The Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance
by Heidi Matz
Something’s up in the wars among nations: It’s peace, and it seems strange, unsettling, as if something’s missing. The implications are astounding: No more nukes, Cuban missile crises, “Red Scares”—no apocalypse now or any time soon. The recent Mideast peace accord gives the cliché “something’s rotten in Denmark” an entirely new meaning.
What happened? First the Berlin wall comes tumbling down, later, the USSR dissolves into a benign, if confused, democratic Russia—and now Rabin and Arafat have shaken hands over the settlement in the Gaza Strip. The Los Angeles Times reported recently that local Jewish leaders are even calling for monies to support Palestinians in the volatile Mideast region. There’s no question about it, the twentieth century seems to be enjoying the incipience of a peace on earth. Between nations, that is.
However, concurrent events such as the furious Crown Heights episode, the holocaust in Bosnia-Herzegovina, virulent German Neo-Nazism, and of course, the racial insurrection in Los Angeles two Aprils ago, imply that fighting is far from over. Political and philosophical holy wars may have abated, but the pugilistic human race, at a loss without a fight, is turning its guns and ammunition upon itself, in the form of civil wars, racial violence, extermination, and discrimination.
Most vulnerable to such divisiveness are people who inhabit areas rich in cultural diversity and imbalanced economic status, which brings us to North Hollywood, a.k.a., NoHo, a subset melting pot and stone’s throw away from the apocalyptic Los Angeles depicted in the nightly TV news. Did you know that North Hollywood is comprised of 50 percent Latinos, 40 percent Anglos, six percent Afro-Americans and four percent Asians? There’s bound to be a difference of opinion here, and residents of North Hollywood and beyond are urged to take a look on the other side of the fence, to walk a mile in our neighbor’s shoes, so to speak.
Across town from North Hollywood, and just uptown from the flash point of the now historical Los Angeles riots, where burned out buildings still stand as local testimony to a global social unrest, a new museum has opened its doors to confront hate.
And who is responsible for this hate, a blanket intolerance for all those different than us? Unfortunately, we are all guilty of bigotry, says L.A.’s Simon Wiesenthal Center, the world-renowned human rights organization. But the bright side is that this hatred and ignorance can be stopped. The center’s new 165,000 square foot Museum of Tolerance is dedicated to teaching tolerance and showing how bigotry is inbred and can be undone.
Located on Pico Blvd. at Roxbury, the building houses a computerized learning center, research library, conference center, two theaters and a cavernous two-part permanent exhibition: The Tolerancenter and the Beit Hashoah (Hebrew for House of the Holocaust). This is not a conventional museum with relics under glass but rather, an in-your-face multi-media event.
The tour begins with a greeting by an obnoxious video host, an emcee-Everyman who welcomes us to the tour and praises us for being intelligent enough to be at a museum in the first place, then slips in a hypocritical discourse on racism: Isn’t it great how neither he nor we are bigots. (His pitch is infused with ethnic slurs and racist innuendoes.) He instructs us to pass through one of two doors located on our right, it’s “our choice.”
We’re not prejudiced, of course, but if we choose the green “Not Prejudiced” door into the main exhibition room, we find it locked. Everyone goes through the door marked in red, “Prejudiced.”
We’re now on our own to browse through the area—a brightly lit computerized carnival of racism, a kind of house of mirrors for the discriminating modern intolerant. In a variety of formats (videos, computers, paintings, electric billboards), viewers get a taste of how it feels to be socially excluded: from the diverting—a carpeted corridor whose walls whisper and shout ethnic insults; a cartoon mural depicting how a high-school argument can ignite into racial violence; and a videotaped cocktail party where elegantly dressed guests of all ethnicities confide racist remarks to each other—to the stunningly disturbing: a graphic and horrifying seven-minute video presentation on three modern genocides.
The light is dimmed along with the mood in the next section, the museum’s Beit Hashoah, where a tourguide walks us through hell. To make the 50-year-old Holocaust a personal experience for even the youngest viewer, each participant receives a plastic card containing a photograph and biography of an actual child who lived in a concentration camp. At the end of the tour, we insert the card into an adjacent computer terminal and receive a print-out of the fate of “our” child (1.5 million children were murdered during the Holocaust).
The story of how Nazism began, Hitler’s rise to power, and the reaction of the rest of the world (a too-long silence) is told through the use of life-size models, voiceovers, and videos. The most jarring event is the concentration camp recreation, which begins when the museum’s plush carpet and wallpaper segues into hard concrete and barbed wire. The tour concludes in the drafty “Hall of Testimony,” a model gas-chamber with a long stone bench where viewers sit in front of video screens and watch actual death-scene footage of some of the 6 million. Near the iron-barred door is a quote by Simon Wiesenthal himself (he is famous for helping to bring to justice nearly a thousand Nazi war criminals), “Only know that hope lives when we remember.”
This is a museum visit that is quite unforgettable, and that is precisely the point. With hope, perhaps one day the suffocating tentacles of ignorance and racism will be replaced with Simon Wiesenthal’s far-reaching message of tolerance toward all and exclusion of none.
Only then will peace truly prevail on this planet.
The Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance/Beit Hashoah Museum, 9786 W. Pico Blvd. Open Mon., Tue., Wed. 10AM-5PM, Thurs. 10AM-9PM, Fri. 10AM-3PM, Sun. 11AM-5PM. Closed Saturdays. $7.50 for adults; $4.50 for students and seniors; free to groups of public school students accompanied by a teacher. (310) 553-9036. ♦