Holocaust museum reopens in Glen Cove

There is an unobtrusive green and white sign on the side of a winding tree-lined road in Glen Cove — it’s the only herald to motorists that they are at the entrance to the museum at the Welwyn Preserve.

The Holocaust museum was begun in 1994 through the efforts of survivors and their children. It has been reborn, reaching out to teach about the Holocaust and to teach tolerance to the surrounding communities.

Boris Chartan and other survivors “wanted to make sure that people remember,” said Beth Lilach, the museum’s director of education. “They wanted a place where survivors could come and feel at home.”

Chartan approached Nassau County, which offered the former summer home of Harold Irving Pratt, of Standard Oil, in the Welwyn Preserve. It was in complete disrepair, noted Lilach. The original museum was housed in one room of the leased mansion and told the story of the Holocaust using posters from the United States Holocaust Museum and Yad Vashem.

After four years of planning and renovation, including 18 months when the gallery was closed, the newly named Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County opened in January. Nassau County replaced the heating and air conditioning systems and installed a handicapped accessible bathroom and elevator. The center raised funds to restore the entrance, lobby, and 1st floor and to protect the building for fire and security.

The road to the center opens onto an expansive green in front of the brick colonial-style mansion. The 2500 square foot museum is off the central lobby. Photographs and explanations divide the rooms; they are interspersed with artifacts and audiovisual displays with films relating to each gallery.

“The artifacts were donated by Long Island-based survivors and their children,” explained Lilach. “It’s a very local museum and very personal. It presents the history through the perspective of the people first and foremost.”

The first gallery shows the life and events of Jews before the Holocaust, with photos donated by survivors and their children.

“It introduces visitors to Jews as a culture-rich people with lives before the Holocaust, not just as victims,” pointed out Lilach. The second gallery outlines the history of anti-Semitism, providing the “context for the Holocaust, she said. “Nazism didn’t occur from a vacuum.”

“Scientific anti-Semitism,” following the introduction of genetics and eugenics, superseded religious anti-Semitism, Lilach explained. She also pointed out that eighty percent of Jews left Germany by 1939, most fleeing to nearby European countries, not anticipating the virulent spread of Nazism. Other galleries take the visitor through the stages of the persecution from the first mass murders of people with disabilities, the Nuremberg Laws, the Evian Conference, Kristallnacht, ghettos, concentration camps, liberation, displaced persons camps, and military tribunals.

Other galleries address the “myth of ‘never again’” said Lilach. They represent six of the genocides that have occurred since the Holocaust - in Cambodia, Burma, Bosnia, Sudan, Rwanda and Iraq. Another wall holds photographs of people who stood up for others’ rights, including Carl Wilkens, Martin Luther King Jr., and

“One is greater than none” — a group of Long Island students whose goal was to rescue child slaves from Ghana. There is also a temporary exhibit room, now housing a display on immigration and caricature, from the Civil War until World War II, illustrating negative images of various immigrant groups in cartoons.

The museum has an extensive array of services and educational opportunities, including a 7000 volume lending library and state of the art research center for students; middle and high school curriculum trunks for teachers to borrow for free; workshops for teachers, employers and law enforcement personnel; literary and art competitions for students; and Holocaust class visits and tolerance training. The museum serves schools, communities and employers in Suffolk and Nassau counties and all five boroughs.

“Long Island needed a Holocaust museum,” stressed Lilach. “The Holocaust comes first, but through the Holocaust we teach about tolerance, bullying and advocating respect and acceptance of all people.”

The museum is at 100 Crescent Beach Road, Glen Cove, NY 11542. www.holocaust-nassau.org, telephone: 516-571-8040.