Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 52, No. 9, Ed. 1 Thursday, February 26, 1998 Page: 2 of 24
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2 Features TEXAS JEWISH post. Thursday. February 26.1998 ■ in our s2no year'.
Holocaust Museum Victim of Own Success
fv
Washington DC Holocaust Museum’s Hall of Witness depicting a train station full of innocents waiting for their ride to death
By James D. Besser
TJP’s Washinton Correspondent
T ast week's ouster of U S Holocaust Memorial
I Museum director Walter Reich, contrary to re-
ports in the national media, was only peripherally
related to the January controversy over Yasser Arafat's pro-
posed visit the facility.
Instead. Reich’s decision not to seek renewal of his contract,
which came after a week of frantic negotiations, was the result
of a rebellion among the Museum’s staff over his management
style. The revolt had gathered momentum in recent months,
and broke into the open during the Arafat controversy.
Both issues—the Arafat flap and the internal guerrilla war
within the museum—represent the first big public-relations
crises the museum has faced since it opened almost five years
ago.
The embarrassing scuffle docs not alter the fact the Museum
continues to work belter than almost anybody expected. Both
Reich’s stubborn efforts to hold on to his job and the passion
of the staffer* who sought tooust him reflect one reason for that
success—an unusual level of dedication to the museum’score
mission among the lay and professional staffs.
But that doesn’t mean the next director will have an easier
lime of it: the job is a precarious balancing act. and it reflects
in large measure conflicting roles for the Museum that will
continue to mean headaches for its lay and professional
leaders
^T^e Holocaust Museum has surpassed the most
I optimistic expectations of its founders
.A Some 2 million visitors pass through the front door
every year, and despite projections to the contrary, the flood
has not abated
It is a place that profoundly affects visitors, mostly non-
Jews, many of whom know almost nothing about the Holo-
caust. The permanent exhibition makes it easy for visitors to
draw connections between the Holocaust and today's world
The message people seem to leave with isn’t “oh, those poor
The price of success: Visitors three and four deep
look at films of liberated concentration camps.
Jews,” but “we can’t let this kind of thing happen again.”
The Museum has become a vital resource for Holocaust
scholars around the world and ordinary educators who want to
teach the lessons of the Holocaust to their students, and it has
become an important link in the worldwide survivors’ net-
work.
Finally, there’s the passion of the people involved
Say what you will about Walter Reich’s skills as an admin-
istrator. but this is a man who is deeply committed to the cause
of Holocaust education and scholarship
So. too, are the staffers who expressed concern about his
leadership. This was no mere turf war; this was a battle
between people with conflicting views of how the Museum
should be ron. but always based on their passionate belief in the
value of their shared effort There are no villains in this story.
£^till, then.* are unresolved and perhaps unresolvable
contradictions in the Museum's function that will
require the next director to be an adroit high-wire
performer
In a world of limited resources, keeping up with the lounst
hordes inevitably conflicts with the desire to expand the
scholarly component of the Museum
The Museum is a complex bureaucracy which is attached to
the biggest bureaucracy of all—the U S. government. The
director must be a scholar, an administrator, a showman—and
an deft bureaucratic tactician.
And more: he or she must be a diplomat and a politician
capable of navigating treacherous issues like the recent Arafat
incident, and be capable of interacting with an often-prickly
Jewish community.
The Arafat incident, while not the cause of Reich's ouster,
reflects other conflicts in the Museum’s operation.
The Jewish community sees the Museum as a kind of
extension of the communal infrastructure, which is not surpris-
ing, since Jews give most of the $20 million in privately raised
money that funds the museum’s operations.
But from the beginning, the creators of the Museum wanted
it to be something bigger—an American museum, standing for
the Amencan determination that the outrages of the Holocaust
not be repeated, against Jews or anybody else.
In the case of the Arafat invitation, the museum’s leadership
was tom between those roles.
Special Mideast peace envoy Dennis Ross and his assistant,
Aaron Miller, both members of the Holocaust Council, wanted
Arafat to visit because they thought it might have a salutary
impact on the stalled peace process. That was clearly in
keeping with the onginal intention of the museum
Who better than Arafat, the erstwhile terrorist, but also
someone who was engaged, however erratically, in a peace
process?
But some Jewish leaders worried: could the Museum, as a
JEWISH institution, legitimately welcome this man with so
much Jewish blood on his hands, whose quasi-govemment
included outspoken Holocaust deniers?
An Arafat visit might be appropriate for a museum that tries
to teach universal truths about
war and hatred, inappropriate 8ee MUSEUM p. 3
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Wisch, J. A. & Wisch, Rene. Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 52, No. 9, Ed. 1 Thursday, February 26, 1998, newspaper, February 26, 1998; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth755096/m1/2/: accessed July 9, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .