NY High School Houses Hands-On Holocaust Museum
Source: The Times of Israel
Down in the Bronx High School of Science basement, in a heavily trafficked area between the boys’ locker room and the nurse’s office, is the school’s most recent attraction — a professionally designed and curated Holocaust Museum and Studies Center.
With its collection of 1,000 artifacts, the state-of-the art facility may have only opened on April 19, 2013, but its existence is a labor of love begun three and half decades ago.
Before there was the field of Holocaust education, and before there were Holocaust museums and memorials in cities across the US, there was Stuart Elenko. Elenko (who died in 2009) was a Bronx Science social studies teacher who combined a passion for collecting historical memorabilia with a belief in the educational power of objects to establish a small Holocaust museum in a corner of the school’s library in 1978. He also instituted a Holocaust leadership class for students interested in learning Nazi-era history through primary sources, and who were willing to share their insights about the dangers of racism, hatred and intolerance with the rest of the student body.
Read the entire story in The Times of Israel.