Museum and RMM Wing

The Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust opened in 1997 to educate people of all ages and backgrounds about the broad tapestry of Jewish life over the past century--before, during, and after the Holocaust. In mid-September 2003, the Museum opened its 82,000-square-foot Robert M. Morgenthau Wing, which contains Edmond J. Safra Hall, a state-of-the-art theater; Garden of Stones, a memorial garden designed by Andy Goldsworthy; The Heritage Cafe, a kosher cafe; a catering hall; classrooms; and expanded gallery space for special exhibitions.

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Andy Goldsworthy

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Garden of Stones

Artist Andy Goldsworthy has designed Garden of Stones, a permanent outdoor Memorial Garden employing stones, trees, and soil as its core elements. A series of 18 carefully selected boulders are installed throughout the garden. Each one has been hollowed out and holds a single sapling Dwarf Oak that will show through a small hole at the top. As the trees mature in the coming years, each will grow to become a part of the stone, its trunk fusing to the base. It will dramatically suggest how nature can survive under seemingly impossible circumstances. As a living memorial, the garden is a tribute to the hardship, struggle, tenacity, and survival experienced by those who endured the Holocaust.

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Between 1941 and 1944, almost 1.5 million Jews were murdered when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Most were shot by mobile killing units consisting of German SS, army, police, and local collaborators. This exhibition presents the evidence, both physical and testimonial, gathered by Father Patrick Desbois and his team from Yahad-In Unum. Interviews with Ukrainian bystanders and witnesses, together with photographs, artifacts, and text panels, tell the chilling story of Jewish victims–men, women, and children–who were summarily executed near the places they lived, with their neighbors watching. 

The Shooting of Jews in Ukraine: Holocaust By Bullets is created by the Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris. The exhibition website, produced by the Mémorial de la Shoah, features content and information from the original exhibition on view in Paris in 2007. To be redirected to the site, click here.

The exhibition is made possible through generous funding from Robert I. Goldman Foundation, Victor Pinchuk Foundation, and Edmond J. Safra Philanthropic Foundation.

Woman of Letters tells the remarkable story of a writer driven to create, of a mother and her daughters, of memory and identity, of legacy and loss. A Russian-born Jewish author, Irène Némirovsky quickly rose to literary celebrity in her adopted France. But her fame and accomplishment, and even her conversion to Catholicism, were not enough to save her when war came; she was deported to Auschwitz in 1942.  Among the few items that she left behind was a valise that contained a leather notebook. Haunted by painful memories, her daughters avoided opening it until Denise read it more than fifty years after their mother’s death. She discovered not a diary, but a major literary work: the first two parts of an unfinished five-part novel, Suite Française. The exhibition illustrates Némirovsky’s life and her extraordinary literary gift to the world with stunning and heartbreaking artifacts, including the original manuscript and the valise, never before exhibited.

Co-produced with Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC).

This exhibition is made possible through generous funding from: American Express, David Berg Foundation, and the Grand Marnier Foundation; leadership gifts from: Nancy Fisher, Fanya Gottesfeld Heller, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council with the generous support of The September 11th Fund, and The Robert Sillins Family Foundation; and additional support provided by: The Diller - von Furstenberg Family Foundation, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Alexis Gregory Foundation, The Felix & Elizabeth Rohatyn Foundation, Howard J. Rubenstein, and L’Avion. Rotunda Salon furnished courtesy of Ligne Roset.

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