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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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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.
If instead I had grown up in Brooklyn and been a fan of baseball, the number 42 would’ve had a similarly huge and cosmic significance. It was Jackie Robinson’s number when he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1947 to 1956.
The space is, to put it kindly, disheveled. A desk in at the front of the first room serves as the office, with various bits that should probably be thrown out or tidied up, just kind of out there. If you need a restroom break, visit the dive bar on the ground floor.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York occupies a huge (full city block) beautiful Italian palazzo of a building constructed for it in 1924. Its classical grandeur meant to evoke the stability of many centuries of tradition. Solid and rich, like a Medici. Which was important, because the Fed was then still a fairly young institution created to stabilize the financial system and steer the economy in the right direction.
For nearly a quarter of a century FDR and Eleanor lived there as their place in New York City. Actually it’s two houses designed to look like one from the outside. Franklin and Eleanor lived to the right, while FDR’s mom lived to the left. 
Today if anyone thinks of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s residence at all, they likely think of Hyde Park, the estate north of New York that houses FDR’s presidential library. That’s absolutely worth a visit; Roosevelt House in Manhattan pales by comparison.