Obj. ID: 53459
Memorials Memorial to Destroyed Jewish Communities at the Holocaust Museum in Houston, TX, USA, 1996
Name of Monument
No official name
Who/What is Commemorated?
The destroyed Jewish communities of Europe
Description
The memorial comprises the outside roof of a museum wing that was added in 1996 to a preexisting building which was adaptively repurposed for museum use. That building was replaced with a larger structure in 2019, but the wing with the memorial was retained. The memorial wing is a reinforced concrete wedge that begins at ground level to the right of the museum's entrance and rises precipitously to a height of 40 feet. The sloping roof is clad entirely with stone plates with the names of destroyed Jewish communities, making the entire sloping face of the building resemble a massive gravestone.
The wing’s most visually arresting feature is an enormous dark brick cylinder that bisects the wedge and appears perched on top of it. This structure, which now houses the entrance gallery to the core exhibition on the ground floor and the Samuel Bak gallery upstairs, bears an obvious resemblance to a crematorium smokestack. As such, it is the museum's most historically resonant element. Additionally, in front of the memorial are 6 upright steel I-beams that are connected by strands of wire. These symbolize the 6 million victims of the Holocaust, and the uprights and wires recall concentration camp fencing.
Inscriptions
On a rectangular black granite plaque, in English:
The names inscribed on these stones
represent only a fraction of the Jewish
communities destroyed during the Nazis’
attempt to annihilate the Jews of Europe.
These communities were the ancestral
Homes of Holocaust survivors.
1939-1945
On the raised metal sign, in English:
Destroyed Communities Memorial
In Memory of Linda and Morris I. Penn and Riva Kremer
By Their Children, Grandchildren, and Great-Grandchildren
[two other plaques at ground level list names of donors]
Commissioned by
Holocaust Museum Houston
sub-set tree: 
Concrete
Black granite (slab)
Historian Gavriel Rosenfeld writes of the museum’s architecture that “in defining the HMH [Holocaust Museum Houston], Applebaum hoped to duplicate the success of Freed's USHMM [United States Holocaust Memorial Museum] and produce a building that would affect visitors emotionally. Deciding that simply renovating the original structure “would not do the exhibit justice,”
Applebaum and his design team believed that the HMH 's architecture should be “deliberately assertive.” As Applebaum put it “We wanted to trigger moral and ethical discussions in the community to alert people to what hate and racism can do.” Or, as museum officials declared: “The building’s stark forms and materials placed the museum in opposition to adjacent buildings and emphasize its distinctive theme: cruelty and carnage are close by, and we must continually stand against them. Even before they enter, visitors arriving at Holocaust Museum Houston become aware that it has staked out a claim to attention, a claim embodied in its physical presence and…. primary spaces.”
The narration of the video produced by the museums about the memorial states that “The Destroyed Communities Memorial honors our local survivors and keeps the memory of these communities alive forever.” According to Ellen Trachtenberg, Co-Chair of the Destroyed Communities Memorial, “We have over 300 oral histories of our survivors and we had a list of the hometowns from the oral histories and then once we did that we had to verify that each one was in fact destroyed.”
Dr. Hy Penn, Co-Chair of the Destroyed Communities Memorial, stated: “if you look at the slope the names are very clear down below and you keep looking up and looking up and they kind of fade away into the clear skies above, into the heavens and it's very powerful… At Jewish cemeteries, it's customary to leave a stone on the monument just to show that you were there that you remember, and people are coming by putting stones on the names of these communities just to say we remember…. I think it's going to be very special when children and adults can come into our Museum and maybe see a name on a stone out there and then come into our Museum and learn about that community and learn the way it was before the Holocaust these ones vibrant and full of life Jewish communities are no longer there but we are continuing to keep them alive just with this Memorial. Holocaust survivor Lili Gordon reminds us “that when think of six million Jews, they came from somewhere, they went to bed somewhere, they were born somewhere, they got married somewhere, and these communities are destroyed and every one of these communities has its own special story.”
Fox, Stephen, “Holocaust Museum Houston,” in Jewish Identity in Contemporary Architecture, eds. Angeli Sachs and Edward van Voolen, (Munich, Berlin, London & New York: Prestel, 2004)., pp. 59-63.
Kroloff, Reed, “Dark Remembrance,” Architecture, November 1996, 114-199., https://usmodernist.org/AJ/A-1996-11.pdf (accessed December 12, 2024)
Rosenfeld, Gavriel, D. Building After Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011)., pp. 273-275.
Trachtenberg, et al. Ten Years: Remembrance, Education, Hope., (Houston: Holocaust Museum Houston, 2005).
Tutt, Bob, “Survivors Remember on the Opening day of Holocaust Museum Houston,” Houston Chronicle, March 3, 1996.
Holocaust Museum Houston, “HMH Destroyed Communities Memorial 2013, Youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoZNxIhfXUI)