A Holocaust education center is coming to Phoenix.
The project, which was announced last year, will be in the heart of downtown Phoenix and comes at an important time, according to Rabbi Jeffrey Schesnol. He’s director of the Arizona Jewish Historical Society and project manager for the Hilton Family Holocaust Education Center.
He told The Show the 28,500-square-foot center will largely be geared toward middle and high school students. The state Legislature passed a bill that requires Holocaust education for Arizona students, and the state just gave the center a $7 million check toward their $40 million budget.
According to Schesnol, they’ve raised more than $32 million so far. The Show spoke with him more about the center, the plans and the goal behind creating it.
Full conversation
JEFFREY SCHESNOL: Phoenix is the fifth-largest city in the U.S. and without any permanent Holocaust or genocide education center. And because of the way the world looks today with regard to prejudice and hatred and antisemitism and marginalization of people throughout, it’s time to have a place to go to learn the lessons of genocides and of the Holocaust.
LAUREN GILGER: So tell us where the plans stand now. This has been a long process to get here, and it’s still many years down the line before it will open, right?
SCHESNOL: We’re going to break ground in approximately ten months. May of 2025, assuming the permitting all goes as planned. And then it will open in the second quarter of 2027.
GILGER: OK. So talk a little bit about the experience that folks can expect. There are pretty detailed plans about what this will look like, and it sounds extensive.
SCHESNOL: So we very fortunate to have the museum design firm of Gallagher & Associates, world renowned for education and museum centers that they have built — some right here in Phoenix: the MIM Musical Instrument Museum, the World War II Museum in New Orleans, the recently opened Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, many Holocaust education centers.
It’s going to be high-tech, totally interactive and immersive. Lots of projection, lots of experiential elements. You can learn everything you need to know about any genocide and the Holocaust on your phone. The data is there, the numbers, the locations. But the feeling when you walk in that will surround you, that’s something that you can’t capture in data that’s transmitted electronically. You have to actually be there to feel it.
GILGER: I want to talk more about what you started to, to talk about at the beginning, which is this “why we want to do this now” thing. It’s less common today for people to learn about the Holocaust, to know about it. Surveys have shown most people don’t know major facts about it anymore. And there’s been a rise in Holocaust denialism, right?
SCHESNOL: There has been. And unfortunately, there has been a significant amount of antisemitism all over the world. The state passed a bill, and it requires all students in middle school and high school to have Holocaust and genocide education during their school year. This new center will satisfy the state requirement. So all the teacher has to do — a bibliography, if you will, with proper citation is available for all the materials, and a preparation for a field trip will be sent to every school that plans a school trip.
And when those busses pull up and they come to this new center, which is adjacent to the (Burton Barr) library near downtown in the Central Arts District, the student will be there to learn the lessons of, that will apply to many possible ways people could be discriminated against or marginalized. They’ll understand why this is important, what the telltale signs are and how to stand up and act and not stand idly by. Which is the mantra of the new center: Do not stand idly by.
GILGER: So this will play a major role in it, in that kind of education, like satisfying that requirement for school kids, you say. What’s your goal in that? Like what’s your broader goal in making sure that the next generation of kids, as we see more and more Holocaust survivors dying, have a real education and have a real sense that this happened?
SCHESNOL: There have been Holocaust survivors visiting school classrooms now for a long time here in Arizona. A man by the name of Oskar Knoblauch basically traveled all over the northern part of the state telling his story, and he told people that they should take hate out of their vocabulary as he did when he was liberated, and that they have to focus on always being respectful of everyone — your friends and your enemies.
But respect will earn you dignity. And dignity is something that all of us have to possess an important part of our own self-worth.
GILGER: I want to ask you about the political moment we find ourselves in now, which I think you’ve referenced here. We’re in a fraught sort of political moment because of the war in Gaza. It’s become a real dividing point among Americans.
We’ve seen, as you said, a rise in antisemitism, but we’ve also seen civilians being killed in very high numbers in Gaza by Israel, many people calling that a genocide. How do you see the conversation about Holocaust education playing into what’s happening right now?
SCHESNOL: When a person visits the new Hilton Family Holocaust Education Center, the very first experience after an orientation film will be what is the world like today, and what are the connections that can be made to what did happen in the past. The today will always change to what is prevalent in our society at the time. So what is today in 2024, 10 years from now it’ll be a different today.
But the reference to what can be learned from what was done and how to avoid it going forward, that will always be an important lesson to be learned. So our role will be to enable people to truly understand what happened, why it should never happen again to anyone, ever, anywhere, and that they have to stand up and act.
A call to action is a critical part of doing this. So if we can help people truly internalize that idea — that you have to be an upstander, you should not stand idly by — then when they walk out of our center, they go home. They tell their parents and their friends and others what they’ve experienced and then bring them back so the whole family understands, and then the whole community will understand, because this is a community wide enterprise. It’s not just about Jewish people. It’s about all of us.
