Holocaust Center Nassau County

PRESS RELEASE

HOLOCAUST CENTER PARTICIPATES IN NYS MUSEUM WEEK

          The Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County (HMTC) will offer docent-led tours during NYS Museum Week from Monday, June 10 – Saturday, June 15 at 1:30 p.m. each day.

          “In keeping with this year’s NYS Museum Week theme, we hope the Long Island community will join us to walk through the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County’s "Path Through History,” says Steven Markowitz, Chairman of the Board of Directors. The experience our visitors have is unlike any other available to them on Long Island.”

          The HMTC’s museum had its grand reopening in 2010. The museum presents a detailed and comprehensive chronicle of the Holocaust, and utilizes multimedia displays, artifacts, archival footage, testimony from local Survivors and Liberators, and encompasses an additional gallery for special exhibits that represent the diverse ethnic, cultural, religious, and other communities across Long Island.

          The first gallery, also known as “Portraits of European Jews, Our Family Album,” displays prewar family photographs of local Survivors. Visitors then walk through a series of galleries devoted to the history of the Holocaust culminating with liberation and postwar experiences.

          The museum ends with a call to action and a moving film featuring a local Holocaust Survivor, David Gewirtzman, and a Rwandan genocide Survivor, Jacqueline Murekatete, underscoring the HMTC’s message that the world still has much to learn. HMTC visitors leave with the feeling of empowerment and the knowledge that they too can choose to be an Upstander and make a difference in their community.

          The special exhibits gallery currently features “Portraits of Our Past: Greek Jews and the Holocaust” provided courtesy of the Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture and Kehila Kedosha Janina, Synagogue and Museum.

About the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County

          The Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County is the pre-eminent Holocaust resource on Long Island, with a contemporary museum and is one of the largest and most comprehensive education program providers in the region. Since 2007, nearly 210,000 students, educators, employers and law enforcement personnel have participated in the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center’s education programs.

          Under construction and scheduled to open in late 2013, the Claire Friedlander Education Institute will accommodate four classrooms with state-of-the-art audio-visual aids and cutting edge technical equipment for specialized Holocaust and Tolerance video-conferencing programs and a wide variety of workshops for youth and adults.

          With the Louis Posner Memorial Library, the Center offers over 7,000 volumes of Holocaust, genocide, multicultural, anti-bias and anti-bullying material for youth and adults, from Kindergarten through post-graduate researchers. It is the largest such collection on Long Island. Additional information is available online at www.holocaust-nassau.org.