WDET News
- Founder of Holocaust Museum Passes Away
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Dec 12, 2008General - Link to Audio
Rabbi Charles Rosenzveig immigrated to the Unites States in 1947 after almost all of his family was killed by the Nazis. He served as a rabbi at Congregation Mount Sinai in Port Huron from 1951 to 1993. But he’s best known for his role in founding the nation’s first free standing Holocaust Memorial Center…built in 1984... on the campus of the Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield. The museum has since moved and now sits on Orchard Lake Road in Farmington Hills. Guy Stern worked closely with Rosenzveig at the Memorial Center. He says the rabbi may have been driven in part…by the memory of his family.
“his mother and his favorite little brother perished in the holocaust and that the memory of his brother in particular with whom he had played…to whom he had played big brother to…he was driven for into all his accomplishments by the memories of these murdered relatives.”
The memorial hosts thousands of visitors a year…many of them students. In creating the memorial…Stern says Rosenzveig made sure it wasn’t just about the facts surrounding the Holocaust. Stern says for Rosenzveig…the museum was about much more than tragedy.
“he took pride in showing the accomplishments of the Jews prior to and after the holocaust. And he also took pride to show the Jewish tradition and the fact that out of the horror of the holocaust…some good could be distilled from the performance, the valorous performance of people who became rescuers and helpmates of the threatened population.”
Because Rosenzveig’s personal effects were destroyed during the Holocaust…his exact age is unknown…though he was widely believed to be in his eighties. I’m Noah Ovshinsky, WDET News.