The Amud Aish Memorial Museum which is set to open in Brooklyn in 2017, is the first museum of its kind focused on a subject that was central to many Jews during the Holocaust, maintaining their faith and observance in times of extraordinary adversity. First founded as The Kleinman Holocaust Education Center (KHEC) in 2009 by Elly Kleinman, The Amud Aish Memorial Museum primary purpose is to educate educators, scholars, and the public on the religious perspective of the Holocaust. The term “amud aish” has a biblical reference and means “pillar of fire”, because it says in the book of Exodus that when the Jews were wandering the desert at night, a pillar of fire illuminated their way.
The logo represents the pillar of fire, which begins with a deep red flame signifying the darkest period in Jewish history. The pillar culminates in a bright green leaf, which stands for the future of the Jewish people. The leaf tries to leave the pattern of destruction by teaching people how to learn from the past and apply those lessons to the future, which is in fact the core objective of The Amud Aish Memorial Museum. Made out of four key divisions the Orthodox Testimony Project in conjunction with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Document & Research Archive, the Artifact Collections Archive and the International Division, apart from the permanent, the organization also has temporary exhibits. As its founder, Elly Kleinman is directly involved and even so, he regularly holds historical lectures, annual exhibitions, school group visits, educational programs at summer camps and international exhibitions and so on.
What makes The Amud Aish Memorial Museum different and unique is the fact that it is the first museum of this kind that brings a new voice to the study of Holocaust history, by including the experiences and perspective of observant communities, so the world can bear witness to how they lived before, during and immediately after the Holocaust. These experiences and stories, which fill in a huge missing part of Holocaust history, can be best seen through the hundreds of thousands of Holocaust documents and artifacts, which were donated by the observant community. Like so many other members of the Jewish community, Elly Kleinman is also a great believer and a person of faith, as he is a son of two Holocaust survivors.
