Australian Holocaust Museums: From Particular to Universal

ABSTRACT

Australian Holocaust museums are at a crossroads regarding their exhibitions and educational programming. Originally survivor driven initiatives, they now face the dual challenge of negotiating the loss of the survivor generation and interpreting the goals of Holocaust education in light of their absence. To do so, they must confront the question of what Holocaust education seeks to achieve and, most poignantly, whether it can continue to speak to succeeding generations of Australian student and general visitors, now far removed from the event both historically and geographically. This article examines how this moment of intergenerational change has and is being negotiated at the Sydney Jewish Museum through reflection on the development and implementation of its newest permanent exhibition, The Holocaust and Human Rights. An explicit attempt to bring the intimate histories of the survivors into dialogue with broader, more universalistic concerns, the exhibition provides a microcosm of both the potential and problematics such ventures entail.

KEYWORDS:

• Holocaust
• education
• museums
• human rights
• genocide

Introduction

Education was fundamental to the establishment of Australia’s Holocaust memorial museums. The major museums in Melbourne – the Jewish Holocaust Centre (now Melbourne Holocaust Museum) opened 1984, and the Sydney Jewish Museum opened in 1992. Both were founded and funded by Jewish survivors as centers for education, remembrance, and research. This historical setting stands in sharp contrast to the majority of international sites, which are seldom solely Jewish in derivation but more often funded and run by state authorities. Explicit in their desire to contribute their personal stories with the hope of educating the next generation about the horrors of war and genocide, Australian Holocaust survivors placed education at the center of their goals. As we now witness the passing of the survivor generation, the educational approaches undertaken at these institutions have developed and transformed.¹ While personal testimony remains at the heart of Australian Holocaust museums’ educational initiatives, intergenerational change and a desire to connect Holocaust education to wider, contemporary themes has witnessed a broadening of educational efforts and scope. These initiatives, however, have not been without controversy.

With the passing of the survivor generation, the meanings accorded to survivors’ experiences and their broader, public applicability have become central to debates about the future direction of these institutions.² In the museum’s early education programs, the encounter with the survivor was largely unmediated. The underlying assumption was that the intensity of a personal interaction with one who had suffered extreme persecution would naturally engender in visitors an increased appreciation of related social issues. They, in turn, would be inspired to work toward the creation of more just societies where events such as the Holocaust would be unthinkable. In other words, exposure to a particular and individual experience was expected to result in a greater sensitivity to connected, universal concerns. Exactly what these concerns might be was left unexamined, and visitors’ perceptions and responses largely unmeasured.³

How these educational goals might be realized in the post-survivor age remains an open question. With the passing of the survivor generation, the need to retain contemporary relevance has become increasingly urgent, and more recent exhibitions and educational initiatives have necessarily shifted toward explicitly universal social and political issues. This progression has been amplified with Australia’s official membership in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2019 and the subsequent responsibilities with regard to Holocaust education that membership confers. As a result of these developments, a variety of new exhibitions and associated educational initiatives have been developed at Australian Holocaust museums that have explicitly, rather than by inference, connected the experience of survivors to broader educational imperatives and themes.

The following analysis of the most recent permanent exhibition and related education programs at the Sydney Jewish Museum – the Holocaust and Human Rights – lays bare this process of change and its consequences. Negotiating the tension between the need to maintain contemporary relevance, while remaining true to the particular vision and mission of the institution’s survivor founders, its first “educators,” this case study reveals the underlying forces that impelled this progression. What is demonstrated is that in constructing explicitly universal interpretations of Holocaust memory, this once-particularistic memory is ultimately untethered, and those who encounter it are free to take from it their own associations and meanings. In stepping out of a “private, personal and Jewish” space, Australia’s Holocaust museums entered the forcefield of public debate. Navigating this new terrain has courted controversy, but also engendered increased educational possibilities, as a more expansive vision has brought the history and memory of the Holocaust to new and increasingly diverse audiences.

