Latest news with #HolocaustMuseum
CBS News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in Skokie, Illinois, temporarily closing for renovations
The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in the north Chicago suburb of Skokie is temporarily closing for a major renovation project. The museum, at 9603 Woods Dr. near the site where the Edens Expressway crosses over Gold Road, closed all its exhibitions Monday. The museum will remain open for public programs and training sessions by reservation only through the end of the month, and will close completely on July 1. During the closure, the Skokie museum will be renovated to build a new lobby that can hold "vastly more guests of all ages and abilities." Also planned are a new visitor welcome center, a redesigned auditorium, and a reflection space in the Karkomi Holocaust exhibition. While the main Skokie museum will be closed, the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center will open a downtown satellite location featuring some of its most popular exhibitions. This satellite location will be in the former Museum of Broadcast Communications space at 360 N. State St. in River North. The State Street location will open this summer, and will remain open for a year. It will feature several award-winning exhibitions — including the museum's Virtual Reality and Holographic Theatres, and stories of survivors of the Holocaust and genocides around the world. The main Skokie museum will partially reopen on Jan. 2, 2026, with limited content that will be announced at a later time, and will fully reopen in the summer of 2026 with a grand reopening.
Reuters
6 days ago
- General
- Reuters
Several Paris Jewish institutions sprayed with green paint
PARIS, May 31 (Reuters) - Five Jewish institutions were sprayed with green paint in Paris overnight and an investigation has been opened, a police source said on Saturday. Police found the paint damage early on Saturday on the Shoah Memorial, which is the Holocaust museum in Paris, three synagogues and a restaurant in the historic Jewish neighbourhood of Le Marais, the source said. Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said on X that he was disgusted by these "despicable acts targetting the Jewish community". It was not yet known who committed the damage, or why. The Interior Ministry did not respond to a request for comment on details of the incidents. France has seen a rise in hate crimes: last year police recorded an 11% rise in racist, xenophobic or antireligious crimes, according to official data published in March. The figures did not break down the attacks on different religions.
Chicago Tribune
27-05-2025
- Business
- Chicago Tribune
Morrie Much, real estate attorney who was active in Jewish causes, dies
Chicago real estate lawyer Morrie Much co-founded the Much Shelist law firm and was active in Jewish causes, providing support to both the Holocaust Museum in Skokie and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. 'He was greatly skilled at his craft, particularly in the areas of real estate, corporate law and secured lending,' said Michael Freed, a law partner of Much's for 33 years. 'He took time to understand the people with whom he was dealing and zeroed in on the important legal issues in the matters that they brought him.' Much, 86, died of complications from prostate cancer April 30 at the Northbrook Inn memory care center in Northbrook, said his son, Larry. He was a resident of Highland Park. Born in Chicago, Much was the son of immigrants from Belarus. He grew up on Oglesby Avenue in the South Shore neighborhood and attended Hyde Park High School, where he was captain of the football team and competed in track and field, setting an Illinois state record for the shot put, his family said. Much received a bachelor's degree in 1959 from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and considered becoming an architect. Ultimately, however, he decided to pursue the law, and he picked up a law degree in 1962 from the University of Chicago Law School. Much took a job with the Chicago law firm Arvey, Hodes & Mantynband. He was drawn to real estate law because his father had invested in real estate and needed help with contracts, his family said. Much later joined the Raynor Mitchell law firm, where he became a partner. When the other Raynor Mitchell partners were retiring, Much decided to start his own firm, so he teamed up with lawyer Michael Shelist to form Much Shelist. Much Shelist grew to focus not just on real estate but also on antitrust law and estate law, among other practice areas. 'When I ventured into a new practice of representing clients in antitrust litigation, it was a departure from our firm's then-existing practice specialties,' Freed said. 'But Morrie saw the potential to the practice and led the firm's decision to support me in what became a significant practice area for us.' Much Shelist grew to be an approximately 90-lawyer firm whose partners were determined to remain independent as the legal industry consolidated. 'There's still more prestige in going to the bigger law firms,' Much acknowledged to the Tribune in 1995. 'No matter what a lot of interviewees tell us, if they get a job offer from a larger firm, 9 out of 10 times they'll take it because of what they see as perceived advantages. If they come with us, however, they usually find we're more collegial, more hands-on and offer challenging work.' Mitchell S. Roth, Much Shelist's co-chairman, called Much 'your consummate founding partner who was well-respected and the way you would picture a leader of a law firm.' 'Morrie was not only a successful real estate lawyer, but he also was approachable and was a visionary,' Roth said. 'He really left a legacy of firm culture, a strong family, doing it all and being successful without having to do it all at a large (law) firm.' Much also was active in the Chicago Bar Association, chairing its continuing legal education subcommittee and its land development and construction subcommittee. Much supported the Jewish United Fund of Chicago and helped to support the construction of the Holocaust Museum in Skokie and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which is a group that has worked to combat antisemitism, perform Holocaust research and hunt down Nazi war criminals. Much retired from his firm not long after turning 75, his family said. 'He was respectful, intelligent, generous caring nurturing father who took pride in honoring his word, being honorable and ethical,' Larry Much said. 'And while he was a stickler about contracts, he liked to keep things simple when it came to documents. That is what was important to him.' Much's wife, Janet, died in January. In addition to his son, Much is survived by two daughters, Elizabeth Much and Katherine Lipschutz; and four grandchildren. Services were held.
