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March 11, 2005/Adar I 30 5765, Volume 57, No. 28
Phoenix may get Holocaust memorial
Survivors' association and historical society team up to realize dream
DEBORAH SUSSMAN SUSSER
Associate Editor
The members of the Phoenix Holocaust Survivors' Association have decided that they would like to leave behind a physical reminder of their presence in the form of a memorial.
For more than a year, the association's president, David Kader, has been searching for a site and a design. Both have now been preliminarily settled upon.
The site of the planned memorial is on the grounds of the CutlerAPlotkin Jewish Heritage Center in downtown Phoenix, which houses the first synagogue built in the Valley. The property belongs to the Arizona Jewish Historical Society.
Risa Mallin, AJHS executive director, said she was thrilled when Kader suggested building the Holocaust memorial on the synagogue grounds. "I had always been involved in the Holocaust issues in the community for the last 25 years," she said. "It didn't take much of a sell to convince me that this was really the place that this should be."
According to Mallin, the details of the agreement between the Survivors' Association and the AJHS have yet to be worked out, and nothing has been formalized in writing.
"There are so many issues (concerning the restoration of the property) to be discussed that this Holocaust memorial is not the first thing on the burner," she explained.
Stu Siefer, AJHS building committee chairman, noted that several elements comprise the master plan for the property, including renovation of the synagogue itself. The final element is the Holocaust memorial, slated to occupy a portion of the site that is 84 feet by 84 feet, on a space northwest of the synagogue building.
"The project, without the memorial, will cost about $6 million," Siefer estimated. "That's construction costs and interiors. That would not include operating costs."
According to Siefer, the AJHS is putting together a program to raise funds for the project.
Bill Tonnesen, the primary artist on the design of the Holocaust memorial, is a local landscape architect who two years ago dedicated himself to becoming an artist in 12 months.
"I can become compulsive on a subject," Tonnesen explained in an interview at his Tempe studio. "That was the case with my career in the art world, and now I'm doing the same thing ... I'm crazy about all things Jewish."
Tonnesen is not Jewish, which he freely acknowledges. "The fact that I'm not Jewish and how that plays into things?" he offered without being asked. "The Holocaust is not a Jewish event. It's a catastrophe of mankind."
To describe the design of the memorial, Tonnesen began with his "ideal memorial," given no technical or financial constraints: "Super computer robots scour the dust of Europe and recreate all the Jews who died and capture them in full-scale figures. If we do that and ask that these figures are shoulder-to-shoulder with an inch or two between them, it will take 550 football fields to realize the loss of European Jewry. ... We don't have that much land and it would be too expensive.
"So I have said, 'What if we use steel pins?' No one has ever done what we're attempting to do. It's to see what six million things look like without containerizing them."
Tonnesen cites James Young, a professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst who is considered by many as the world's foremost authority on memorials and memory, as "this connecting person. His sensibility about which memorials are more successful has become ours."
Rather than arriving to see something, Tonnesen explained, visitors to the memorial would experience "quite the opposite," beginning with a ramp leading down into the earth. "At the entry point (to the memorial), you're 12 feet down. Then you enter the Valley of the Six Million. You step off into what I think will be a slightly uneasy space."
He envisions that the walls four stories above and one story below would be covered with steel pins, six million in all. "When you finally enter the memorial proper, you will be standing in a single empty room," said Tonnesen. "In the middle of the floor there will a 16-square-foot gust of wind coming up out of the floor through bar grating."
Visitors would be guided through the memorial by docents rather than going through unaccompanied.
"From the 1930s to the end of the war, European Jewry lost control," said Tonnesen. "I want this (memorial) to be all about control.
"As simple as the idea sounds of representing a human life with a steel pin, it is a very difficult thing to do. It is technically difficult and expensive. And it can be discouraging. If a pin costs us only 50 cents to purchase and install, that's $3 million."
Three million dollars is "what we need to build the structure," Tonnesen told Jewish News. "The wild card is the pins. ... We will not know the actual cost of the pins until we do test walls."
So far, according to both Kader and Tonnesen, the boards of the Phoenix Holocaust Survivors' Association and the Arizona Jewish Historical Society have approved the design. "We have a total green light from both of these Jewish groups," Kader told Jewish News - but he believes that "going public in a big way is a couple of months off."
Kader, Tonnesen and AJHS president Jerry Lewkowitz have met with Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, who has pledged to support the memorial effort.
"They showed me the design and asked if I would be part of the advocacy group," Gordon told Jewish News. "I said I was humbled and there would be no way that I could say no. I would feel obligated not because I'm mayor but because of what our relatives all experienced.
"Certainly the survivors, because of their age, are becoming fewer and fewer, and the real-life stories that come from one's mouth are now primarily reduced to photos and memorials and books. ... Here in Phoenix having something, whether it's this or something else, that will take the place of some of the survivors I think would be important."
As for the design of the memorial, Gordon said, "I learned a long time ago that art and design and architecture is very subjective. So I'll stay out of that part but support the concepts and causes I believe in."
Shelley Cohn, executive director of the Arizona Commission on the Arts, believes that "there are great opportunities for community dialogue around (the memorial) if it is positioned and thought through.
"It's important when there's a project of this scale that there is certainty about how it fits into other community priorities and what the intent is," Cohn told Jewish News. "Is it a space or is it an educational arm, and how is it connected to an institution that can carry forward that agenda?"
Young, a key consultant in efforts to memorialize the Holocaust in Germany and elsewhere, and in the memorialization of the World Trade Center towers, told Jewish News he had not seen Tonnesen's design and so would reserve judgment, but suggested that the Jewish community in Phoenix might consider some of the key questions involved in the building of any Holocaust memorial:
"For whom is this being built? What kind of memory is being articulated here, and toward what end?"
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