A Particular Past

The desire to connect educating about the Holocaust with broader social justice concerns was, in fact, always evident at the SJM. As early as 1994, the first CEO of the museum, Alan Jacobs, noted that: “The Museum recently screened John Pilger’s “Death of a Nation” and invited members of Sydney's East Timorese community to help draw attention to the continuing plight of East Timor. This is very much in line with our stand against racism, the abuse of human rights and genocide.”⁴ Subsequent CEOs expressed similar sentiments, with Rabbi Jeffrey Cohen stating in a 1996 Jewish News report that the “museum plans to fulfil its mission primarily through its two permanent exhibitions – Culture & Continuity and The Holocaust,” both of which “pay tribute to the fortitude and endurance of the human spirit and present powerful statements on democracy, morality, social justice and human rights.” Yet in the same article, the SJM Marketing Manager Samantha Feldman affirmed that the institution’s new mission statement established the museum as an “institution with a single-minded commitment to education about the events of the Holocaust: the systematic destruction of six million Jews in Europe by the Nazi regime.”⁵ In contrast Rabbi Cohen stated that, the “mission recognizes the universal messages in what is a uniquely Jewish experience,” he said. “We are attempting to place the Holocaust on the Australian agenda as a means of ensuring that these events will never be repeated – not to Jews or anyone.”⁶

What is evident in these examples is that in the early years of the SJM, the inclusion of broader social justice and human rights concerns was justified by way of inference from the institution’s central educational mission – educating about the Holocaust. This tension between the need to maintain a particularistic perspective on the meaning and import of the Holocaust and the desire to address broader, universal messages continued to animate the educational initiatives of the SJM throughout its first two decades. At times, this proved a difficult path to tread, especially as the demand to relate teaching about the Holocaust to other historical and contemporary tragedies increased. The museum’s education programs addressed this challenge through what might be best labelled a “unique and universal” framework, similar to that pioneered by Michael Berenbaum, the inaugural Program Director at the USHMM.⁷ Through this paradigm, the institution could maintain its focus on survivor experiences, yet respond to increasing external demands to retain contemporary relevance. For example, when launching a new range of educational materials in 2003, the author of the materials, Sophie Gelski, remarked that “Undeniably the Holocaust is a Jewish tragedy – but not exclusively. Therefore the implications, as well as the universal lessons of this man-made catastrophe, should be of major importance to teachers across a range of subject disciplines.”⁸

Interestingly, prior to the SJM’s establishment, a more fluid and explicit connection to broader social justice and human rights concerns was evident in the planning phase. The “Proposal for the Establishment of a Jewish Holocaust Museum in Sydney” (1986), a formative document resulting from an intense process of consultation and debate, lists several reasons for undertaking to build a Holocaust museum that could aptly be described as universal. A Holocaust museum, it says, stands as “a warning against circumstances which give rise to the dehumanization of minorities, leading to genocide,”⁹ and notes that while “attitudes towards the Holocaust will be set within the context of antisemitism generally,” the Holocaust will also be set “within the context of persecution of minority groups.” ¹⁰ Even so, these universalistic sentiments are not explicitly addressed or developed further. In the “Proposal,” it is evident that the particular story of the Holocaust will address universal issues through inference rather than direct connection or the contextualization of the Holocaust into pre-existing frameworks such as Human Rights or genocide. Instead, “by highlighting the potential for evil in a totalitarian regime, it [the SJM] will promote commitment to democracy and freedom.”¹¹ On this basis, the committee asserts that a “project of such worth and lasting impact deserves the support of the Jewish and, indeed, the general communities.”¹²

While expansive, therefore, in its outlook, the “Proposal” does not explicitly connect Holocaust memory to specific social causes that were prominent at this time of its release. For example, it does not connect safeguarding the rights of minorities in Australia’s to the end of the White Australia policy and the shift to a federally endorsed “multicultural Australia,” despite the official discrimination faced by post-war Jewish refugees in this regard. Similarly, no explicit link is made to the history of Aboriginal persecution in Australia. While the advent of the SJM occurred well before the rise in popular Australian national consciousness regarding the persecution of Australia’s indigenous population (which came to light most powerfully in the “Bringing Them Home” report of 1997), detail of the murder and dispossession of Australia’s indigenous peoples was known but remained largely unaddressed. Neither was a connection made to dominant forms of Australian national commemoration like ANZAC or the folk idea of a “Fair Go”¹³ – all perspectives that one might expect if connecting Holocaust education to more universal concerns in an Australian context.

Nonetheless, the “Proposal” did contain humanist elements that evince a desire to address Holocaust memory to non-Jewish Australians and to explicitly connect it to broader themes. However, with the opening of the SJM in 1992, these more expansive approaches were curtailed, and a more particularized version of the Holocaust was propagated. While it is unclear exactly how such a contraction came about, the shift to a sole benefactor, survivor and entrepreneur, John Saunders, and the support of the Australian Association of Jewish Survivors, meant that the museum’s leadership was dominated by survivor concerns. Their particularistic version of Australian Holocaust memory would remain dominant in the SJM’s early years despite attempts by other stakeholders to connect the Holocaust to other stories/events.

This survivor-centred focus was epitomized by the SJM’s first curator, Sylvia Rosenblum who, when queried on the potential for a Holocaust exhibition to speak to other historical events, emphatically stated, “One cannot use the Holocaust to tell other stories’” From Rosenblum’s perspective a Holocaust museum should aim to “tell the story of the Holocaust simply, truthfully and honestly so that it would never happen again.”¹⁴ She characterized such an approach as a “survivor attitude to memorialization of the Holocaust,” and defined this perspective as consisting of:

The desire and/or need to fulfil the Jewish injunction to remember – zachor – and the desire or need to bear witness. These factors were paramount in the establishment of the Sydney Jewish Museum. Unlike its counterparts around the world, its memorialization of the Holocaust therefore, is private, personal and Jewish and has not been subjected to the problems of institutionalization, and politicization of state-owned or state-subsidized museums.¹⁵

Hence in the SJM’s first two decades, the focus on the particular continued, but was somewhat mollified as investment in the institution was diversified due to Saunders demand that financial responsibility also be the concern of the broader Jewish community.¹⁶ As the SJM entered its third decade, however, a new board headed by descendants rather than survivors was determined to bring the issue of contemporary relevance to the fore and make explicit connections to broader histories of historic and contemporary persecution.

The desire to expand programming in more universalistic directions had been evidenced in more recent years, underpinned by an increase in professional staff and a greater involvement of second and third generation descendants. Temporary exhibitions like Butterflies of Hope in 2007 started to make more explicit links to Human Rights, this time through the prism of children’s rights.¹⁷ Other programs such as the Hakoah Internship program also encouraged students to connect what they learned and contributed at the SJM to a greater understanding of human rights.¹⁸ And intergenerational initiatives such as Young Friends, a group for descendants, also helped set the tone with program spokesperson Amelia Klein stating that “The presence every one of us is important; it indicates our willingness to embrace the messages of understanding, human rights and justice that the museum teaches.”¹⁹ Despite these developments the SJM’s core exhibitions and education programs remained predominantly survivor and Holocaust-focussed. Attempts to broaden this remit would only come into sharp relief with the first major redevelopment of the SJM’s permanent exhibitions since the museum’s opening, planning for which began in earnest in 2012.²⁰

A Universal Past

As part of the redevelopment process, what it might mean to broaden the SJM’s exhibition and educational remit was debated by survivors, educators, board members, and volunteers in a range of formal and informal settings. Was the Holocaust a story of extreme racism that therefore justified the need for a Centre for Anti-Racism Education? Was it the ultimate example of genocide that should impel a Centre for Comparative Genocide studies? Or were the atrocities of the Holocaust the impetus for the growth of the international human rights movement in the post-war period and hence a gateway into a broader discussion of human rights on both domestic and international levels? In each instance, the legacy and memory of the museum’s survivors became pivotal in these debates.²¹ Indeed, one proposal that the Holocaust displays should culminate in an ethics section stated that “The new ethics section will take the Sydney Jewish Museum to the vanguard of values education and it is the survivors that will guide us on this path.”²²

Those initiatives that could adequately capture the meaning and import of the survivors’ experiences would still be favored, yet why one interpretative paradigm of those experiences would be chosen over another would ultimately be decided by its potential for contemporary relevance i.e. the perceived ability of the given framework to speak to current and succeeding generations. On the strength of this imperative, a decision was taken by the SJM Board to create a Holocaust and Human Rights (HR) exhibition, a direction that would have far reaching implications for the shape of Holocaust memory at the SJM and its educational focus and programming.

At the time this decision was taken, many Holocaust museums across the globe were extending their exhibition programs and educational mandates to encompass the topic of human rights.²³ In Australia, the SJM was the first museum to undertake such a development. As a private museum, the SJM was able to navigate the often-fraught process of confronting these topics through a less overtly political framework than state museums or those institutions developed through a public-private partnership. For state run museums, such as the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, content development would involve confronting the often-competing demands of government imperatives, as well as a variety of community stakeholders.²⁴ While the SJM did not need to accord, or even consult, with government, this did not mean that the exhibition development process was without political dimensions. Rather, in the case of the SJM, an institution founded and shaped by Sydney’s Holocaust survivor community, these political battles are most acutely evidenced against the backdrop of intergenerational communal change.

Prior to the opening of the Holocaust and Human Rights exhibition, the SJM had also completed a major redevelopment of its permanent Holocaust exhibition, which opened in 2017. The Holocaust and Human Rights which opened the following year was intended to “complete” the exhibition by transmitting the relevance of the Holocaust to contemporary audiences. This new exhibition would thus constitute an explicit articulation of the universalistic resonance of Holocaust memory at the SJM. It also marked a significant moment in the intergenerational transfer of memory, as its contours and final shape were determined largely not by the survivors, but their descendants.

Providing support for the Holocaust and Human Rights exhibition, was the president and the board. This group comprised a radically changed entity to the board that had founded and opened the museum in 1992.²⁵ The majority of its members were second generation with only one survivor on the board at the time of the exhibition’s opening. Additionally, unlike previous permanent exhibitions, there was not enough inhouse expertize to undertake this initiative independently. Hence an Australian Research Council grant was applied for and was eventually successful, which allowed bringing on board the additional expertize of University of Sydney academics including the author of this article and Professors Jennifer Barrett and A. Dirk Moses, as well as Sydney museum designer Jisuk Han of X2 Design. An international research program that included site visits and interviews in Europe, Canada, the US, and South Africa provided a greatly expanded context for the exhibition’s development. International trends were considered against a changing Australian backdrop. Unlike the Proposal formulated prior to the museum’s opening, there was no question that the Holocaust and Human Rights exhibition, while connecting to the past, would focus its gaze squarely toward the Australian present.

The exhibition team was thus empowered by the board to explicitly, rather than through inference, address human rights issues in connection with Holocaust history and memory. Museum educators were part of the exhibition development at every stage, establishing education as a core goal of the project from the outset. Conceptually and spatially, the exhibition needed to make sense of the flow between the permanent exhibitions and to do so both a historical and thematic context for the exhibitions was developed. Based on international site research as well as current scholarship on the history and development of human rights, the following curatorial and educational framework was decided upon.

The historical framing took account of contemporary scholarly debate on the import of the crimes of the Holocaust in particular on the development of post-war human rights culture.²⁶ Hence the Holocaust was deemed to provide an effective framing device to explore human rights challenges if accurately historicized in terms of the language used in international society in the 1940s, which referred to mass criminality against civilians. Nazi targeting of Jews was recognized but was also contextualized as part of the regime’s general criminality. The shock at the extent of this criminality motivated United Nations delegates to pass the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in November 1948. The Universal Declaration was then fruitfully utilized as the exhibition’s framing device but was also historicized in order to understand its limitations and omissions. In particular, the complex topics of community and cultural rights was not addressed in the Declaration. These limitations were explicitly acknowledged in the exhibition’s framing text which then set the scene for an understanding of an evolving human rights culture.

The international research had demonstrated that sites and museums that explored human rights issues effectively focused on local and/or regional human rights issues while connecting them to contemporary international human rights agendas. Hence a decision was made to focus on local human rights issues in Australia. Consultation with local communities, and in particular with local Indigenous communities, was thus made an imperative to ensure that the definition and content of human rights in the exhibition took into account Indigenous knowledge and experience of, as well as struggles for, human rights. Education programs that centered on Australian human rights issues were also developed.

The research process and conclusions culminated in the following exhibition objectives:

The Holocaust and Human Rights would:

1. Connect the historic and thematic content in the new permanent Holocaust exhibition to contemporary human rights issues, debates and concerns, with an emphasis on those issues most pertinent to the Australian context;

2. Offer a distinctly Australian contribution to the growing international interest in and proliferation of museums focused on human rights;

3. Function as a “learner and self-led” space for all visitors. It will be a place for questioning and inquiry;

4. Provide space for reflection and contemplation by encouraging visitors to connect the historical materials to contemporary human rights debates and violations.²⁷

The overarching aim of the exhibition was articulated thus:

The Holocaust and Human Rights will outline the achievements and failures of the human rights movement. It focuses on historic and contemporary human rights struggles in Australia and the region, exploring and questioning our individual, communal and national responsibilities in upholding human rights today.²⁸

The structure of the exhibition comprised four main sections: An historical introduction provided a link to permanent exhibition and set the historical backdrop against which the contemporary materials would then be displayed. Similarly, a human rights timeline that articulated major human rights developments and failures, flanked by two AV screens that showed footage of these achievements on one and the continuation of mass atrocities and genocides on the other, provided further contextualization. The centerpiece of the exhibition was the display Coming to the Table, a video installation of four tables, each focussing on a particular human rights issue that was pertinent to Australia but also held historical resonance with human rights abuses committed during the period of the Holocaust. These included: LGBQTI Rights, Disability Rights, Refugees and Asylum Seekers and Indigenous Rights.

Historically these topics held links to the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, the T4 program that targeted people with disabilities, the refugee crisis both before and after WWII, and “scientific” racism. While these historical connections were drawn, careful distinctions were also made to differentiate these human rights issues in the present. Sometimes these connections sat uncomfortably with stakeholders. For example, the exhibition explicitly addressed Australia’s controversial record on asylum seekers. Some board members felt this was an unbalanced representation of Australia’s migration policies, particularly given the shift that occurred during the Malcolm Fraser’s conservative government when, from 1975-1982, the Fraser government accepted thousands of refugees to the broad acceptance of the Australian community. The policy’s humanitarian qualities notwithstanding, as the number of boat arrivals increased, public and political support began to wane. Agreement was forged that all aspects of Australia’s migration policies would be displayed, and the judgement of these would be left to the visitor. In this manner, the Coming to the Table display did not offer “answers” to these issues but rather acted as a provocation to visitors, “challenging them to reflect on key human rights issues that confront Australia. It embodies the complex and on-going process of negotiating and upholding human rights in both its content and design, inviting visitors to both intellectually and physically ‘Come to the Table’ and think deeply about the human rights issues we face today.”²⁹

Despite this consensus, the exhibition would prove contentious among board members who feared that the exhibition would become a vehicle for political advocacy, but ultimately the curatorial team was given license to proceed with the following caveat as expressed in the exhibition’s masterplan Reverberations: The Holocaust and Human Rights: “While not a vehicle for political advocacy, the exhibition can and should allow visitors to conclude their visit on a note of reflection, acknowledging the complexity of the issues. It may also stimulate them to apply what they have learned, or further investigate contemporary issues using links provided in the exhibition.”³⁰ Interestingly, the recent Gandel Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey, which sought to trace whether Australians did indeed make such connections, concluded that there was “a strong correlation between Holocaust awareness and pro-social feeling towards minority groups, refugees, and First Nations Australians.”³¹

Such views are evidenced in responses to The Holocaust and Human Rights exhibition. To allow visitors expression of their views a final section of the display was set aside for general visitors and students to reflect on what human rights meant to them and offer their responses to the exhibition. In this small but significant section, the consequences of a more explicit articulation of the connection of Holocaust memory to contemporary issues can be seen. Engagement with the materials was clearly evinced with the majority of statements affirming the need to continue to uphold human rights within Australia and internationally. Further, the museum’s education programs were significantly expanded to include programs centred on ethics, citizenship, rights, freedom and responsibilities, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its impact today. As noted, education staff were involved in the exhibition development from the outset, and their input was decisive in terms of the human rights issues that would be addressed in the exhibition. Links to the NSW syllabi were an essential component in ensuring that the displays would be useful to NSW teachers as they endeavored to teach this complex history across a range of subject areas.³²

Educational imperatives thus both informed and leveraged the four central topics comprising the Coming to the Table displays. Explicit links to syllabi such as Aboriginal Studies and Legal Studies were created by SJM educators to facilitate a framework for educators working in areas beyond the standard History or English frameworks. Educators also paid particular attention to demographic factors, noting that the programs would need to respond to “a diverse range of issues, reflecting the ever-changing contemporary social, political, economic and cultural landscapes of Australia,” and take account of the moral imperative of informed citizenship embedded in the Australian curriculum, which states that all “complex issues require responses that take account of ethical considerations such as human rights and responsibilities, animal rights, environmental issues and global justice.”³³ These new programs have proved popular and allowed SJM education staff to explicitly address these issues onsite through use of the Holocaust and Human Rights exhibition.³⁴

These successes notwithstanding, those who feared political implications emanating from a shift to an explicit focus on human rights were somewhat vindicated, particularly with regard to Israel/Palestine. Fears that inappropriate comparisons would be made sat in tension with the imperative to address the topic given the human rights context at hand. Such concerns were compounded by apprehension that the museum’s volunteer guide base would not be able to respond adequately to questions or concerns that visitors might have. Ultimately, it was not possible to come to consensus on where in the exhibition the topic might be addressed, and it was left to the educators to address the issue within the context of their programming.

