'We rise together and we fall together': Refurbished Illinois Holocaust Museum reopening

A few weeks before Wednesday's reopening of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, CEO Bernard Cherkasov toured the updated facility.

At his side was Dede Harris. A longtime supporter, board member and docent, she is the widow of Sam Harris, a Holocaust survivor who co-founded the museum and served as its president.

“We held hands,” Cherkasov recalled of the tour that followed a 15-month renovation of the museum. “Many times we stopped and cried because she was so moved by how welcoming and beautiful the spaces are.”

Among the improvements are a new reflection gallery; a larger, state-of-the-art auditorium; improved accessibility; a refurbished lobby and welcome center; and expanded exhibitions, including virtual reality and digital options available to visitors around the world.

Treasured items from the collection remain on display: holograms of survivors sharing their testimonies; a train car like those that transported people to Auschwitz; the blanket survivor Cipora Katz's father wrapped her in when the family escaped the Warsaw Ghetto; and Sam Harris' little brown belt. After his parents and most of his siblings were murdered at Treblinka, a Nazi death camp, it was the only thing he had left.

Remember the past, transform the future. That’s the mission of the museum established by Holocaust survivors in response to attempts by neo-Nazis to march through Skokie in the late 1970s.

In 2009, the museum relocated from a Skokie storefront to a 65,000-square-foot combination museum and education center at 9603 Woods Drive.

Designed by the late architect Stanley Tigerman, it is a visually striking, profoundly symbolic space. Representing the movement from dark to light, the museum's exterior juxtaposes the dark, angular, windowless wing with its white, curvilinear counterpart flooded with natural light. At the entrance stand columns evoking Solomon's Temple.

According to Cherkasov, attendance ranged from 60,000 to 80,000 visitors annually after the 2009 move. It grew to nearly 300,000 visitors during the 12 months preceding the renovation, he said. That growth prompted the upgrade, which cost about $10 million and was financed through public and private funds.

“The way we treat the Holocaust and genocide needs to evolve, and our space needed to evolve alongside it,” said board Chair Robert Romanoff.

That includes using technology to teach the lessons of the Holocaust to an international audience. To that end, the museum incorporates virtual reality to share survivor stories “both within the physical confines of our building and literally around the globe,” Romanoff said.

The enormity of the Holocaust is perhaps impossible to convey, but it is the museum's responsibility to “present the story in the most impactful manner we can and to make sure we reach as many people as we can,” he said.

“While our stories are rooted in the Holocaust, they don't end there,” Romanoff said, referring to exhibitions examining genocides in Rwanda, Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Burma and Cambodia, among others.

The museum also presents special exhibitions unrelated to the Holocaust. Past exhibitions include 2023's “The Negro Motorist Green Book” detailing how Black people navigated America during the Jim Crow era using a book listing safe places to visit. The museum examined gay rights as part of “Rise Up: Stonewall and the LGBTQ Rights Movement”; celebrated Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Nelson Mandela; and devoted much of 2019 to an exhibition titled “Purchased Lives: The American Slave Trade from 1808 to 1865.”

Opening Nov. 15 is “Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare,” an examination of the Red Scare's impact on politics, free speech, antisemitism and national security during the 1940s and 1950s.

The special exhibitions serve the museum's mission by reminding visitors that “inequity, injustice and indifference did not end after the Holocaust. They continue today, even in the U.S.,” said Kelley Szany, senior vice president of education and exhibitions.

The founders may not have imagined the museum as it exists today, but Szany believes they would have cheered its evolution.

“They always hoped. They always believed,” she said. “They always understood that more was possible. That's why we are where we are today as an institution.

“I believe they are beaming with pride at what has occurred over the past few years,” added Szany, whose 20-year tenure with the museum began when she was a Loyola University student intern. “We have honored their memory. We have done them proud.”

Szany and her colleagues continue to expand the collection. More recent additions include Marianne Rothschild Schwab's donation of a family painting slashed during the Kristallnacht attacks against Jewish homes, synagogues and businesses.

The slash marks are “a permanent reminder of the horrors unleashed that evening,” Szany said.

The museum also received a donation from the family of Leo Edelmann, a German-Jewish immigrant and owner of a Chicago auto parts company. The 160 documents included letters of support, wire transfer records and employment offers Edelmann wrote on behalf of at least 12 Jewish families he helped save.

“It was a lifeline from Chicago to occupied Nazi Europe,” Szany said.

Many people visit the Illinois Holocaust Museum hoping to find answers to today's problems. They see democracy and equal rights under threat, said Szany. They hear dehumanizing rhetoric that divides people by religion, appearance and gender, and they seek ways to “respond to injustice in the world today,” she said.

She and her colleagues encourage visitors to “use your voice to stand up to injustice in your community. Our survivors did.”

Ultimately, the museum serves as a memorial to survivors' strength, compassion, camaraderie and resilience, Cherkasov said. In their darkest days, they found a way to fight back and retain their humanity. Highlighting that shared humanity to prevent future atrocities is one of the museum's primary objectives, he said.

“We rise together, and we fall together,” he said. “If we don't learn from history, we're bound to repeat it.”

bvitello@dailyherald.com

<strong id="strong-72305a8311b660f37c0cd203a016f332">The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center</strong>

Where: 9603 Woods Drive, Skokie. (847) 967-4800 or ilholocaustmuseum.org

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday to Monday

Admission: Adults, $18; seniors, $12; students up to age 22, $8; children, $6. Virtual reality admission, $5; holography theater admission, $5.