Art World
Guatemala to Welcome First Central American Holocaust Museum
The Museo del Holocausto will teach visitors about the 'Holocaust by Bullets.'
Alyssa Buffenstein
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A colonial-era house in Guatemala City, Guatemala will be the site of the Museo del Holocausto, the first Holocaust museum in Central America. It is set to open before the end of the year according to an official statement on its website.
A project of Yahad – In Unum—an organization dedicated to preserving the stories of witnesses to Nazi mass murders in the former Soviet Union, and to identifying the sites of mass graves and execution sites—the museum will focus its permanent exhibition on the shooting deaths of Jewish and Roma people, and others who were killed in their own towns in Eastern Europe.
The museum’s permanent collection will tell the stories of witnesses to the so-called “Holocaust by Bullets” through documentation of eyewitness accounts, and objects gifted to Yahad In Unum from Jewish communities in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Poland, Romania, Moldova, and Lithuania.
Anticipating its official opening, the museum has been hosting temporary exhibitions since the beginning of 2016. On November 14, it unveiled its first art exhibition, by Tel Aviv-based artist Mira Maylor. “Memories of the Holocaust Through Art” includes the newly-commissioned “Barbed Wire Series.”
“Mira Maylor is a young Israeli artist whose artwork shows us how memories inhabit us and are evoked in a subjective manner, through recollections, memories, dreams,” says Marco Gonzalez, executive director of Yahad In Unum.
“She invites us to consider all those Jewish victims who perished during the Shoah, and by including them in our memory, to stand stronger together, so that such violence never happens again.”
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