The museum’s mission

It’s never pretty when one Jewish institution attacks another. It’s even uglier when the attack is so off-base as to be laughable.

A group calling itself Holocaust Museum Watch has begun staging events demanding that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, stage a conference on Arab anti-Semitism. HMW feels the federally funded museum is violating its own founding charter, which calls on the institution to “alert the conscience of the world and spark public outcry” to genocides as they unfold around the world.

The group’s spokesman is Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, the protege of Riverdale, NY, Rabbi Avi Weiss. Herzfeld told NJJN correspondent James Besser that his group wants the museum to talk about “the Arab countries that want to destroy Israel, who are taking the people killed by the Nazis and depicting them as Nazis themselves.”

HMW may regret opening this particular can of worms. From its founding moments, the Holocaust Museum has struggled with its mission, especially as that mission has intersected with present-day politics. One early debate was whether to call the Turkish massacre of Armenians “genocide” and thus risk a diplomatic incident between Turkey and the United States and, by extension, Turkey and Israel.

The museum has also been wary of acting as a human rights watchdog — in part because it lacks the investigative expertise and budget to duplicate work already being done by the State Department and nongovernmental organizations. There have also been objections — voiced by such ardent pro-Israel activists as, well, Avi Weiss — that a focus on present-day Mideast politics could bring an uncomfortable debate over how the museum should treat the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Ultimately, the museum has decided that its signal contribution to America and the world is bearing witness to a particular period in Jewish and world history and encouraging all its visitors to consider present-day genocide in light of its lessons. Why any Jewish group would want to embarrass a museum charged with that duty is beyond comprehension.

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