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| Should you go? | |
| Time spent | 84 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned | In its section on the Holocaust in Hungary, Amud Aish displays the contents of a small, battered case. It belonged to Magda Horowitz, who survived, and brought it with her. It contained, among other relics, a challah cover her sister Edit embroidered as a child. Magda wanted to be buried with the case, her last link to her murdered family. But after visiting Amud Aish, she brought the case to them, said she changed her mind, she didn’t want the story to be buried after all. The case is nothing, but the story is everything, and every other object at Amud Aish has a similar one. But this one stuck with me the most.
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Amud Aish Memorial Museum is New York’s second museum of the Holocaust. However, this one is poles apart from the monumental, overwhelming, purpose-built museum on the shores of the Hudson in Lower Manhattan. Located in the farthest reaches of Brooklyn (at least, from my Manhattan-centric perspective), Amud Aish focuses specifically on the Orthodox community as both its subject and its audience.
I took a very long lunch recently to ride to the end of the number 4 train, then catch a 20-minute Uber ride to get to Mill Basin, where Amud Aish Memorial Museum occupies space in the corporate office of Americare Certified Special Services on the ground floor of a fairly nondescript multi-use building. There’s nothing on the outside that would tell you there’s a museum there. Indeed, it’s such a boring building I forgot to photograph it, so I have a screenshot from Google Street View instead.
No exterior signage confirms that the building actually does house a museum, though there is a discreet sign inside the lobby, where the office receptionist will confirm that, yes, a curious, appointment-having museum-completist is the right place.
Unspeakable banality
Like the exterior, the offices of Americare are absolutely nothing to write home about. Like the vast majority of corporate offices, beige and blah to the point of being slightly dehumanizing. When I first read about Amud Aish, I reacted with, I’d call it polite skepticism, about the suitability of putting any museum, much less a museum on this topic, in a corporate office.
Visiting changed my mind. Why shouldn’t the Holocaust be remembered in some underused corporate space in a random office in a random corner of New York City? Isn’t that exactly the sort of place where the Holocaust happened? I mean, of course there were the camps, the operational, horrific, business end of things. But Amud Aish’s space made me think about the obsessive records the Nazis kept. The massive bureaucracy that kept the trains running and the camps supplied. It reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase about Adolf Eichmann. I cannot imagine a more banal place for exploring evil than a modern American corporate office.
That being said, the next time anybody complains to me about the state of their workplace, and needing to go in to the office however many days a week, I have a retort. “You may think you have it bad,” I will say, “But at least you don’t walk by the systematic dehumanization of the Jews and the murder of six million people on the way to the coffee machine or the photocopier.”
What’s on view at Amud Aish
Chavi Felsenburg, Amud Aish’s Head of Acquisitions & Education, was kind enough to give me a personal tour of the museum (visitors must make an appointment for a tour in advance).
Amud Aish tells the story of what happened in Europe in a straightforward, chronological way. It begins in a small room just beyond the receptionist’s area, that conveys a taste of Jewish life before the Nazis, featuring report cards, school books, other ephemera. The Nazis come to power, Jews are increasingly stereotyped and demonized, and a hallway features a timeline of the step-by-step stripping of rights that led to Kristallnacht and, from there, to the ghettos, and from there to the camps.
An open space divided by photographic images of brick walls displays objects and photographs from the ghettos, then proceeds geographically, outlining what happened to Jewish people country-by-country (Germany, Poland, Hungary…) as the Holocaust unfolded. Detailed explanatory texts seem superfluous given a guided tour, but I appreciated being able to snap quick photos of them in lieu of taking notes.
Side stories illustrated with immigration papers and an ocean liner menu reflect Jews who escaped, through foresight, luck, or help. There’s a fascinating bit, mainly told via text, about the escape route via Asia to Japan and later Shanghai, either by sea or via the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Resilience and Recovery
Then the story moves to the end of the war, to the liberation of the camps and the long, slow path to rebuilding lives in the wake of the Holocaust. The museum emphasizes the lengths people went through to keep Jewish traditions and education alive. For example, it was a huge problem figuring out how rabbis could bless second marriages for people who lacked proof that their first spouse had been murdered.
A final section of displays discusses some of the people who worked to make the world aware of what was happening and to help Jews escape. People like Mike Tress, Yaakov Rosenheim, and Recha Sternbuch. This space is divided into a series of displays featuring detailed text biographies and photographs, along with documents and artifacts, about each of these individuals.
While Amud Aish is unflinching in the the facts of what happened, the overwhelming stats, it doesn’t dwell overly much on depicting the horror. There were mercifully few photos of mounds of dead bodies or living people who looked like skeletons. This is not for shying away from the horrors of what happened as much as it is a curatorial choice. “Amud Aish” is Hebrew for pillar of fire, as in the fire that guided the Israelites through the desert. A light in the darkness. Amud Aish is consciously more about how people survived than about how they died.
Priceless // Worthless
Most of the objects in the Amud Aish collection aren’t big showy things. They’re small, everyday, human items. A prayer book. A cloth to cover challah. A child’s shoe. Singed identity cards. Honestly, they seem like old crap from someone’s nana or bubbe. And, I mean, that is true, but it hits different when nana or bubbe have been through a genocide..
More than most places I’ve visited in my tour of New York museums, Amud Aish drove home to me how thin the line can be between the worthless and the priceless. Granted, that’s nearly always true — value is deeply subjective. Think about the fragmentary Greek sculptures at the Met, or the couple of centuries when nobody much cared for Vermeer. But the objects in Amud Aish’s collection make the point eloquently and powerfully.
In any other context the value of these objects would be trivial — sentimental at best. But these objects embody stories: a huge and terrible story, and also myriad small individual stories. They are tangible links to a horrific time. And somehow they survived against tremendous odds, when so much else, and so many people, did not. And now they rest, safe and cataloged, their stories recorded, in a museum embedded in a corporate office in a quiet neighborhood in the far reaches of Brooklyn.
I think when we met, Chavi and I were both expecting that she’d give me a a quick look around the place, a perfunctory whistle-stop tour. Instead, we ended up talking almost an hour and a half about Amud Aish and its purpose and the stories of the collection.
Chavi let me peek inside Amud Aish’s archive, an appropriately corporate 
storeroom lined with metal shelves. Banker’s boxes and archival containers contain documents, other objects, things Amud Aish has collected. Clearly, the museum could show more, tell more stories. But it’s small, scrappy, strapped for cash and support, and limited in space and person-power. For a place like this, just having the roof over its head is a victory.
What is a Museum?
When I started systematically visiting and writing about museums, I defined a museum as a non profit organization that has a physical space that aims to educate, and entertain at least a bit, its intended audience. That definition gave me a rubric for rating places without being overtly comparative about it.
But you can also define a museum, or at least judge its quality, in terms of curation. A museum is an institution whose purpose is to select and display, out of infinite things in the world, the things that are the most important, the best, the most symbolic, the most significant. The things someone needs to see if they want to know about… whatever. The history of immigration in America; the defense of the harbor; locks, locks, and more locks; the life of Antonio Meucci, an Italian immigrant who may have invented the telephone.
However big or small the subject, the success or failure of a museum comes down to the objects the curators chose to put on literal pedestals, and the stories people like Chavi Felsenburg tell about those objects to bring them to life for people who might be extremely distant in space and time from their creators and owners.
Some of these things, I can’t believe anyone kept them. Amud Aish has one of those striped-pajamas uniforms that everyone knows from “Schindler’s List” or history class. It belonged to Chaim Schmidt, who was in Bergen-Belsen. It’s frayed, worn. stained. If I were Chaim, if I survived what he did, I would’ve burned it. With extreme prejudice. But he saved it, another small, tangible link. I guess to help prove that, yes, it really happened.
Should you visit Amud Aish Memorial Museum?
I think most visitors to Amud Aish are Orthodox school kids or members of the local Jewish community. Who else is going to schlep out to Farthest Brooklyn?
That said, any Jewish New Yorker should think seriously about seeking out Amud Aish. Anyone with relatives who went through the Holocaust will find it a worthwhile place to reflect.
For non-Jewish people? It’s a harder call. Those interested in the history of World War II, the Nazis, and the rest, might find it a valuable resource. So would any history buff who is interested in smaller stories, the specificity of individual lives.
Amud Aish Memorial Museum is tells its harrowing story in a space that turns out to be sort of perfect, although also sadly inadequate. Its collection is both trivial and priceless. I hope some foundation or rich benefactor embraces it so that it find bigger and better ways to tell the stories of its objects and the people who owned and cared for them. But I also hope that it never has a monumental, starchitect-designed home like the Museum of Jewish Heritage or the Holocaust museums in DC or Berlin or wherever. The stories Amud Aish tells are small and human. I hope its space continues to honor that, whatever form it takes.
For Reference:
| Address | 5923 Strickland Avenue, Brooklyn |
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| Website | https://www.amudaish.org/ |
| Cost | General Admission: $25 (recommended donation.) Advanced reservations required for tours. |
| Other Relevant Links |
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In March of 2026, the Jewish Children’s Museum launched an escape room themed on the Book of Exodus. Designed for older kids and adults, operating in teams, the escape room requires reservations and a separate admission. I got to peek inside during my tour, and I’m obsessed with the idea of solving puzzles to get out of Egypt. I hear the exit even has a dramatic water feature that simulates parting the Red Sea!
