An interview with Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center CEO Jackie Congedo

By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer

With more than 500 original artifacts from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland and 20 institutions around the world, the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. makes a Midwest stop at Cincinnati Union Terminal, Oct. 18 through April 12, 2026. It’s presented by Cincinnati Museum Center and the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center (HHC) — both housed at Union Terminal.

Here, HHC CEO Jackie Congedo shares what visitors can expect amid artifacts from the Nazis’ complex of death camps in Poland at which they exterminated 1.1 million people, nearly 1 million of whom were Jews. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did the exhibition come about?
My colleague Elizabeth Pierce, who runs the Cincinnati Museum Center, is closely connected with other similar civic museums. And when this was at Kansas City, Mo. Union Station (in 2021), her colleague there talked about how meaningful this massive exhibition was for the entire community and how it really united the community around a shared sense of civic responsibility. It’s only been in a handful of cities in North America. It’s the largest collection of artifacts outside Auschwitz.

Elizabeth, as she heard about this, immediately said it has to be in Cincinnati. We have this incredible connection to Union Terminal. HHC is located in a building where survivors took their first steps at rebuilding their lives. We have this deeply meaningful, authentic space. I understand they were considering Chicago as well.

And once the traveling exhibition team, the curatorial team, the production team saw the terminal and our museum, they realized yes, this is where it should go. Relatively few venues can host something of this magnitude. It was in Boston and it’s coming here from Toronto. We are the last planned stop in North America. Then it returns to Europe.

How will you augment the exhibition with local connections, resources, people?
We’ve been able to add certain elements that bring forward local stories. The first words people will hear are of Werner Coppel, who was a survivor of Auschwitz. He rebuilt his life in Cincinnati. And it will be his words talking about how he arrived in this building with a wife, a suitcase, and a baby, and that ended the first part of his life.

We have local survivor testimony, local survivors of Auschwitz throughout. There’s a room towards the end of the exhibition that’s fully dedicated to the survivors of Auschwitz, almost exclusively local. We have artifacts from local survivors’ stories and lives.

Visitors will look at the scope and scale of this enormous atrocity and the level of deliberate intentionality and planning that went into mass murder.

You cannot leave the exhibition without feeling totally sober and in awe of the level of deliberate, efficient, meticulous planning and documentation done to execute this genocide. That’s important for people to reckon with and to wrestle with.

We want people to come through and feel the weight of this in a way that is challenging for them and productive and motivating.

We’re trying to encourage people to make this one part of a two-part visit to Union Terminal, either on the day they come to see the exhibition or, if you buy a ticket to the Auschwitz exhibition, you get a discounted ticket to HHC and you can use that for six months.

And the way HHC does that is to partner with the VIA Institute on Character’s tools that show people how to pursue the best of humanity.

What does it look like and how do we rise to that in ourselves and in our communities? How can we rise as upstanders today?

We’ve designed a student experience (the exhibit is appropriate for grades seven to 12) that includes an hour in the Auschwitz exhibition and an hour at the Holocaust and Humanity Center. There will be a lot of opportunities for self-exploration.

We were really deliberate in the contextual resources that we built and are sharing with teachers to make sure that this history falls within the broader arc of the Jewish story, including, what is Jewish identity, what is antisemitism. These two things are not exclusively co-located with the Holocaust. Jewish identity, Jewish history predates the Holocaust. And antisemitism unfortunately persists.

We’ve also been working with folks who are giants in the space of Holocaust education — in Dayton, Renate Frydman and others — to help us think about how we can lift up, spotlight those stories.

What are some artifacts that speak to you personally in this exhibition?
Each piece is intentionally chosen to add a different dimension to how we understand the history. One of the first is a prayer shawl. The audio tour shares that this is the kind of thing a Jewish boy on his bar mitzvah would receive. It would be with him through all these meaningful ceremonial ritual events throughout his life.

And it says, this isn’t something we should be able to see, because this human being was denied a basic right to a burial, a proper burial. His life was stolen from him. This artifact should be with him. But instead, we have it because of the way this atrocity unfolded.

And the questions that we have to ask ourselves today are, what choices are we making that outline whether we will lead into the dark or into the light? All of these pieces in different ways help to bring that story to light.

We’re expecting big crowds, so you want to get your tickets as much as you can in advance.

There will be a robust slate of public programs that accompany this exhibition over the next six months, including guest lectures.

And we’ll have a weekly debrief session on the weekends during high-volume times, called Circles of Humanity, where we’ll have our team there to facilitate some debrief for people and start to guide them towards the question about what’s our role to play today and how can we channel our character, strengths, be the best of humanity in our time.

Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. will be on exhibition at Cincinnati Union Terminal under the auspices of Cincinnati Museum Center and the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center, Oct. 18-April 12, 2026, 1301 Western Ave., Cincinnati. Information about individual tickets is available at cincymuseum.org/Auschwitz. For group sales, email groupvisits@cincymuseum.org.

To read the complete October 2025 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.