Fort Lee Holocaust Museum expands
Public will soon tour exhibits inside Congregation Beth Israel
A visit to the Fort Lee Holocaust Museum, the only Holocaust museum in the country housed inside an active synagogue, provides an opportunity for visitors to honor the victims and survivors of the Shoah.
And soon the museum will host a wider audience as an expansion of its contents and displays will open to the public toward the end of the year. Artifacts, photos of old newspaper stories, hate-filled propaganda posters, maps, and charts, along with explanatory texts arranged in chronological order, now line the walls.
“While it is impossible for a visitor to fully comprehend the scope and long-lasting effects of the Holocaust, walking through the museum space evokes feelings of anger, shock, disbelief, and horror about a time in the history of the Jewish people that cannot and should not be forgotten,” Dr. Beth Gerson, one of the museum’s curators, said.
When visitors enter Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades, they climb nine stairs of the tall, narrow building to a landing at the sanctuary level. On the wall, they see two framed documents: a resolution from the New Jersey General Assembly marking the museum’s opening on May 4, 2008, and a proclamation from the state’s United States Holocaust Council designating April 27 through May 4, 2008, as Days of Remembrance for its victims, signed by then-governor Jon Corzine.
When congregants sit in the synagogue’s main sanctuary, they face a special Torah scroll on a wooden stand on the bimah. “While so many important religious artifacts were destroyed during the Holocaust, our synagogue was gifted with one of 1,564 Torah scrolls that were saved from being destroyed in Czechoslovakia during the war,” Craig Bassett, Beth Israel’s executive director, said.
Because of the way the scroll was handled during the war, the Memorial Scrolls Trust, which gave it to the synagogue on permanent loan, advised that it’s unlikely to have remained kosher, although Mr. Basset said that its kashrut has not been checked. “The Torah lives on with us today, reminding us of all that was lost and our responsibility to ensure that nothing like the Holocaust happens again,” he said.
Climbing nine more steps to the museum, viewers can read the details as they unfold in large pages from various newspapers in the United States, “beginning with a paper published in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany,” Dr. Gerson said.
A large section of charred steel from Ground Zero rests on the landing. The World Trade Center Artifact program donated the wreckage as a reminder of September 11 and that hate crimes did not end with the Holocaust.
The Holocaust Museum is on the second floor of the synagogue, overlooking the sanctuary. Rabbi Meir Berger z’l created it in 1993. Many years and synagogue mergers later, Dr. Beth Gerson and Dr. M. David Isaak, members of the congregation and the museum’s co-curators, revitalized it. Both “had the professional experience and research capabilities to bring the small museum to life,” Mr. Bassett said.
Dr. Isaak, a retired dentist, graduated from MTA, CUNY, and then dental school at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Dr. Gerson, a retired public-school educator, graduated from Queens College and earned her doctorate in language, literacy, and learning at Fordham’s graduate school of education. The couple has been married for 27 years.
In 2013, after six months of extensive training, Dr. Gerson became a gallery educator at the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in lower Manhattan. Several years later, Dr. Isaak also became a gallery educator and is an accomplished translator of German, Yiddish, and Hebrew.
“We did extensive research in preparation for our roles as curators of the Fort Lee Museum,” Dr. Gerson said. In addition to ongoing professional development at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, they have studied with scholars and curators, both online and in person, at the Center for Jewish History in New York, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the World War II Museum in New Orleans, and the USC Shoah Foundation’s Echoes & Reflections, a program for educators.
They have traveled overseas as well, to the Jewish Museum in Athens and the Etz Chaim Synagogue in Crete, the Imperial War Museum in London, the Polin Museum in Warsaw, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Austria, and Yad Vashem in Israel. And they have visited the sites of five concentration camps throughout Eastern Europe and Germany.
“Each museum and site provided us with new insight, perspectives, and knowledge,” Dr. Gerson said. “There is also a personal aspect to the museum.
Dr. Isaak’s father, Pinkas Isaak, died in 2008. Years later, as he helped his mother go through some paperwork, he found a tattered envelope behind his parents’ sofa. “The envelope contained letters and postcards, many from my grandfather and uncle, that were sent to my Aunt Eva, who had spent the war years in Portugal, a country that remained neutral,” Dr. Isaak said. Most of the letters, from family members who died in the Holocaust, were written in German.
