Daniel
Libeskind
|
Lolle
Boettcher |
GHETTO FIGHTERS
MUSEUM
Living The Memory
With A Master Planner
By Nina Boxer
 HERE
was Daniel Libeskind on 9/11? America’s most famous
architect in the rebuilding of Ground Zero had completed one of
his “living memory constructions” – the Jewish Museum of
Berlin – and it had its grand opening on Sept. 11, 2001.
“It closed two hours after it opened,” he
said, “because of the uncertainty as to what the world was
coming to.”
As Libeskind accepted the Janusz Korczak
Honorary Award from the American Friends of the Ghetto Fighters’
Museum in Israel, he was reminded of the time his mother, as a
teenager in Lodz, Poland, won first prize in a writing competition
judged by Janusz Korczak, the famous children’s
educator.
The dinner at the
Pierre
Hotel
also honored the
Moriah
School
in
Englewood
,
N.J.
, and Lolle Boettcher, a Christian schoolteacher in
St. Louis
,
Missouri
. The evening raised $1.4 million for the museum in Kibbutz Beit
Lohamei Haghetaot in the western
Galilee
.
“The history of the Holocaust then is a
topic that I feel compelled to teach,” Boettcher said. “It has
caused me to look at life through this event and has reshaped all
I believe.”
“Many think architecture is simply an act
of construction,” Libeskind said, “but it is also an act of
living memory and a communicative act.”
For the Jewish Museum in
Berlin
he didn’t create just “a container with windows.”
He explained, “The building is penetrated
by a life that comes from really no-longer-visible addresses of
Jews and Germans who lived around the site. These slashes and
wounds in the building communicate that we are still in touch with
those things that are not completely visible or audible to us.”
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