News
Mound of Remembrance and Tower of Remembrance
The American Sacred Grounds Foundation has proposed the erection of a Sanctuary and Holocaust Monument in Oświęcim. It would be a place for meditation, prayer, veneration, and memory, while serving at the same time as a final resting place for Holocaust victims, according to Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum spokesman Jarosław Mensfelt.
Mensfelt said that Foundation head Mahli Lieblich had presented the project to Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum management.
The project would be located “on the banks of the Sola or in some other location as indicated by the International Auschwitz Council.” The building would consist of a tower surrounded by a wall. Inside the building would be a well, into which would be scattered the dust formed as a result of engraving the names of Holocaust victims in the surrounding wall. According to Lieblich, this would be a symbolic and final grave for the murdered.
The cost of the project is estimated at $29 million.
Mensfelt said that the project has been presented to the International Auschwitz Council, which has not yet voted on the matter. He emphasized, however, that the building will not be allowed to stand on the Museum grounds or in the buffer zone around the site of the Auschwitz German camp.
The American project is similar to the concept of the Mound of Remembrance and Reconciliation, planned for a location between the sites of the Auschwitz I and Birkenau camps, and proposed in the mid-1990s by a former Auschwitz prisoner, Professor Józef Szajna.
In 2002, the International Auschwitz Council expressed its support for the Szajna plan, while criticizing its intended location immediately adjacent to the walls at the Auschwitz I site. The Council noted that the mound, as high as a 12-storey building, would radically alter the landscape and loom over the Auschwitz site. The authors of the project found a new location for the mound. These considerations will almost certainly be applied to the new project as well.
The Sacred Grounds Foundation has its headquarters in Miami. Its honorary members include Archbishop Luigi Accogli, Miami Beach mayor David Dermer, and Rabbi Barry Blum of Philadelphia.