The very modern building — nothing obviously traditional or historically informed about it —
giant matzoh ball soup (no swimming). I watched an animated, talking bottle of wine in a video embedded in a ginormous wineglass, something I’ve never encountered at another children’s museum.
The Traditions floor culminates in an impressively thorough overview of the Jewish holidays, designed as a village. Naturally it includes holidays like Hannukah and Yom Kippur and Passover that I reckon almost any New Yorker will know. And it also covers ones that I know less well but am fascinated by. Tu B’Shevat, the New Year of trees, features a somewhat creepy and ent-like animated tree, who explains that holiday.
Sarah Leah and I talked about how some of the exhibit designs from twenty years ago are showing their age. Mainly that relates to attention spans. Some of the videos and other interactive elements feel long to young visitors today, where they did not back in 2004. And fashions and tastes have changed enough in the past couple of decades that some of the videos look dated. (Though not as dated as the unintentionally hilarious biopic of young “Teedie” at the 
Like so many things in the Bronx, Bronx Terminal Market went into decline, rendered obsolete by the larger and more modern Hunts Point Market. This entire area fell into disuse and decay. Its rebirth happened because of nearby Yankee Stadium.
I want to break my rule and say that the whole building is my favorite thing about the Frick, but if I had to pick just one thing, I’m so happy to get to visit the Garden Court again. It’s lovely, green, and a respite when you need a minute away from the art.
The biggest change from the old Frick is the second floor. Formerly offices of the museum staff, and before that the family’s private living spaces, the Frick has reclaimed a series of upstairs rooms for art. Everything about them is fantastic, although I do worry that they’re so intimate that crowd control will prove a challenge.
Perhaps my biggest surprise — shock even — at the new Frick was a bowl of buttons at the member preview. Some bore the classy old-school “HCF” monogram logo, which, thankfully, The Frick has not thrown out in favor of some sort of superflat sans serif font. But the other buttons read, “FRICK YEAH!” If I’d been wearing pearls I would’ve immediately clutched them. Kudos to the marketing team for making a joke I never thought I’d see The Frick willingly make about its august founder’s surname.
It’s lame to pick the obvious crowd-pleaser, but I loved the centerpiece picture in the Il Lee show. IW-2201, 2012 is a big oil and acrylic work. Here’s a detail, a larger picture is in the review, below. Photos do not do it justice, though.
Funnily enough, Il Lee also loaned the Vilcek Foundation several bags of pens. Apparently he keeps every one he’s ever worked with. Those are on display in a plexiglas box in the middle of the ground floor gallery space. I’m a big fan of art that elevates humble materials, and there are few more humble than a Bic pen.
The exhibit also features an circular interactive table with multiple touchscreens. This gadget, designed to look like a record, that lets visitors explore in huge detail Louis Armstrong’s music, his collaborations with other artists, his travels, his life and the neighborhood, and more, all with stills, video, and audio. You could spend a long time exploring there.
The most unexpected thing about the house is the Armstrongs bought the lot next door and made it into an expansive garden, with pine trees, a little lawn, a tiny koi pond, and a bar and barbecue. In this one place, I felt a legendary musician exerting some star power. They only built the garden in 1970, so just a year before Armstrong died. Better late than never.
The Super Bowl exhibit’s walk down advertising memory lane was deeply nostalgic to me. Amid Cindy Crawford selling Pepsi and a baby selling a brokerage, Apple’s 1984 ad, introducing the Mac, stands out as possibly the most revered commercial of all time. Also, why did anyone think Spuds McKenzie was a good idea?
In 1991, the institution renamed itself the Museum of Television & Radio, since even then increasing amounts of TV was distributed in ways that had nothing to do with “broadcasting.” The same year the museum moved into a fun, Philip Johnson-designed post-modernist building, which is meant to resemble an old-timey radio.
he current iteration of the Paley Museum doesn’t have a permanent collection, although there are a few adorable antique TV sets on display in the library. Instead, it hosts temporary exhibitions on timely topics. To wit, when I visited in early February, the Super Bowl. And, in a nod to Black History Month, props and costumes from the Nat Geo “Genius” miniseries about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., in a modest second floor gallery.
The curators took a sensible chronological approach, with stats on each of the LVIII games along the top (who played, final score, TV audience size). Wall texts offered details on how the Super Bowl evolved, with images and video. Artifacts livened things up: balls and jerseys, helmets, playbooks, and, climax of the exhibition, the actual Vince Lombardi Trophy. (A reproduction belonging to the New York Giants was on display the day I visited, as the actual Trophy had important duties off in Vegas.).
Then again, the town of Bethpage on Long Island, which for some reason feels qualified to weigh in on New York City museums, rated the Paley Center a “best museum and best children’s party place” in New York in 2023. So…you may want to take that into account as you evaluate whether you should visit.