As Project Director of the exhibition, I was faced with questions as to why the topic of Israel/Palestine was not included in the Holocaust and Human Rights exhibition timeline. The omission was picked up on by a Sydney Morning Herald journalist in an article about the opening of the museum:

While the timeline notes the Rohingya crisis, the partition of India, the Howard government's 2001 Pacific Solution in which asylum seekers are processed offshore and Kevin Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generation, it makes no mention of the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict. … Dr Alba conceded the museum could be criticised for its omission but “if the criticism means we will develop and change that aspect, then that is what will happen” … So far, the anonymous responses include calls for respect, equality and protest. One note defines human rights as the right not to be invaded and the right not to be occupied.³⁵

The issue of whether and how to address the Israel/Palestine conflict in the Holocaust and Human Rights exhibition and education programs continues to be debated and will not be easily resolved. The atrocities of 7 October 2023 and the subsequent global rise in antisemitism will, no doubt, further complicate how this topic will be addressed. However, what this exchange and others like it demonstrated is that once the message of the Holocaust is explicitly universalized through paradigms such as human rights, visitors will make their own connections/conclusions and respond accordingly. Unlike the SJM’s original programs, in which an unmediated interaction with the survivor left the visitor to reflect on connected contemporary and universal issues, yet never compelled them to do so, the Holocaust and Human Rights made such demands explicit. This shift necessitated the charting of new territory for the SJM, and it will not be the last Australian Holocaust museum to face such issues. As the Australian government has committed itself to membership of IHRA, Holocaust education programs will continue to be developed and implemented across the country, with Australia’s Holocaust museums at the vanguard of these efforts. The imperative to connect the history of the Holocaust with contemporary social and political concerns is therefore far from abating, and the pressing question for Australian Holocaust museums is not whether, but rather how, they will seek to meet this challenge.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number DP190101946].

Notes on contributors

Avril Alba

Avril Alba is Associate Professor in Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation in Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies at the University of Sydney. She teaches and researches in the broad areas of Holocaust and modern Jewish history with a focus on Jewish and Holocaust museums. Her monograph, The Holocaust Memorial Museum: Sacred Secular Space, was published in 2015. From 2002 to 2011 Avril was the Education Director at the Sydney Jewish Museum, where she also served as the Project Director/Curator for the permanent exhibitions “Culture and Continuity” (2009), “The Holocaust” (2017), and “The Holocaust and Human Rights" (2018). She is currently working on an ARC Discovery project, “The Memory of the Holocaust in Australia” and an ARC Linkage Project “Evaluating the Impact of Holocaust Museum Education.”

Notes

1 For an overview of this trend across the spectrum of Australian Holocaust museums see: Suzanne D. Rutland and Suzanne Hampel “Holocaust education and remembrance in Australia Moving from family and community remembrance to human rights education” in Navras Jaat Aafreedi and Priya Singh, Conceptualizing Mass Violence: Representations, Recollections, and Reinterpretations, Mass Violence in Modern History (UK: Routledge, 2021).

2 See Avril Alba, “What to make of the legacy of Holocaust Survivors”, FASS News 18 October 2021 https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/news-and-events/news/2021/10/18/what-to-make-of-the-legacy-of-holocaust-survivors.html

3 Visitor books from these early years affirm that many visitors did indeed feel deeply moved by the museum but these responses were anecdotal, collected immediately as the visitor left the museum and never followed up in any systematic manner.

4 Alan Jacobs, “From the Director’s Desk” Australian Jewish News 26 August 1994, 2.

5 “Jewish Museum to Raise Profile” Australian Jewish News 12 April 1996, 7.

6 Ibid.

7 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Michael Berenbaum, eds., The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1st ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993).

8 “Sydney Jewish Museum adapts to changing student needs”, Australian Jewish News 8 August 2003, 3.

