The Holocaust Memorial at Zion Memorial Park in Bedford Heights, Ohio, has been an anchor for the Cleveland-area Jewish network for more than 60 years. Today, it is the first Holocaust memorial site outside Washington, D. C. , to be designated a National Holocaust Memorial by U. S. lawmakers.
The memorial is probably the first and oldest Holocaust memorial in the United States, according to U. S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and the Kol Israel Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 1959 through Holocaust survivors who settled in Cleveland.
“This designation of a national memorial ensures that the Holocaust is denied. Forget it,” Hallie Duchon, executive director of the Kol Israel Foundation, told USA TODAY.
The designation came from the general federal spending bill that Congress passed on Dec. 23.
The Obelisk monument, which includes a crypt containing the remains of others killed in the Nazi genocide, was built by Holocaust survivors in 1961. Decades later, the U. S. National Holocaust Museum opened. He was held in Washington, D. C. in 1993.
In the 1950s, Holocaust survivors in Ohio, because of Morry Malcmacher’s idea, needed a booth to honor their lost circle of family members by reciting Kaddish, a Jewish prayer recited for the dead. Before coming to the United States, Malcmacher survived several German concentration camps. when he was a teenager before being released from the Dachau camp, his daughter, Anne Adelman, 75, told USA TODAY.
“After we came to America and settled, my father was just looking for a position where he could say Kaddish for his parents,” said Adelman, who was born in a willing people camp in Feldafing, Germany, in 1947.
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When World War II began, 89-year-old Louise Gips and her circle of relatives were uprooted from their home in Poland as children and forced to paint in a hard-labor camp in Siberia as prisoners of war, she says.
For the next two years, Gips and the city’s Jews had to go hungry, beaten and diseased due to overcrowding and lack of medicine, he said. Her late husband lost his entire circle of relatives in the Nazi fuel chambers, she said.
“Not a single one, not even a cousin or anyone, left,” Gips said.
After the end of World War II and when Gips discovered that foreigners lived in her family’s home in Poland, she, her parents and siblings went to a camp for displaced people in Germany. From there, they traveled to the United States and settled in Ohio. when Gips 14.
“It’s a miracle that you could go to war, because so many other people didn’t,” Gips said. “It was a miracle that we were here and our biggest concern was that the world wouldn’t remember it. “
“Now that we’re all a little old, the monument will be there to remember the world and let it forget,” he added.
Members of Congress and President Joe Biden have given the Cleveland Holocaust Memorial its national designation at a time when anti-Semitism is at an all-time high in the United States, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Several high-profile cases of athletes, musical artists and television hosts spreading incorrect anti-Semitic information have occurred in months, prompting complaints from civil rights groups.
That makes the designation of Ohio’s National Holocaust Memorial even important, Duchon said.
“These other people who need to deny it, they can try, but it happened,” he said.
The national memorial designation “preserves the heritage and stories of our ancestors, which is central to offering our original Holocaust education program,” he continued.
Gips said she would respond to Holocaust deniers by presenting herself and her circle of relatives, who are “miracles of survival. “
“Look at me, look at my children, look at my family, look at natural miracles,” he said.