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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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Northwestern University Touts Progress on Addressing Campus Antisemitism Amid Federal Scrutiny
Signs cover the fence at a pro-Palestinian encampment at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. on April 28, 2024. Photo: Max Herman via Reuters Connect.
Northwestern University on Monday touted its progress in addressing the campus antisemitism crisis, issuing a statement containing a checklist of policies it has enacted since being censured by federal lawmakers over its handling of pro-Hamas demonstrations which convulsed its campus during the 2023-2024 academic year.
“The university administration took this criticism to heart and spent much of last summer revising our rules and policies to make our university safe for all of our students, regardless of their religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, or political viewpoint,” the statement said. “Among the updated policies is our Demonstration Policy, which includes new requirements and guidance on how, when, and where members of the community may protest or otherwise engage in expressive activity.”
The university added that it has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, a reference tool which aids officials in determining what constitutes antisemitism, and begun holding “mandatory antisemitism training” sessions which “all students, faculty, and staff” must attend.
“This included a live training for all new students in September and a 17-minute training module for all enrolled students, produced in collaboration with the Jewish United Fund,” it continued. “Antisemitism trainings will continue as a permanent part of our broader training in civil rights and Title IX.”
Other initiatives rolled out by the university include an Advisory Council to the President on Jewish Life, dinners for Jewish students hosted by administrative officials, and educational events which raise awareness of rising antisemitism in the US and across the world. Additionally, Northwestern said that it imposed disciplinary sanctions against several students and one staff member whose conduct violated the new “Demonstration and/or Display Policies” which regulate peaceful assembly on the campus.
“In closing, although Northwestern has made significant progress in the fight against antisemitism on campus, the university remains vigilant and will continue to do what is necessary to make our campus safe,” the statement concluded. “Importantly, the fight against antisemitism is NOT [sic] a zero-sum game. All members of our communities on campus — all religions, races, national origins, genders, sexual orientations, and political viewpoints — deserve to feel safe and know that our rules will be enforced to protect them against hate, discrimination, harassment, and intimidation. Northwestern is committed to this principle.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Northwestern University struggled for months to correct an impression that it coddled pro-Hamas protesters and acceded to their demands for a boycott of Israel in exchange for an end to their May 2024 encampment.
University president Schill denied during a US congressional hearing held that year that he had capitulated to any demand that fostered a hostile environment, but his critics noted that part of the deal to end the encampment stipulated his establishing a scholarship for Palestinian undergraduates, contacting potential employers of students who caused recent campus disruptions to insist on their being hired, creating a segregated dormitory hall that will be occupied exclusively by students of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) and Muslim descent, and forming a new advisory committee in which anti-Zionists students and faculty may wield an outsized voice.
The status of those concessions, which a law firm representing the civil rights advocacy group StandWithUs described as “outrageous” in July 2024, were not disclosed in Monday’s statement.
Northwestern University is not the only school creating distance between itself and the anti-Zionist movement, a step many colleges have taken in response to US President Donald Trump’s vowing to cut the flow of taxpayer funds supplementing their budgets should they refuse to crackdown down on illegal protests and antisemitism. Following the Trump administration’s cancelling of over $400 million in federals contracts and grants awarded to Columbia University, former interim president Katrina Armstrong proposed a list of reforms the school would agree to undertake — in areas ranging from undergraduate admissions to campus security — to restore the funds.
Armstrong later resigned from her position, saying in a statement which explained the decision that she wishes to return to her role as executive director of the university’s Irving Medical Center, as well as several other positions she holds.
Meanwhile, Harvard University recently fired a librarian whom someone filmed ripping posters of the Bibas children, two babies murdered in captivity by Hamas, off a kiosk in Harvard Yard and denounced him as “hateful.” Additionally, it paused a partnership with a higher education institution located in the West Bank, a move for which prominent members of the Harvard community and federal lawmakers had clamored in a series of public statements. The Trump administration initiated a review of $9 billion in taxpayer funds it receives anyway, prompting interim president Alan Garber to defend Harvard’s handling of the issue.
“For the past fifteen months, we have devoted considerable effort to addressing antisemitism,” Garber said. “We have strengthened our rules and our approach to disciplining those who violate them. We have enhanced training and education on antisemitism across our campus and introduced measures to support our Jewish community and ensure student safety and security.”
Northwestern University is in the Trump administration’s crosshairs too. It is one of 60 universities being investigated by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights over its handling of campus antisemitism, a project that will serve as an early test of the administration’s ability to perform the essential functions of the agency after downsizing its workforce to increase its efficiency.
“The department is deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite US campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in March. “US colleges and universities benefit from enormous public investments funded by US taxpayers. That support is a privilege, and it is contingent on scrupulous adherence to federal antidiscrimination laws.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Pressure Mounts on UN Members to Block Reappointment of Controversial Anti-Israel Official
Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, attends a side event during the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, March 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
The United Nations is facing growing pressure to block the reappointment of Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who has an extensive history of using her role to denigrate Israel and seemingly rationalize the terrorist group Hamas’s attacks against the Jewish state.
The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is set to reappoint Albanese for another three-year term on Friday, despite calls from several countries and NGOs urging UN members to oppose her reappointment due to her controversial remarks and alleged pro-Hamas stance.
Since taking on the role of UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories in 2022, Albanese has been at the center of controversy due to what critics, including US and European lawmakers, have described as antisemitic and anti-Israel public remarks.
In the months following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities, across southern Israel, Albanese accused Israel of perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinian people in revenge for the attacks and circulated a widely derided and heavily disputed report alleging that 186,000 people have been killed in Gaza as a result of Israeli actions.
She has also previously made comments about a “Jewish lobby” controlling America and Europe, compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and stated that Hamas’s violence against Israelis — including rape, murder, and kidnapping — needs to be “put in context.”
Last year, the United Nations launched a probe into Albanese for allegedly accepting a trip to Australia funded by pro-Hamas organizations.
In the past, she has also celebrated the anti-Israel protesters rampaging across US college campuses, saying they represent a “revolution” and that they give her “hope.”
On Monday, US Rep. Brian Mast, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, sent a letter to the president of the UNHRC, Ambassador Jürg Lauber, to express his strong opposition to Albanese’s reappointment.
In the letter, Mast claimed that Albanese has failed to act “in an independent capacity with a professional, impartial assessment, and maintain the highest standards of efficiency, competence, and integrity.”
“Ms. Albanese unapologetically uses her position as a UN special rapporteur to purvey and attempt to legitimize antisemitic tropes, while serving as a Hamas apologist,” the letter read.
“In her malicious fixation, she has even called for Israel to be removed from the United Nations while likening Israel to apartheid South Africa,” Mast wrote in a letter signed by six fellow lawmakers. “Regrettably, Ms. Albanese’s rhetoric has perverted the very institution and its foundational principles in which she was appointed to serve.”
Governments worldwide, including France, the UK, Germany, Canada, and the Netherlands, have condemned her statements as antisemitic and urged that she not be given another term in her role.
Last month, 42 members of the French Parliament publicly urged the government to oppose Albanese’s reappointment, arguing that it “would send a regrettable signal to victims, human rights defenders, and states committed to credible multilateralism.”
This week, British Labour Member of Parliament David Taylor also objected to Albanese’s reappointment, saying “there is no place for such alleged antisemitism on the international stage.”
“Albanese’s response to the largest antisemitic massacre of the 21st century was to describe it as ‘a response to Israel’s oppression,’” Taylor told the Jewish Chronicle. “She described Israel as being a ‘settler colonial conquest.’”
“Making statements of this nature in a UN capacity is abhorrent and does so much damage to communities already torn apart by horrific violence, going against everything the United Nations stands for,” Taylor said.
Human rights groups and NGOs have also campaigned to prevent the anti-Israel rapporteur from receiving a second term.
