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New exhibit about Auschwitz presents the heart-wrenching evidence of loss and destruction—and lets visitors draw their own conclusions
The Royal Ontario Museum’s new exhibition has arrived just in time for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of a concentration camp where 1.1 million men, women and children, were murdered, almost all of them Jews.
Auschwitz. Not Long ago. Not Far Away. features 500 artifacts—including items from pre-war Germany and Poland—as well as video testimony from survivors liberated on Jan. 27, 1945.
Its only Canadian stop will be in Toronto, at a time when knowledge about the Holocaust is fading, and demonstrators have yelled ‘Go back to Europe’ at Jewish people during protests against Israel.
The day before the official opening on Jan. 10, a lone protester marched in front of the ROM, with a sign that read ‘Gaza. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away,’ satirizing the name of the show.
It’s a fraught moment to launch a multi-million-dollar exhibit about the Holocaust, but the museum CEO and director Josh Basseches says the time is right for the exhibit.
The museum surveyed the public before committing to the show and found interest was as high as a blockbuster exhibit on dinosaurs, Basseches said in an interview with The CJN.
“If anything, interest in the show went up after Oct. 7,” he said, referring to the Hamas attacks on Israel in 2023, and the subsequent, ongoing war in Gaza.
“It’s a sobering exhibit. Having the opportunity to understand about an event like this at a place like the ROM, which feels for many as a safe, comfortable place to be, makes it something that people want to do,” he said.
“The treatment is quite sensitive, it avoids sensationalism. It doesn’t have some of the most visceral and disturbing issues, because we wanted to make this an exhibition that could engage people of a wide variety of ages, and from any sort of different background…. As we move further from the Holocaust, whether you are Jewish, or not Jewish, the idea of being a witness, of being aware of an understanding of what happened, feels to me profoundly important.”
Between 325,000 and 350,000 people are expected to visit the Auschwitz exhibit, Basseches said. In 2017, the museum mounted The Evidence Room, an exhibit that, replicated the architecture of Auschwitz to demonstrate that the Nazis deliberately constructed and operated the extermination camp. That show received about 250,000 visitors.
Auschwitz, which runs until Sept. 1, is housed in the angular Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. The first object visitors encounter in the gallery area is a woman’s red dress shoe, brought by an unknown deportee to the camp. Along the wall are the concrete fence posts, at one time strung with electrified wire, that defined the boundaries of Auschwitz.
As Basseches promises, the exhibit largely shies away from the most grotesque photos of starving prisoners and piles of corpses. Instead, the artifacts of deportees and the physical remains of the concentration camp, as well as video testimonies from survivors, explain the story of Auschwitz.
The display winds through the fourth-floor space, starting with the history of the town of Oswiecim, Poland, where Auschwitz was built, and the political and economic instability that led to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany.
Artifacts from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum and 20 other institutions trace the persecution of Jews, and others, including the disabled, homosexuals and the Roma people, as well as their desperate attempts to find refuge outside Europe.
The show culminates with mass deportations in cattle cars, and ultimately the fate of prisoners sentenced to slave labour in the satellite camps, and death in the gas chambers and crematorium. Suitcases, broken eye glasses and household objects including a cheese grater, brightly painted mugs and spoons, which were all confiscated when people arrived in Auschwitz are displayed. A small, scuffed child’s shoe and sock are placed in their own glass display case.
Photographs of camp commander Rudolf Hoss’ children splashing in a pool outside the camp gates as well as mug shots of prisoners, and drawings of the camps by prisoners line the museum walls. The triple-tier wooden bunk bed, where inmates were crammed into barracks and the pipes used to deliver the deadly Zyklon-B gas to the victims in the gas chambers, disguised as showers, are at the centre of the exhibit.
The exhibit was designed by the Spanish company Musealia, which had previously produced museum shows about the Titanic and the human body, which featured actual corpses.
In an interview with The CJN, the day before the exhibit opened, curators and historians Paul Salmons, and Robert Jan van Pelt, and Luis Ferreiro, director of Musealia, discussed the exhibit and how it has evolved over the years.
