Adelaide Holocaust Museum and Andrew Steiner Education Centre to open in November

The Adelaide’s first Holocaust museum opens next month will be challenging for artist and survivor Andrew Steiner.

SA Holocaust survivor and sculptor Andrew Steiner in the soon to be opened Holocaust Museum on Wakefield Street. Picture: Emma Brasier

The yellow Star of David forcibly pinned to the clothing of persecuted Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe is among the tragic artefacts to be showcased in Adelaide’s first Holocaust museum from next month.

The Adelaide Holocaust Museum and Andrew Steiner Education Centre will be the third facility to open in Australia dedicated to remembering six million Holocaust victims.

The not-for-profit museum is set to expand following a $2.5m federal grant.

Its opening on November 9 will be an emotional challenge for Mr Steiner, a renowned Adelaide Hills artist, who recalls that failing to wear the yellow star in Budapest was fatal.

He was an 11-year-old Jew living in Hungary in 1944 when lined up for execution and labelled a “dirty Jew”.

SA Holocaust survivor and sculptor Andrew Steiner. Picture: Emma Brasier

A Yellow cloth Star of David with the German word for "Jew" written in Hebraic style. On loan courtesy of the Sydney Jewish Museum, in the soon to be opened Holocaust museum on Wakefield Street, Adelaide. Picture Emma Brasier

Mr Steiner saw his parents and other family members forced into labour camps and military units.

“I will be extraordinarily elated and thoroughly humbled,” said Mr Steiner, when the museum finally opens its doors to the public.

The 87-year-old has spent the past three decades teaching Holocaust history to tens of thousands of South Australians.

He said the museum and education centre – a decade-long dream – would become “a beacon of light” in SA.

“The idea is to showcase the possibility of how to be caring, decent human beings through the examples of those who risked their own lives, and their family’s, to assist Jews when much of the world had turned a blind eye to their mass persecution,” he said.

Former prisoners of the ‘little camp’ in Buchenwald stare out from the wooden bunks in which they slept three to a ‘bed’. Elie Wiesel, who was to become the world's leading spokesman on the Holocaust and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Picture: US Holocaust Memorial Museum

The museum, in the Catholic Church’s Fennescey House on Wakefield St, city, at a peppercorn rate, will unveil a never-before-seen travelling exhib­ition in SA donated by the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem.

The Righteous Among the Nations exhibition pays tribute to the small minority of citizens, including Australians, who rescued Jews at a time of prevailing mainstream indifference and hostility during the Holocaust, from 1933-1946.

Mr Steiner said it would highlight the museum’s core message to visitors: “Everybody is in a position to be an up-stander instead of a bystander”.

The almost complete museum’s permanent exhibition displays the stories of six Holocaust victims from SA, including that of Eva Temple, and explains how the Holocaust occurred, why Jews were the focus of it, and how SA responded.

Museum director Kathy Baykitch said the museum would preserve artefacts, including a century-old Hebrew scroll of the Torah stolen by the Nazis from a synagogue in a Czechoslovakian village that was left with few survivors.

“We are living in such a fragile world and this museum is about remembering the atrocities of the past to educate and inspire us to stand up against racism and anti-Semitism and see the humanity in all of us,” she said.

The museum, which will rely on donations, will be officially opened prior to an annual interfaith event marking Kristallnacht at nearby St Francis Xavier’s Cathedral.

For information on the museum visit ahmsec.org.au.