Curator: April Slabosheski
The Holocaust, An Oregon Perspective examines Holocaust history through the stories of people who survived the Holocaust and later made their home in Oregon and Southwest Washington, and as such, is about both Holocaust history and about Oregon. Rooted in the past yet engaging visitors in the present, this exhibition meets visitors where they are, posing questions like “What brings you here today?” and “How do you feel about what you’ve seen here today?” This exhibition explores the solemn gravity of the Holocaust through the words, objects and photographs from OJMCHE’s Collection and local Holocaust survivors, which tell deeply affective stories. Visitors walking through this exhibition will find themselves within a timeline of Holocaust history and amid objects and photographs from the past, while history is made present in through video testimony of Holocaust survivors and their family members recorded in 2017; a digital interactive element that considers contemporary, incongruent references to Nazi Germany; and a comparative analysis of European Jewish populations in 1933, 1945, and 2015. This non-sequential experience is deliberate, designed with the intention that visitors weave their knowledge of the past with the implications of this history for today. “We study the Holocaust to examine our connections to each other,” affirms the exhibition. In an interconnected world where injustice persists on a grand scale, how might knowledge of this atrocity contribute to our understandings of our responsibility to one another?
