It wasn’t until his father died that the Rev. Rodrick Burton realized his family had such an important connection to the .
His father, Charles Wesley Burton, a former counselor at Eureka High School, came of age amid the civil rights movement of the 1960s. As a college student at Illinois State University, the elder Burton had walked into a barbershop in Normal, Illinois, in 1961 as part of a protest organized by the NAACP. Burton got his hair cut that day, though other barbers in some parts of town refused to cut young black men’s hair. His commitment to fighting for civil rights would continue.
At the elder Burton’s funeral, his son met members of the ºüÀêÊÓƵ Jewish community who had come to honor their friend, who had served on the board of the Holocaust Museum.
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On Monday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Burton told that story to a crowd of dignitaries and Holocaust survivors as the museum announced an $18 million expansion that will triple its size and elevate its importance as one of 22 such museums across the country.
As a school counselor in west ºüÀêÊÓƵ County, his father would regularly bring high school students to the museum, Burton said, to learn not just about the genocide of 6 million Jews in World War II, but the unique connection that has historically existed in America between Jews and blacks in fighting for civil rights.
That history, Burton mentioned in his remarks, is showing strains, with the “troubling, recent trend of anti-Semitic attacks,†including those carried out recently in New York by young black men who belong to an extremist wing of the Black Hebrew Israelites.
Sadly, the lesson of “never forget†that is so often repeated by Jews to remind every new generation of “what can and did happen in a democracy,†is needed now as much as ever, said Bud Rosenbaum, chairman of the museum’s executive committee. A larger, modernized museum will serve as an education point for thousands of future schoolchildren, like the ones Burton’s father used to bring regularly in the early days of the 25-year-old facility.
There will come a time when the people who lived through the Holocaust, who suffered incomprehensible losses, will be gone, having taken in their last breath on earth.
But that day hasn’t come yet.
So 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, six Holocaust survivors, including two who spent time at concentration camps, lit candles here to remember the history that defines so much of their existence.
Oskar Jakob was 13 when he and his family were sent to Auschwitz from their home in Hungary. He would lose 41 family members in the Holocaust. Jakob, now 89, was liberated from a work camp on April 15, 1945. He moved first to New York and settled in ºüÀêÊÓƵ in 1962.
“It brings back such sad memories,†he told me after the candle-lighting ceremony. “I’m very blessed to be alive on this day.â€
The rise of anti-Semitism — in Europe and the U.S. — worries Jakob.
Jakob mentioned the in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27, 2018, which claimed 11 victims. It was the deadliest attack on a Jewish community in the country’s history.
“I never thought I was going to live to see that in this great country of the United States,†Jakob said. “But sadly it happened.â€
The tallied 1,879 attacks against Jews in the U.S. in 2018, the third-highest total in 40 years. A year before, the march in Charlottesville attracted white supremacists, anti-Semites and other hate groups.
That’s what makes the expansion of the Holocaust Museum in ºüÀêÊÓƵ so timely, and necessary, says Mendel Rosenberg.
“I constantly talk about the Holocaust,†says the 91-year-old, who was one of the six survivors at Monday’s ceremony.
Rosenberg was born in Germany and grew up in Lithuania. After surviving camps at Stutthof and Dachau, he emigrated to the U.S., where he joined the Army and served in Korea.
His story, like Jakob’s, and the thousands of others recorded at the museum, will be preserved to teach future generations to “never forget.â€