Holocaust Museums and Memorials Around the World: Museums of the Future

Alongside CWB Scholars we will travel with Museum historians, experts, and contemporary witnesses to 10 different regions. We will explore the history behind the exhibits, discuss the nature of memory and memorials, and discover how the world remembers the Shoah and honors the lives we lost. We will also explore how that memory is interconnected to genocides, both past and present. Our experts will challenge us to grapple with issues of cultural identity, responsibility to community, and decision-making, as well as ways in which individuals and nations responded, or failed to respond, to the crisis through close examination of the Museum’s artifacts and memorials.

Our October Event in this Series: Museums of the Future

Tali Nates

Tali Nates is the founder and director of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre and chair of the South African Holocaust & Genocide Foundation. She is a historian who lectures internationally on Holocaust education, genocide prevention, reconciliation and human rights. Tali has presented at numerous international conferences including at the United Nations (2016 & 2020). She published articles and contributed chapters to many books, among them God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors (2015), Remembering The Holocaust in Educational Settings (2018) and Conceptualizing Mass Violence, Representations, Recollections, and Reinterpretations (2021). In 2010, Tali was chosen as one of the top 100 newsworthy and noteworthy women in South Africa, by the Mail & Guardian. She won many awards including the Kia Community Service Award (South Africa, 2015) and the Agit Gratias Award (2020, Czech Republic). Tali serves on the Academic Advisory Group of the School of Social and Health Sciences, Monash University (IIEMSA), South Africa. She was one of the founders of the Holocaust and Tutsi Genocide Survivors groups in Johannesburg. Born to a family of Holocaust survivors, her father and uncle were saved by Oskar Schindler. The rest of the family was murdered.

Dr. Michael Berenbaum

Dr. Michael Berenbaum is a writer, lecturer, and teacher consulting in the conceptual development of museums and historical films. He is director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust at the American Jewish University, where he is also a Professor of Jewish Studies.

He was the Executive Editor of the Second Edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica that reworked, transformed, improved, broadened and deepened, the now classic 1972 work and consists of 22 volumes, sixteen million words with 25,000 individual contributions to Jewish knowledge. For three years, he was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. He was the Director of the United States Holocaust Research Institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Hymen Goldman Adjunct Professor of Theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. From 1988–93 he served as Project Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, overseeing its creation. He also served as Deputy Director of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, where he authored its Report to the President.

Berenbaum is the author and editor of twenty books, scores of scholarly articles, and hundreds of journalistic pieces. His most recent books include: Not Your Father’s Antisemitism, A Promise to Remember: The Holocaust in the Words and Voices of Its Survivors and After the Passion Has Passed: American Religious Consequences, a collection of essays on Jews, Judaism and Christianity, Religious Tolerance and Pluralism occasioned by the controversy that swirled around Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion. He was the conceptual developer on the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Educational Center and played a similar function as conceptual developer and chief curator of the Belzec Memorial at the site of the Death Camp. He is currently at work on the Memorial Museum to Macedonian Jewry in Skopje, the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, and the Holocaust and Humanity Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Alice Herscovitch The Montreal Holocaust Museum

Alice Herscovitch is currently a Consultant on Donor and Government Relations at the Montreal Holocaust Museum. She retired as the Museum’s Executive Director in 2019, after 11 years in which the organisation grew considerably in terms of audience, programming and funding. Among achievements by the MHM team during her leadership, the Museum tripled its collection, more than doubled its visitorship, developed over 20 pedagogical tools, created local, national and international partnerships, led a national teacher training program, digitised and catalogued its oral history collection, and led an initiative which successfully digitised and catalogued almost all Canadian collections of recorded survivor testimony. Faced with increasing interest and growth in its publics, Ms. Herscovitch currently works with the Museum to assure a major expansion and its relocation to the downtown core. Having garnered significant private and government support, the new Montreal Holocaust Museum will open in a vibrant downtown neighbourhood in Fall 2025.

Ms. Herscovitch is the former Director of Social Development at the Conférence régionale des élus, a para-public organization devoted to the social, economic and cultural development of the Montreal region. She was previously the Executive Director of Project Genesis, a community advocacy organisation working on issues of social rights of marginalized populations, from 1987 to 2003. She taught for many years at the McGill School of Social Work in social policy and was a member of the Executive Committee of Centraide of Greater Montreal, as well as the NDG Community Council and a Board member of the Fondation du Grand Montréal. She has worked for over 30 years with people and organizations to promote progressive change on issues of social justice and to sustain non-profit organisations.