Collective conscience

Readers of Jewish News may be aware that plans are afoot to build a major Holocaust memorial in Phoenix. Here, briefly, are some stories of other memorials:

The Paper Clip Project is the extraordinary work of high school students at a small school in Whitwell, Tenn. Born of a genuine empathy, the project combines the hard work of remembering the Holocaust with the poetry of memory, and tempers sorrow with redemption.

Every symbol - from the paper clips themselves, which were worn by Norwegians protesting the yellow stars Jews were forced to wear during World War II, to the German railcar reincarnated as a place to house the paper clips the students gathered - was considered by the participants, and embraced by the community.

Memorial efforts do not always inspire such unity. In his book "The Texture of Memory," cultural historian James E. Young explores the ways in which the decision to commemorate the Holocaust can provoke controversy both within the Jewish community and without.

As Young tells it, the Holocaust memorial in Boston began as one survivor's idea. He formed a small committee and approached a sculptor, who agreed to work with the group. But, Young recounts, "When the committee turned to other survivors for support, they found unexpected resistance. ... Bitter arguments ensued, community support withered, and the project was put on hold."

And then the memorial gone wrong turned into a how-to lesson. Once the original idea for the memorial had been rejected, the committee hired a professional executive director, who in turn assembled local Jewish leaders, philanthropists and academics.

"Acutely aware that contested memory would be an inevitable part of this, or any, public memorial commission," writes Young, "the New England Holocaust Memorial Committee decided not to suppress argument and dissent but to turn debate itself into one of the project's reasons for being."

The resulting Boston Holocaust memorial, designed by San Franciscan Stanley Saitowitz, was dedicated in 1995. In 1998, it received the Henry Bacon Medal for Memorial Architecture from the American Institute of Architects, which recognizes "architecture whose purpose is to portray, promote, or symbolize an idea of high spiritual concern."

Tucson, a city with a Jewish community of some 20,000 in 1990, considered at the time no fewer than 80 proposals from artists around the world before settling on a design. As residents of one of the largest cities in the country, we owe it to ourselves, and to future citizens, to behave like the cultural center we're becoming and follow Boston's - and Tucson's - civic-minded lead.

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