OUR COMMUNITY
What the Holocaust Memorial Sculpture will look like at Meijer Gardens.
Keeping Memories Alive
New website will share Grand Rapids Holocaust survivor testimonies for the first time.
ASHLEY ZLATOPOLSKY CONTRIBUTING WRITER
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SEPTEMBER 23 • 2021
The idea began during an informal Zoom group held during COVID-19, Franciosi says, where Jewish Federation of Grand Rapids and its partners met to discuss a soon-to-be-installed Holocaust Memorial Sculpture at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park. “We were trying to figure out ways to supplement the educational component,” Franciosi says. “We were talking about local connections in particular, so as a BELOW: Survivor and Grand Rapids resident Joseph Stevens and two Polish boys who were part of his underground cell during the war. RIGHT: Here he is in the early 2000s.
GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIVERSITY
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new project created in partnership with Jewish Federation of Grand Rapids aims to preserve the stories of Holocaust survivors who settled in the Grand Rapids area. Launching before the end of the year, a special website dedicated to the survivors will feature personal interviews, photos, archives and more, capturing their journeys both during and after World War II. “Right now, we have about 10 stories that we’re going to be doing,” says Nicole Katzman, executive director of Jewish Federation of Grand Rapids. “As we complete them, we’re going to share these with the community and with community partners, and then continue to add more stories of survivors.” With a small, yet close-knit Jewish community on the west side of the state, the website hopes to spotlight a group of people who are sometimes overshadowed by Metro Detroit’s larger Jewish community. Once the website is complete, which currently has three stories finished, the individuals behind the effort want their project to be a template or model that other communities in Michigan can replicate and use for their own purposes. “There are people who settled in Benton Harbor and all over the state who have similar stories,” explains Rob Franciosi, a professor at Grand Valley State University near Grand Rapids who is helping spearhead the project and its research. “We thought by creating a model, that might be instructive for other people to take and run with as well.”
group we decided that some kind of a website to honor Holocaust survivors who settled in Grand Rapids would be our unique contribution there.” While there are many websites devoted to the history of the Holocaust, Franciosi says that few, if any, spotlight the west Michigan perspective. To help tell the stories of survivors, the up-and-coming website will use a geospatial software program that shows how people traveled from Europe to places like Shanghai, the Dominican Republic and, ultimately, Grand Rapids. Peg Finkelstein, who has led many archival efforts for the website, spent the last year scanning and documenting the history of the Jewish Federation
