Library last December.

Ted Blum holds the yellow star his great-grandfather was forced to wear in Hungary that Blum found among his family’s artifacts.

Friedberg explained that historians realize that “we cannot continue to tell the stories the same ways over and over, so we have iteratively adjusted how we communicate and what level of knowledge we can assume.” For example, in efforts to reach teens, who are on their phones a lot and consider the Holocaust “ancient history,” USHMM has created short video stories, including one called, “Undeniable Truth,” that appear on online platforms like Tik Tok.

USHMM is also in the process of completely re-doing its permanent exhibition. The five-year project is expected to open sometime in 2029. Friedberg described the reasons. “First, because of the shift in levels of knowledge and perspective that the average visitor brings to the museum; second, the incredible advances in scholarship around this history that allows us to inject new levels of complexity and even specificity; and third, changes in progress of technologies of the exhibits, that we can tell stories in more effective ways than we could before.”

About the event, Blum later posted on LinkedIn: “It was a great evening centered around the important role the USHMM plays in shining light on the past and shaping the future fight against antisemitism, conspiracy theories and Holocaust distortion. Thank you to generous hosts Kevin and Cindy Abel!”

Tanen told the AJT: “Nearly 60 attendees joined us to learn how the Museum – an institution founded by an Act of Congress and located alongside our nation’s monuments to freedom in Washington, D.C. – is reaching key audiences far beyond our walls. From our traveling exhibition to our summer Arthur and Rochelle Belfer National Conference for Holocaust Education, to our global effort to rescue and preserve the evidence of the Holocaust, the Museum is ensuring that the truth of the Holocaust is secured for future generations.”