Spertus has room for kids of Darfur

Mar. 6--Since the Spertus Museum opened in 1968, the small, energetic institution has stuck to its mission: to preserve and pass on Jewish history, tradition and art, with particular attention to keeping alive memories of the Holocaust.

On Sunday, the museum opened "Smallest Witnesses," 27 chilling pictures of depravity drawn in pen and crayon by children. The young artists are black Africans from the Darfur region of western Sudan, and the pictures portray scenes they witnessed of Arab-dominated army troops and militias murdering and raping their people.

It may seem strange for a Jewish institution to focus on genocidal violence in a place and in circumstances far removed from anything Jewish, but museum Director Rhoda Rosen said the exhibit fits in with the larger Spertus mission.

"When we educate about the Holocaust, we teach of a time when intolerance and violence resulted in death and suffering on a massive scale," Rosen said. "We hope to draw attention to this [Darfur] situation and remind visitors of that, with the hope that it may help to prevent contemporary genocide."

In fact, Rosen said she was disappointed she could get the Darfur exhibit only for four weeks, through April 2. It runs concurrently with another powerful traveling exhibit, "Anne Frank: A History for Today," about the young Jewish diarist doomed by the Holocaust. "This is not a monumental departure for us, but a variation within the theme of our mission," Rosen said.

Other Jewish institutions are pursuing similar initiatives, saying they want not only to keep alive the memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of Nazi slaughter in World War II, but also to use lessons of the Holocaust to alert the world to genocidal episodes today in an attempt to stop or prevent them.

The state-sponsored genocide in Darfur, still in progress, happens to be the latest occurrence.

For two decades, Sudan's northern, Arab-dominated government has wreaked havoc on southern and western provinces largely populated by black African Muslim, Christian and animist tribes.

In the last three years, the Sudan government has isolated the California-size Darfur region. It has denied access to United Nations and international watchdog groups while army troops and government-equipped and trained militia units attack villages, slaughtering tens of thousands, raping thousands of women and chasing 2 million of Darfur's 4 million people from their homes to refugee camps.

In response, many Jewish museums in recent months have spotlighted the Darfur crisis, either through visits of the Darfur children's pictures or other special exhibits.

"A part of our Holocaust memorial's function is that we must tell people that genocide did not end with Holocaust," said Jerry Fowler, a staff researcher at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

His museum, which opened in 1993 amid violence in Bosnia, currently has a Darfur exhibit based on photos and victim testimonies Fowler himself brought back from refugee camps last year.

"Part of the vision for the museum articulated by Elie Wiesel was to have a 'Committee of Conscience' on genocide to call the rest of the world's attention to genocide, and through that committee, we were one of the first national institutions to start talking about Darfur," Fowler said. "We've really tried to send up a red flag about what is happening."

The Museum of Tolerance at Los Angeles' Simon Wiesenthal Center also opened in 1993 and has a specific mission of "raising the awareness of contemporary events, when the horrors of the Holocaust are happening again," museum Director Lieba Gest said.

"It is an approach that has been effective and is being adopted by many other museums," she said.

The Darfur exhibit, which already was at Gest's museum, has been touring the U.S. since August and soon will go to Canada and Europe.

It was put together by two researchers from Human Rights Watch, a watchdog group based in the United States. A year ago February, the researchers traveled to camps set up for Darfur refugees just inside Chad's eastern border.

"We were doing research on sexual violence," said Olivier Bercault, one of the two. "But as we would sit talking to adults, the children would crowd around so noisily it was hard to work." His colleague gave the children pieces of paper and crayons and told them to sit quietly and draw.

"She gave them no instruction of what to draw. But by the time we had finished, they had drawn these amazing pictures of the terrible things they had experienced," he said.

In Chicago, Rosen thought pairing the Darfur images with the Anne Frank exhibit would be compelling for some of the 12,000 to 15,000 public school students who visit the Spertus each year. Since the early 1990s, public middle and high school classes have kept the Spertus busy as they view exhibits that satisfy a state mandate that they learn about the Holocaust. That law was recently expanded to require lessons on other genocides as well.

"There is something almost natural about pairing the poignancy of Anne Frank's words--with all their pain and innocence--as she tried to understand the horror she was trapped in," said Rosen, "with the innocence and pain reflected in these 27 children's drawings from Darfur."

Using a child's perspective is very important in reaching today's youngsters, she said, particularly since so many have little awareness of the Holocaust.

"What we have started to notice," said Rosen, "is that students who know nothing about the Holocaust access it much more powerfully if its history is presented to them through the stories of children like themselves.

"That's what I like about the Darfur exhibit. These pictures were created by children without being monitored by adults, just like Anne Frank wrote her diary. Young audiences sense that and are pulled into the story because of that."

wmullen@tribune.com

-----

Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.