Epoch Times
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Epoch Times
83 Boxes of Nazi Papers Found Under Argentina's Top Court
In a chance discovery, Argentina's top court has found dozens of boxes of Nazi material confiscated by authorities during World War II. 'Upon opening one of the boxes, we identified material intended to consolidate and propagate Adolf Hitler's ideology in Argentina during the Second World War,' the Supreme Court Museum said in a statement on May 12. The discovery came to light while archives were being relocated in preparation for a new Supreme Court Museum. Among the documents found were postcards, photographs, propaganda material for the German regime, and thousands of notebooks belonging to the National Socialist German Workers' Party Organization Abroad and the German Trade Union. The current President of the Supreme Court, Horacio Rosatti, has ordered an exhaustive review of all the material found after its initial preservation. The court was able to piece together some of its history, it said. Related Stories 4/9/2025 2/5/2025 The 83 boxes were sent by the German embassy in Tokyo to Argentina in June 1941 aboard the Japanese steamship Nan-a-Maru. The embassy had then declared their contents as personal belongings and asked that they be cleared without inspection. Instead, Argentina's Customs and Ports Division halted the shipment and warned the foreign minister at the time that the volume and nature of the materials might jeopardize the country's neutrality during WWII. In response, the Special Investigative Commission on Anti-Argentine Activities, created by the Chamber of Deputies and active from 1941 to 1943, stepped in. Its president demanded a full report on the Tokyo shipment. On Aug. 8, 1941, customs officials and Foreign Ministry representatives randomly opened five boxes and found postcards, photographs, and propaganda material from the Nazi regime. When German diplomats asked for the crates to be returned so they could resend them to Tokyo, the commission went to court to stop them, arguing that the examined materials contained anti-democratic propaganda harmful to Argentina's Allied nations. They also pointed out that the embassy had already smuggled in a radio-telegraph transmitter under diplomatic cover. A federal judge then ordered the entire shipment to be seized on Sept. 13, 1941, and three days later sent the case to the Supreme Court. Eight decades later, during the museum-preparation move, those same crates were rediscovered gathering dust in the basement. The court has now transferred the boxes to a room equipped with extra security measures and invited the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires to participate in their preservation and inventory. Nazi Operations in Argentina Earlier this year, the Argentinian government, under the Javier Milei administration, made available to all citizens a series of declassified documents that include information on Nazi operations in Argentina. From 1933 to 1954, according to the Holocaust Museum, According to The 'Most of them would end up living their lives there, sometimes without even changing their names. Others, like Adolf Eichmann or Klaus Barbie, were eventually caught by the Mossad or Nazi hunters,' it said. In 2020, the Simon Wiesenthal center, named after the Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter, released a list of some 12,000 names of Nazis in Argentina, many of whom had Swiss bank accounts. In a statement on its website, the center In At least 14 of those accounts remained open into the 21st century, some even as recently as 2020. As a result of the committee's investigation, Credit Suisse said it pledged to further investigate its potential role in supporting Ratline activities.
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
An open letter to Sen. John Curtis
Dear Sen. John Curtis: You recently asked for input on four places you described as spots 'where American principles aren't just spoken, but also felt.' Those places, you said, are the Holocaust Museum, The National Museum of African American History and Culture, Arlington National Cemetery, and Ensign Peak in Utah. This open letter to you, in advance of your maiden speech on the Senate floor, is about one of those places: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Twenty years ago, our very large family went on a trip around the country. We visited national sites with historical significance, including the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall in Philadelphia and the Statue of Liberty in New York. When we arrived in our nation's capital, we had a long list of places to see: Smithsonian Museums, the Washington Monument, the Capitol Building, the White House and the Lincoln Memorial. But, on the very top of my list was the Holocaust Museum. One of the reasons I felt it was important for my children to see and understand what happened during the Holocaust was that many of the children in our family would not have been spared. You see, in our family, a number of our children have disabilities, are Black, have Jewish heritage or other attributes that would have made them targets during the Holocaust. People with disabilities were some of the first to be targeted under the Nazi regime, literally beginning the same day the war began. The Holocaust Museum Encyclopedia estimates that some 250,000 people with disabilities were 'euthanized' (murdered) during the regime. At first, doctors and staff in hospitals were encouraged to neglect patients, letting them die of starvation and disease. Infants and small children were also killed by lethal injection. Later, gas chambers were used. Next, we have children who have Jewish ancestry. Gone. My Black children? Obviously 'inferior' to the 'ideal' race envisioned by Hitler and his goons. Black people in Germany faced discriminatory laws and policies that restricted their economic and social opportunities. They were also harassed, imprisoned, ostracized, unable to find work, involuntarily sterilized and yes, murdered. In 1935, the Nazi government enacted two Nuremberg Race laws. The first, the Reich Citizenship Law, restricted German citizenship to those 'of German or related blood.' The second outlawed interracial marriage and any sexual relations between Germans and Black or Roma people. As we moved through the museum and its special exhibit at the time on medical 'experimentation,' several of my older children were indignant. 'That's not right!' they exclaimed. 'That's not fair!' Of course, they were right. They, like many people, wondered how things could have gotten so bad that mass killings became just a job. That leads me to my second reason for taking my children to the Holocaust Museum. I wanted them to understand that genocide does not start with killing. In fact, Sen. Curtis, when I talked to one of my children about this letter, I asked them what had stood out to them about the visit. My son was 15 at the time and told me that first, the museum had made a deep impact on him and is something that still comes to his mind. Second, what really stuck with him is just what I had hoped: that genocide does not begin with killing. That's where it ends. Dr. Gregory Stanton, founding president of Genocide Watch, has observed that every genocide has predictable processes, or ten 'stages,' although he is careful to clarify that this is not a linear process. Multiple stages can happen simultaneously. The first four stages all have to do with 'othering' people. The first stage is classification, when we classify the world into 'us versus them', including separation by race, ethnicity, religion and national origin. The second is symbolization, when we begin to give names to those classifications: Jew and Aryan, Hutu and Tutsi, Turk and Armenian. Sometimes the symbols are more than just naming, but are physical, like the Nazi yellow star, or the blue scarves the Khmer Rouge forced people from the eastern zone of Cambodia to wear. The third stage is discrimination, when laws and customs prevent groups of people from exercising their full rights as citizens or as human beings. Groups of people can't work, can't marry, can't send their kids to school and can have citizenship stripped away. They can't get redress in courts, can't vote and can't get passports. The list is extensive on how laws are used to further the othering. The fourth stage is dehumanization — calling people cockroaches, vermin, animals, a 'cancer' or disease. The dehumanization makes it easier for people to kill those they classified, symbolized and discriminated against. It becomes an act of patriotism to 'cleanse' society rather than seeing it as the murder it is. The fifth stage is organization, usually by the state, often using militias and armies. Sometimes, hate groups are militarized. The organization can be formal or informal, centralized or decentralized. The sixth stage is polarization, when 'moderates are targeted who could stop the process of division, especially moderates from the perpetrators' group.' The seventh stage is preparation, when plans for deportation and eventually killing are made by leaders. Perpetrators who support the leaders plans are usually trained and armed. The eighth stage is persecution, when victims are 'identified, arrested, transported, and concentrated into prisons, ghettos, or concentration camps, where they are tortured and murdered.' The ninth stage is extermination, or genocide, the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Finally, the tenth stage is denial. Denial continues the genocide, because it is an ongoing attempt to destroy the victim group psychologically and culturally, and to deny its members even the memory of the murders of their relatives. In my mind, one of the key lessons we should learn as individuals and society is that, believe it or not, actions have consequences. There was a musical a number of years back that had a song with the words: 'When I choose the very first step on the road, I also choose the last.' I want my children, my grandchildren, my neighbors, friends and fellow residents of planet Earth to deeply internalize that when we say 'never again,' we must start at the beginning of the process and not the end. The Holocaust Museum is sacred ground, not only because of its deliberate efforts to remember those that some would prefer forgotten, but also because of its hopeful belief that genocide can be averted. As you pointed out in your letter, you do not want to be a politician that fits Aesop's insight, 'After all is said and done, more is said than done.' The Holocaust Museum should be a stark reminder that action must be taken when society begins to head down the road that leads to destruction of an entire population. I wish you all the best in your time as a Senator. My plea to you is to please take action and stand for those being 'othered.'