“Following my mother’s death in 2013, I began the tedious process of translating the letters to learn the little-known details of what had happened to my family members during the rise and domination of Nazi Germany,” Dr. Isaak said. “The process was fascinating. We listened to the voices in their letters and began to follow the breadcrumbs to piece together their stories.”
Drs. Isaak and Gerson visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and searched the online files at Yad Vashem and the German Federal Archives to learn whatever they could about Dr Isaak’s family. The result of that research is Dr. Isaak and Dr. Gerson’s self-published work, “Missing Pieces: A Family Story Retold,” as well as a memoir about Dr. Isaak’s parents’ experiences, titled “Our Story: Martha and Pinkas Isaak.”
The curators of the Fort Lee Holocaust Museum have created a timeline that takes the visitor from the rise of Hitler through the invasion of Poland, the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto, Operation Barbarossa, the horror of the Final Solution, and the brave soldiers and upstanders who fought to liberate the innocent. Detailed explanations of antisemitism, conspiracy theories, German propaganda, and the shifts from open immigration to quota restrictions line the walls. Photos of identification badges and armbands meant to demean Jews, pages from diaries, passports, ship manifests, lost tallit katan, tefillin, yarmulkes, testimonies hidden in milk cans, and actual pieces of barbed wire fill the glass cases.
As visitors make their way from case to case, wall text to wall text, map to map, artifact to artifact, they stop, breathe, and reflect.
“The museum has been designed for independent exploration as well as docent-led tours,” Dr. Gerson said. Visitors are encouraged to read the explanations accompanying the pictures, photos, maps, newspaper clippings, and related artifacts. “The majority of artifacts displayed in the cases were gifted to the museum by congregants,” she added. “Provenance and attributions are provided throughout the exhibit.” To the extent possible, the exhibition is presented chronologically.
“We encourage people who have personal artifacts that tell an individual story that is contextualized historically to share them, as they are far more descriptive and meaningful to those who come to the museum.” Dr. Gerson said. Her mother-in-law buried her rings in a box of chocolates and sent them to an uncle in London with a note: “Please eat these very carefully.” The rings eventually were donated to the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
The last section of the exhibit is a collection of books about the Holocaust. One of the display cases holds a copy of “The Journey That Saved Curious George: The True Wartime Escape of Margret and Hans Augusto Rey.” The Reys wrote the children’s books about Curious George the monkey. During the museum tour, the curators highlight the way the couple held onto their manuscript as they escaped Nazi-occupied France. Had they not, children around the world would have missed the opportunity to delight in their masterpiece.
“By following the footsteps of those we highlight at the museum, we can bear witness to their courage — their desire to live with normalcy despite insurmountable circumstances,” Dr. Gerson said.
“Like my husband, David, who was born in Wales during the blitzkrieg and whose parents had fled Germany in 1938 and found refuge in London, in many instances, we are able to illustrate different parts of a person’s life that was able to be lived only because his or her family had left Germany just in time,” she said.
“While six million is a nearly incomprehensible number, the individual stories, while often horrific, are human and often relatable,” she continued. “We want visitors to get to know and connect with the people behind the stories of courage and hope against all odds.”
Dr. Gerson believes her experience as a teacher has prepared her to educate students on the Holocaust, but she acknowledges that “tours are, and always will be, tailored to the audience. When a teacher books a tour, I like to know what the students already know about what they are about to see,” she said.
“While the experiential experience of visiting the museum is not multimedia in its presentation, the social hall of the synagogue is available to offer videos such as ‘The Number on Grandpa’s Arm’ and ‘The Tattooed Torah,’” Mr. Bassett said.
“We also have access to rich resources, many of them sourced from Yad Vashem and the USC Shoah Foundation,” Dr. Isaak added. “These sessions and discussions are intended for groups who want to delve a little deeper into the witness testimony and the study of the Holocaust.”
In May 2024, Drs. Beth Gerson and M. David Isaak offered congregants their first tour of the museum. They hope to provide more tours for New Jersey public school students whose schools comply with state-mandated Holocaust education. Final touches are being made to the museum. and it is expected to open to the public toward the end of this year.
To find out more about visiting the museum, donating relevant artifacts, or becoming a museum docent, email Craig Bassett at FLHMinfo@cbiotp.org.
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