The idea for the show began when Ferreiro read Man’s Search for Meaning, a seminal work by psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, who survived the concentration camps, but whose wife and child were murdered.
“Part of what I learned from Man’s Search for Meaning is that when you do things with your heart, there’s no explanation needed, or no justification. It was born from a moral need to do something after reading that book.”
Inspired to learn more, Ferreiro, contacted Van Pelt, a professor of architecture at the University of Waterloo and an expert on Auschwitz, who had designed The Evidence Room at the ROM.
Ferreiro was willing to wager his family’s business on producing the exhibit, but he admits he was naïve and had much to learn.
Van Pelt sent Ferreiro, who is not Jewish, a reading list of 20 books, and told him to visit Auschwitz and Yad Vashem (the Holocaust memorial in Israel) before they began designing the current exhibit, which had its debut in Madrid in 2017. About 1.25 million people have seen the show so far, with more stops planned.
This particular exhibition is smaller than in other cities—Van Pelt laments that the ROM Crystal’s oddly-shaped walls resulted in less exhibition space—and some artifacts are not on display, including a cattle car which was used to transport prisoners to Auschwitz. The railcar has been displayed outside at other museums, but a secure spot could not be found at the Toronto museum, which is currently in the midst of a renovation.
Van Pelt says he argued for the cattle car to be placed outside but a little further away at Queen’s Park, the site of the provincial legislature. Whatever graffiti the railcar attracted, would have added to the story of the artifact, but since Musealia owned the cattle car and had paid for its restoration, it was not his decision.
The exhibit, however, has added a few pieces from survivors who came to Canada after the war, including a sculpture by Felix Kohn, which has never been displayed before, and two tiny charms crafted by Esther Friedlander, who was working in a slave labour factory and was sheltered by her friends when she was ill.
The ROM was also able to arrange for the loan of an unfinished painting from Amsterdam that had been done by Van Pelt’s great-uncle, who was killed in Auschwitz.
Each curator has an object in the collection that they find especially poignant.
Van Pelt is drawn to a tallit that belonged to Solomon Krieser, who grew up in the town of Oswiecim. It is a complicated object, since the artifact shouldn’t even be on display, he says.
Traditionally, a bar mitzvah boy receives one of these prayer shawls at age of 13 and is buried in it at his death. But in this instance, Krieser fled from Poland to France, where he and his family were arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Before he was deported, he was able to smuggle the tallit to one of his daughters, who survived.
“So the fact that this very artifact exists and that we are able to show it, in some way shows the catastrophe, because it should not exist,” Van Pelt said.
British curator Paul Salmons, who has been involved with the exhibition since the start, points to an exhibit displayed for the first time in Toronto—two silver rings, each with a red heart in the centre, crafted in Auschwitz by Leon Kritzberg for himself and a woman he knew from before the war, Miriam Litman.
The pair found themselves on either side of the wire at Auschwitz and Kritzberg, a member of the Sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria, was able to pass goods to help Litman survive, Salmons says.
The rings are “symbolic as well as emblematic of the entire approach of exhibition, which is telling a story of mass inhumanity and destruction and dehumanization,” he says. “But throughout the exhibition we struggled also to re-humanize those people who were dehumanized, to show them as real, living people, as people who had loves and hopes and dreams and this is a form of resistance and resilience in Auschwitz that we were able to tell here for the first time.”
But even in the face of heartbreaking stories, the curators—who are immersed in Holocaust education—aim to let viewers draw their own lessons from the memory-laden artifacts.
“At no point in the exhibition do we moralize, not a single point, not even at the end, there is no point where we said, ‘Bad, bad Germans’ or ‘Never Again,’ or fight antisemitism, or any kind of direction,” says Van Pelt. “We do not give any direction for people of how to interpret the material, beyond the fact that we want them to pay attention and learn to pay attention.”
Holocaust education has been mandated for Ontario high schools since 2023, and many Grade 10 History classes are planning to visit the exhibit. There are valid reasons to study the Holocaust, but it can’t be the cure-all for antisemitism or historical amnesia, Salmons believes.
“It’s the most extensively documented, most intensively researched, best understood example of genocide in human history so far. So if you care at all about how and why mass violence happens and how societies can fall apart, it seems like it’s a good place to start,” he said.
“It seems to me that it’s perfectly reasonable that we would spend at least a few hours, a few lessons, examining that and reflecting upon it. That’s quite different though from using a difficult, traumatic emotionally challenging path to create a space where you tell young people what they should think about the world.”
Van Pelt says the curators did not approach donors and promise that they would create an exhibition that would counter Holocaust denial or diminish antisemitism. Rather, they intended to tell a compelling evidence-based story about Auschwitz.
One of the lessons from the Holocaust is that education by itself can’t prevent mass violence, Salmons points out. “We see that just over 80 years ago, a highly educated society that turned its resources against its neighbours and committed this genocide,” he said.
“If you’re serious about the cry of ‘never again’, then take it seriously and change the way you educate. It shouldn’t just be that when you arrive in a Holocaust lesson this is the first time that you talk about human rights or this is the way you stop prejudice or antisemitism. It can be a contribution, but it’s too big a burden to place on one visit to an exhibition or a few lessons in class.”
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Anti-Israel Activists Gear Up to ‘Flood’ UN General Assembly
US Capitol Police and NYPD officers clash with anti-Israel demonstrators, on the day Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint meeting of Congress, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, DC, July 24, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas
Anti-Israel groups are planning a wave of raucous protests in New York City during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) over the next several days, prompting concerns that the demonstrations could descend into antisemitic rhetoric and intimidation.
A coalition of anti-Israel activists is organizing the protests in and around UN headquarters to coincide with speeches from Middle Eastern leaders and appearances by US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The demonstrations are expected to draw large crowds and feature prominent pro-Palestinian voices, some of whom have been criticized for trafficking in antisemitic tropes, in addition to calling for the destruction of Israe.
Organizers of the demonstrations have promoted the coordinated events on social media as an opportunity to pressure world leaders to hold Israel accountable for its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, with some messaging framed in sharply hostile terms.
On Sunday, for example, activists shouted at Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon.
“Zionism is terrorism. All you guys are terrorists committing ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza and Palestine. Shame on you, Zionist animals,” they shouted.
BREAKING: PRO-PALESTINE PROTESTORS CONFRONT “ISRAELI” AMBASSADOR DANNY DANON AT THE UNITED NATIONS
1/5 pic.twitter.com/4G1VYEMGzV
— Within Our Lifetime (@WOLPalestine) September 14, 2025
The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), warned on its website that the scale and tone of the planned demonstrations risk crossing the line from political protest into hate speech, arguing that anti-Israel activists are attempting to hijack the UN gathering to spread antisemitism and delegitimize the Jewish state’s right to exist.
Outside the UN last week, masked protesters belonging to the activist group INDECLINE kicked a realistic replica of Netanyahu’s decapitated head as though it were a soccer ball.
US activist group plays soccer with Bibi’s mock decapitated HEAD right outside NYC UN HQ
Peep shot at 00:40
Footage posted by INDECLINE collective just as UN General Assembly about to kick off
‘Following the game, ball was donated to Palestinian Genocide Museum’ pic.twitter.com/TQ84sgZhKr
— RT (@RT_com) September 9, 2025
Within Our Lifetime (WOL), a radical anti-Israel activist group, has vowed to “flood” the UNGA on behalf of the pro-Palestine movement.
WOL, one of the most prolific anti-Israel activist groups, came under immense fire after it organized a protest against an exhibition to honor the victims of the Oct. 7 massacre at the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel. During the event, the group chanted “resistance is justified when people are occupied!” and “Israel, go to hell!”
“We will be there to confront them with the truth: Their silence and inaction enable genocide. The world cannot continue as if Gaza does not exist,” WOL said of its planned demonstrations in New York. “This is the time to make our voices impossible to ignore. Come to New York by any means necessary, to stand, to march, to demand the UN act and end the siege.”
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), two other anti-Israel organizations that have helped organize widespread demonstrations against the Jewish state during the war in Gaza, also announced they are planning a march from Times Square to the UN headquarters on Friday.
“The time is now for each and every UN member state to uphold their duty under international law: sanction Israel and end the genocide,” the groups said in a statement.
JVP, an organization that purports to fight for “Palestinian liberation,” has positioned itself as a staunch adversary of the Jewish state. The group argued in a 2021 booklet that Jews should not write Hebrew liturgy because hearing the language would be “deeply traumatizing” to Palestinians. JVP has repeatedly defended the Oct. 7 massacre of roughly 1,200 people in southern Israel by Hamas as a justified “resistance.” Chapters of the organization have urged other self-described “progressives” to throw their support behind Hamas and other terrorist groups against Israel
Similarly, PYM, another radical anti-Israel group, has repeatedly defended terrorism and violence against the Jewish state. PYM has organized many anti-Israel protests in the two years following the Oct. 7 attacks in the Jewish state. Recently, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) called for a federal investigation into the organization after Aisha Nizar, one of the group’s leaders, urged supporters to sabotage the US supply chain for the F-35 fighter jet, one of the most advanced US military assets and a critical component of Israel’s defense.
The UN General Assembly has historically been a flashpoint for heated debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Previous gatherings have seen dueling demonstrations outside the Manhattan venue, with pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups both seeking to influence the international spotlight.
While warning about the demonstrations, CAM noted it recently launched a new mobile app, Report It, that allows users worldwide to quickly and securely report antisemitic incidents in real time.
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Nina Davidson Presses Universities to Back Words With Action as Jewish Students Return to Campus Amid Antisemitism Crisis
Nina Davidson on The Algemeiner’s ‘J100’ podcast. Photo: Screenshot
Philanthropist Nina Davidson, who served on the board of Barnard College, has called on universities to pair tough rhetoric on combatting antisemitism with enforcement as Jewish students returned to campuses for the new academic year.
“Years ago, The Algemeiner had published a list ranking the most antisemitic colleges in the country. And number one was Columbia,” Davidson recalled on a recent episode of The Algemeiner‘s “J100” podcast. “As a board member and as someone who was representing the institution, it really upset me … At the board meeting, I brought it up and I said, ‘What are we going to do about this?’”
Host David Cohen, chief executive officer of The Algemeiner, explained he had revisited Davidson’s remarks while she was being honored for her work at The Algemeiner‘s 8th annual J100 gala, held in October 2021, noting their continued relevance.
“It could have been the same speech in 2025,” he said, underscoring how longstanding concerns about campus antisemitism, while having intensified in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, are not new.
Davidson argued that universities already possess the tools to protect students – codes of conduct, time-place-manner rules, and consequences for threats or targeted harassment – but too often fail to apply them evenly. “Statements are not enough,” she said, arguing that institutions need to enforce their rules and set a precedent that there will be consequences for individuals who refuse to follow them.
She also said that stakeholders – alumni, parents, and donors – are reassessing their relationships with schools that, in their view, have not safeguarded Jewish students. While supportive of open debate, Davidson distinguished between protest and intimidation, calling for leadership that protects expression while ensuring campus safety.
The episode surveyed specific pressure points that administrators will face this fall: repeat anti-Israel encampments, disruptions of Jewish programming, and the challenge of distinguishing political speech from conduct that violates university rules. “Unless schools draw those lines now,” Davidson warned, “they’ll be scrambling once the next crisis hits.”
Cohen closed by framing the discussion as a test of institutional credibility, asking whether universities will “turn policy into protection” in real time. Davidson agreed, pointing to students who “need to know the rules aren’t just on paper.”
The full conversation is available on The Algemeiner’s “J100” podcast.
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Brown University Reactivates Students for Justice in Palestine Following Suspension
Illustrative: Brown University students gathered outside University Hall. Photo: Amy Russo of USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect
Brown University has reinstated Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a notorious anti-Zionist group widely recognized as a leading driver of campus antisemitism, following a suspension related to its conduct at anti-Israel demonstrations last year.
“Brown leaders have continued to work to ensure that all members of our campus community understand the expectations and community standards for demonstrations and protests on campus,” university spokesman Brian Clark told The Brown Daily Herald, which first reported the story on Tuesday. “While Brown’s policies make clear that protest is an acceptable means of expression on campus, it cannot interfere with the normal functions of the university.”
Brown University first launched investigations into its anti-Israel groups and individual students following their riotous conduct during a protest of the Brown Corporation that was held in October 2024.
Staged outside the Warren Alpert Medical School to inveigh against the corporation’s recent rejection of a proposal to adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement — which aims to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination — the demonstration saw the Ivy League students engage in harassment and intimidation, according to a community notice obtained by The Algemeiner. The protesters repeatedly struck a bus transporting the corporation’s trustees from the area, shouted expletives at them, and even lodged a “a racial epithet … toward a person of color.”
Other trustees were stalked to their destinations while some were obstructed from entering their bus, according to the missive by Russell Carey, Brown’s interim vice president for campus life and executive vice president of planning and policy. The official added that the students — many of whom are members of Students for Justice in Palestine, which has links to terrorist organizations, and its spin-off, Brown Divest Coalition (BDC) — harmed not only the trustees but also the university as an institution of higher learning.
Speaking to The Herald, anti-Israel activists denied any wrongdoing and accused Carey of inciting an “attempt to attack and defame student protesters holding the corporation accountable to their decision to continue to invest in companies enabling genocide and apartheid.” Framing themselves as victims, the students added that the Brown Corporation should be “deeply ashamed.”
Brown went on to suspend SJP, stripping the group of its recognition and privileges.
According to The Herald, the university has terminated the suspension and re-recognized SJP despite finding it guilty of “disruption of community” and “harm to persons.” However, the group is on probation until the end of this academic year.
An SJP operator acknowledged that political pressure may have contributed to the group’s reinstatement, noting that a local American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) chapter demanded that the university lift its suspension in January in a letter which lodged allegations of free speech violations.
Even with the group restored to good standing, its activity remains restricted. It may not “hold rallies or demonstrations for the remainder of the academic year” and is barred from holding “teach-ins and speaker events until November,” the Herald said.
Anti-Israel and far-left activity has caused Brown to incur exorbitant financial penalties imposed by the US federal government.
In July, Brown agreed to pay $50 million dollars and enact a series of reforms put forth by the Trump administration to settle claims involving alleged sex discrimination and antisemitism, the school’s president, Christina Paxson, announced.
“The university’s foremost priority throughout discussions with the government was remaining true to our academic mission, our core values, and who we are as a community at Brown,” Paxson wrote. “This is reflected in key provisions of the resolution agreement preserving our academic independence, as well as a commitment to pay $50 million in grants over 10 years to workforce development organizations in Rhode Island, which is aligned with our service and community engagement mission.”
The resolution made Brown University the latest higher education institution at the time to accede to US President Donald Trump’s demands for policies that would pull academia back from what he has described as an ideologically leftward drift that has precipitated racial hatred against Jews and violations of the rights of women designated as female at birth. The government is rewarding Brown’s propitiating by restoring access to $510 million in federal research grants and contracts it impounded.
Per the agreement, shared by Paxson, Brown will provide women athletes locker rooms based on sex, not one’s self-chosen gender identity — a monumental concession by a university that is reputed as one of the most progressive in the country — and adopt the Trump administration’s definition of “male” and “female,” as articulated in a January 2025 executive order issued by Trump. Additionally, Brown has agreed not to “perform gender reassignment surgery or prescribe puberty blockers or hormones to any minor child for the purpose of aligning the child’s appearance with an identity that differs from his or her sex.”
Regarding campus antisemitism, the agreement calls for Brown University to reduce anti-Jewish bias on campus by forging ties with local Jewish Day Schools, launching “renewed partnerships with Israeli academics and national Jewish organizations,” and boosting support for its Judaic Studies program. Brown must also conduct a “climate survey” of Jewish students to collect raw data of their campus experiences.
Another major provision shutters any Brown initiatives which may advance the aims of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement.
“Brown shall not maintain programs that promote unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes, quotas, diversity targets, or similar efforts,” the agreement stipulated. “Brown will cease any provision of benefits or advantages to individuals on the basis of protected characteristics in any school, component, division, department, foundation, association, or element within the entire Brown University system.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.