UN Watch, a Geneva-based NGO, has organized a petition against her reappointment, which has garnered over 83,000 signatures.
Last month, Maram Stern, executive vice president of the World Jewish Congress, sent a letter to the president of the UNHRC urging him to reject the renewal of Albanese’s mandate, citing what she described as the UN official’s history of anti-Israel animus and antisemitic statements.
“Ms. Albanese has repeatedly made public remarks that propagate harmful antisemitic tropes, question the legitimacy of the State of Israel, and employ rhetoric that undermines the credibility of the Human Rights Council itself,” the letter read. “Her persistent lack of objectivity and failure to uphold a balanced and impartial approach required of her as special rapporteur compromises her credibility as an independent expert.”
The American Jewish Committee (AJC) also urged UN Members to reject Albanese’s second term, saying she “has systematically demonstrated a troubling pattern of conduct and expression that is incompatible with the responsibilities, neutrality, and integrity expected of a UN special rapporteur.”
“Her actions not only betray the victims of terrorism and antisemitism but also are a stain on the credibility of the Human Rights Council itself,” the AJC wrote in a letter.
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Three Jewish Coaches Lead Teams in NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Final Four
Florida Gators head coach Todd Golden and Auburn Tigers head coach Bruce Pearl talk before the game as Auburn Tigers take on Florida Gators at Neville Arena in Auburn, Ala., on Saturday, Feb. 8, 2025. Photo: USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect
The men’s 2025 NCAA Tournament Final Four bracket includes four No. 1 seed teams, three of which have Jewish coaches who will lead the way in the two national semifinals taking place on Saturday.
Auburn University Tigers head coach Bruce Pearl has contributed Auburn’s success in the NCAA in part to God and his Jewish faith. He described Israel as the “ancestral homeland for the Jewish people” and called for the release of American-Israeli Edan Alexander from Hamas captivity at a post-game conference last month. He also took the Auburn team on a trip to Israel, where they made stops at the Western Wall and Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
The Tigers will compete on Saturday in the NCAA Tournament Final Four against the Florida Gators whose Jewish coach, Todd Golden, is an Israeli citizen who previously played two years professionally for Maccabi Haifa in Israel.
In 2009, Golden was co-captain of the USA Open Team, coached by Pearl, that won gold at the Maccabiah Games, which is an international multi-sport event for Jewish and Israeli athletes. Golden has been the coach of the Tigers for two seasons, but prior to that he was the assistant coach at Columbia, the head coach at San Francisco, and even worked under Pearl. Golden was director of basketball operations for the Auburn staff for the 2014-15 season and was promoted to assistant coach for the 2015-16 campaign.
Duke and Houston also play each other on Saturday in the Final Four. The head coach of the Duke Blue Devils, Jon Scheyer, also formerly played in Israel and holds Israeli citizenship. He played professionally for Maccabi Tel Aviv from 2011-12. In October 2023, not long after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, Scheyer commented on the conflict and said in part: “My heart breaks for the people in Israel — that have hostages, American lives that are taken, mourning loved ones.” Scheyer is leading Duke to the Final Four in only his third year as head coach.
The Houston Cougars – the fourth men’s team competing in the Final Four – do not have a Jewish coach, but they have a player who was born in Israel and played for Israel’s national youth squad. Guard Emanuel Sharp, who is the son of Derrick Sharp, was part of Israel’s under-16 national basketball team and also played for Maccabi Tel Aviv for over a decade.
This year’s Final Four have a combined record of 135-16. Since seeding began in 1979, this is only the second time in history that all four No. 1 seeds advanced to the Final Four. It previously happened in 2008. Larry Brown was the last Jewish coach to win the NCAA Tournament when he led Kansas to the victory in 1988.
The 2025 NCAA Tournament Final Four begins on Saturday, with two national semifinals taking place at the Alamodome in San Antonio, and ends on Monday with the national championship.
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