Renate Frydman, founder and curator of Prejudice & Memory: A Holocaust Exhibit, will lead a tour of the exhibit at 10:30 a.m., Tuesday, Sept. 10 to commemorate its 25th anniversary on permanent display at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.

The tour is presented by the JCC’s adult programming department in partnership with the adult education and programming committees of Beth Abraham Synagogue, Beth Jacob Congregation, Temple Beth Or, and Temple Israel.

Frydman, chair of the Dayton Holocaust Education Committee, originally designed Prejudice & Memory as a mobile exhibit in 1997.

For more than a year, she had collected artifacts from local survivors, liberators, and rescuers. It was among the first exhibits in the United States to focus on local people’s Holocaust experiences.

Prejudice & Memory had been on display at 10 sites across southwest Ohio when the late retired Maj. Gen. Charles D. Metcalf — then director of the Air Force Museum — invited Frydman to display the exhibit there from February through September 1999.

Two weeks after the exhibit went on display at the Air Force Museum, Metcalf told Frydman the museum wanted to keep the exhibit there permanently.

The late Dave London, an Air Force Museum restoration volunteer, renovated Prejudice & Memory two years ago.

Artifacts on display include the Buchenwald concentration camp uniform of survivor Moritz Bomstein, the accordion 14-year-old Gertrude Wolff Kahn took with her when she was rescued from Nazi Germany through the Kindertransport program, and the violin her husband, Robert Kahn, was forced to play at age 15 on Kristallnacht as Nazis beat his father.

In the museum’s World War II gallery is a French railroad car constructed in 1943. Millions of Holocaust victims were herded into this type of boxcar and sent to concentration camps. Allied prisoners of war were also transported to German POW camps in these boxcars, some even to Buchenwald concentration camp.

The railcar, part of the Prejudice and Memory tour, was airlifted to the Air Force Museum in 2001.

Admission to the Air Force Museum, the tour, and parking are free. The museum is located at 1100 Spaatz St., Fairborn.

RSVP by Sept. 5 here or contact Stacy Emoff, semoff@jfgd.net. Emoff is also coordinating a pay-your-own-way lunch for participants after the tour at a nearby restaurant.

To read the complete September 2024 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.