Friday, April 08, 2011

Holocaust Exhibit Provides Hands On Experience

"The Nazi Scourge: Postal Evidence of the Holocaust and the Devastation in Europe" will be open to the public April 10 at the Chicagoland Jewish High School in Deerfield, Illinois.

"The exhibit, owned by the Florence & Laurence Spungen Family Foundation, will display more than 300 World War II postal artifacts: stamps, covers, postcards, letters, bank notes, forgeries, and manuscripts from concentration camps and Jewish ghettos," according to an article by Reporter Lilli Kuzma that appears on the Evanston-Review website.

Danny Spungen, 49, a life-long collector and philatelist, purchased the collection in 2007, and has toured with it in the U.S., and other countries, including Greece, Holland, Belgium, and England. In June, the show travels to Italy.

Lilli quotes Spungen as saying, "I will be going to a school in China, too. The whole exhibit will be translated to Mandarin, and, in 2013, China is issuing a coin in commemoration of the Shanghai Ghetto." The Collection was translated into Greek for the Pan-Hellenic Philatelic Exhibition: Patraphilex 2010.

Spungen acknowledges former collection owner, Ken Lawrence, of Pennsylvania, in the article and explained that he shows the pieces, because "I promised this man I would not let this collection sit in a closet."

The exhibit also includes hands-on artifacts such as a Jewish badge and a Nazi armband both of which can be seen in the photo above.

School official Stephanie Smerling says, "Our kids will choose and write about an artifact and how it made them feel. I'm the parent of a 10th grader, and this exhibit provides a unique perspective, brings the Holocaust home in a very personal way."

For additional information and to view exhibit items online, visit http://www.spungenfoundation.org/ .

To read the entire article, click here.
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posted by Don Schilling at 12:01 AM