9 A Proposal for the Establishment of a Jewish Holocaust Museum in Sydney, 1986, p. 2. Sydney Jewish Museum Institutional Archives.

10 Ibid., 6.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., 2.

13 The Australian idea of the “Fair Go” is the belief that no matter a person’s background or circumstances, they should be treated with respect, equality and fairness.

14 Sylvia Deutsch, “The Holocaust is Unique” Australian Jewish News, 23 July 1993, 10.

15 Sylvia Rosenblum, “Are Museums the Best Place for the Memorialization of the Holocaust?,” International Network on Holocaust and Genocide 11 (1996): 17.

16 Announced in “From the CEO” in the SJM’s Newsletter, August 1996. “Our Chairman Mr John Saunders AO, announced on 18 April, 1996 that he would limit his donation to the Museum to $1.000,000 over the next three years, at which time his financial support would cease. As a result, the Sydney Jewish Museum must now move from being a privately funded organisation to a community based one.”

17 “Education at the Sydney Jewish Museum” Australian Jewish News, 27 July 2007, 4.

18 “Sydney Jewish Museum’s Internship” Australian Jewish News, 12 September 2003, 4.

19 “Jewish Museum welcomes Ambassadors of the Future” Australian Jewish News, 11 October 2002, 9.

20 This process culminated in the document 2020 A Masterplan for the Redevelopment of the Sydney Jewish Museum, endorsed by the SJM Board on 18 February 2013.

21 Avril Alba, “Transmitting the Survivor’s Voice: Redeveloping the Sydney Jewish Museum,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 30, no. 3 (September 1, 2016): 243–57.

22 The Future of our Past, Renewing the Sydney Jewish Museum, 13.

23 See Katrin Antweiler, Memorialising the Holocaust in Human Rights Museums, vol. 37 (Germany: De Gruyter, 2023); Jennifer Barrett, “Museums, Human Rights, and Universalism Reconsidered,” in Andrea Witcomb and Kylie Message-Jones, Volume 1: Museum Theory (John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015); Jennifer Carter and Jennifer Orange, “The Work of Museums: The Implications of a Human Rights Museology” (conference presentation, Federation of International Human Rights Museums Conference, International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, October 11, 2011); Jennifer Carter and Jennifer Orange, “Contentious Terrain: Defining a Human Rights Museology,” Museum Management and Curatorship 27, no. 2 (May 1, 2012): 111; Jennifer A. Orange, “Translating Law into Practice: Museums and a Human Rights Community of Practice,” Human Rights Quarterly 38, no. 3 (2016): 706–35.

24 Catherine D. Chatterley, “Canada’s Struggle with Holocaust Memorialization: The War Museum Controversy, Ethnic Identity Politics, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights,” Holocaust & Genocide Studies 29, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 189–211; A Dirk Moses, “The Canadian Museum for Human Rights: The ‘uniqueness of the Holocaust’ and the Question of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 14, no. 2 (2012): 215–38.

25 Alba, “Transmitting the Survivor’s Voice: Redeveloping the Sydney Jewish Museum.”

26 Marco Duranti, “The Holocaust, the Legacy of 1789 and the Birth of International Human Rights Law: Revisiting the Foundation Myth,” Journal of Gencoide Research 14, no. 2 (2012): 159–86; Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA; Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).

27 Avril Alba, Jennifer Barrett, Marie Bonardelli, Sarah Haid, Jisuk Han, A. Dirk Moses, Roslyn Sugarman Reverberations: The Holocaust and Human Rights, Sydney Jewish Museum, 2016, 14

28 Ibid., 17.

29 Ibid., 20.

30 Ibid., 14.

31 Steven Cooke, Donna-Lee Frieze, Andrew Singleton and Matteo Vergani, Gandel Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness in Australia Survey: Project Report (Geelong, Australia: Deakin University, 2022), 4.

32 Reverberations: The Holocaust and Human Rights, 23–6.

33 Ibid. 23.

34 See the museum’s website for a full account of all museum education programs, including those focussed on human rights: https://sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au/high-school-excursions-at-the-museum/ accessed 1 August 2023.

35 “Sydney Jewish Museum defends exhibition of human rights history” Sydney Morning Herald 15 February 2018: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/sydney-jewish-museum-defends-exhibition-of-human-rights-history-20180215-h0w4ir.html Accessed 1 August 2023.