Debate over Holocaust memorial obscures the bigger picture

(Editor’s note: This column is reprinted by permission of the Times Union.)

Standing in front of a room jammed with supporters and skeptics, Michael Lozman said he always knew his plan would be contentious.

“Controversy and memorials go hand in hand,” Lozman added, leaning toward the TV news microphones that crowded his podium during Tuesday night’s public hearing.

Lozman, an orthodontist from Menands, is right about that. Name a memorial of any emotional heft — the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington is an example — and you can guarantee a segment of the public was fiercely against it. Opposition is to be expected.

Usually, the big fight is over aesthetics. Maya Lin’s stark design for the Vietnam Memorial was derided as a disrespectful gash when unveiled in 1981. Today, the design is revered as a cherished memorial to a painful war.

Lozman’s plan for a Capital District Jewish Holocaust Memorial plan faces resistance on two fronts. Some dislike the unsubtle design of the $1.4 million memorial. Others think the location, Troy-Schenectady Road in Niskayuna, is all wrong.

For sure, the location is atypical. We’re used to seeing memorials and monuments clustered in the downtowns of cities. Stroll around the Capitol in Albany and you can hardly avoid tripping over some memorial or another. You become immune to them.

Out in suburbia, along its busy four-lane highway, the Niskayuna memorial would stand alone. It would gain significance by being unexpected, like a noise in the night that jolts you awake.

The placement next to the Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery has a compelling backstory. The land was donated by Edward Scharfenberger, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany, grandchild of a Russian Jew who fled persecution. By Lozman’s telling, Scharfenberger saw God’s hand in his ability to help such a meaningful project.

Neighbors aren’t so sure. They believe the Holocaust memorial — any memorial — is inappropriate for the area. Though no homes abut the site, they say it would be a threat to residential character.

Some opponents have less prosaic concerns. They don’t want a daily reminder of an event so horrific. Though the memorial would eventually be shielded from passing traffic by trees, they fear being triggered by a memorial that might be upsetting.

It’s an argument for this hypersensitive age of “safe spaces.” The reality, though, is that the world is an upsetting place, when we look at it honestly, and few moments in its history are as disturbingly horrific as the Holocaust that killed six million Jews.

The memorial should upset us. What would be far worse is allowing ourselves to forget. More than a few speakers Tuesday mentioned that hate seems to be on the rise.

“It is important to educate people about what happened so it doesn’t happen again,” said Marian Rosenbloom, 88, who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto but not, he said, before witnessing Nazi solders using children for target practice.

The memorial, as proposed, would include railroad tracks positioned in the shape of the Star of David, a boxcar similar to those that carried Jews to concentration camps and a wall intended to represent a gas chamber. Lozman said the intent is not to shock, but he insists that the memorial must deal honestly with Nazi monstrosity. It can’t sugarcoat the horror.

In response to criticism, Lozman has already toned down the design — scrapping planned barbed wire, for example — but critics still find it overly literal. Mishka Luft, whose parents survived the Holocaust, on Tuesday said a considerate memorial would not reproduce the tools used by the oppressor.

The point is thoughtful, but the standard isn’t followed by every memorial. Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Ala., powerfully depicts the dogs and water hoses that suppressed marchers for civil rights. The New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston includes haunting towers that recall gas-chamber smokestacks. Holocaust memorials in other places also include boxcars and railroad tracks.

Beauty and design are matters of taste, but a design that bothers nobody is probably bland and forgettable. It’s worth remembering the hostility that confronted Lin’s Vietnam memorial decades ago. Time has proven those critics wrong.

For now, though, the design debate seems secondary. Those details can be finalized after the Niskayuna Town Board grants the special use permit needed for the memorial to proceed.

As noted Tuesday by Neil Golub, chairman of Price Chopper supermarkets and a significant voice in the region’s Jewish community, Lozman erred by failing to reach out for community input before launching a plan that took many by surprise. But he’s doing so now, and his initial mistake shouldn’t keep the region from embracing so important a project.

“It will be a place where people come to meditate,” Lozman said. “It will be a place where people come to pray.”

We need as many places like that as we can get, in suburbia or anywhere else.