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May 7, 2004/Iyar 16 5764, Vol. 56, No. 33
Polish stone for Cuba's Shoah memorial
LARRY LUXNER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
SANTA CLARA, Cuba - Barely a five-minute taxi ride from Cuba's imposing shrine to Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara is a lesser-known monument honoring the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.
The unpretentious memo-rial is located within the crum-bling Jewish cemetery of the city of Santa Clara, home to only 23 of Cuba's estimated 1,500 Jews.
The monument's centerpiece is an original cobblestone from Chlodno Street in the Warsaw Ghetto. The 19-pound block was donated by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, following lengthy negotiations by two Cuban-American Jewish women who wanted to do something for the island they left years ago.
Aida Wasserstein of Wilm-ington, Del., said she first went back to Cuba in March 1999 on a Jewish humanitarian mission and later reconnected with Miriam Saul, a childhood friend now living in Atlanta. Saul introduced her to David Tacher, the leader of Santa Clara's tiny Jewish com-munity.
"Tacher told us he wanted some tangible object that had survived the Holocaust," Wasserstein said.
Saul had thought it would be an easy task, but said it turned out to be "gargantuan."
"All the Holocaust survivors we knew had already given whatever they had to museums, and the museums hesitated because they didn't want mementos to be wor-shipped like idols," she said.
In the end, the solution was to bring a piece of the Wash-ington museum to Cuba.
Diane Saltzman, chief curator of the museum's collections division, said that shortly before it was inaugurated, her institution had received a gift from the Polish government consisting of several crates of cobble-stones removed from a street inside the Warsaw Ghetto.
"In the museum, there's a section where you can actually walk on the stones," she told JTA. "Over the years, we've saved a small cache of stones that we weren't doing anything with, and they felt it was important to memorialize the Holocaust in Santa Clara."
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