Michael Berenbaum works to make sure the world remembers the Holocaust

Michael Berenbaum had been a top executive of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington for about a decade when the burden of helping to run the place got to him.

It was not the time he spent among images and artifacts from this darkest period of human history, or the challenge of finding ways to explain unimaginable horrors to new generations. That was what provided the intellectual stimulation of the job.

No, it was the spending of days on end in budget meetings. The museum had been conceived, built and opened, and for him what was left was drudgery. “I realized,” he told me recently, “that it’s more fun to create something than to run it.”

That was in 1996. The realization set him on a path that led ultimately to his founding Los Angeles-based Berenbaum Group, which is in the business of creating museums devoted to the Holocaust and the history of persecution and genocide around the world.

The role has brought Berenbaum, 65, to places as distant geographically and spiritually from one another as the ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Boro Park, Brooklyn, where family memories of prewar European Jewish life and the rise of the Nazis are woven into the fabric of daily existence, and Skopje, Macedonia, where a population of 200 Jews is trying to rekindle memories of a community that predated Philip of Macedon. Among the other projects he has worked on are museums of tolerance and Jewish history in Mexico City, Philadelphia and Skokie, Ill.

This work gives a practical foundation to his stature as one of the nation’s leading scholars of the Holocaust, a subject on which he has written or edited more than a dozen books.

It’s a field in which the demand for reexamination of the meaning of the past seems never-ending. The creation of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, for example, involved long, fraught discussions about how, or whether, to address Nazi extermination programs aimed at Gypsies, the mentally and physically handicapped and others.

The debate placed Berenbaum in conflict with Elie Wiesel, then the chairman of President Carter’s Commission on the Holocaust, of which Berenbaum was deputy staff director.

“The assumption was that Jews were synonymous with the victimization of the Holocaust, but other people wanted a stake in the representation of their victimization,” he says. “I wrote a memo to Wiesel saying you can’t get away with not including non-Jews if you’re going to build in an American context.” The conflict led to his departure from the commission in 1980.

Berenbaum, who has short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and a matching well-trimmed beard, speaks with the measured tones of a rabbi — which indeed he is, though he has never served a regular congregation. He has taught at Georgetown and Yale, among other universities, and currently holds a faculty appointment at American Jewish University in Bel-Air. He was teaching and serving as a chaplain at Wesleyan University when he was recruited for the Carter commission.

Berenbaum rejoined the body in 1987, when it had settled on building a museum in Washington, D.C., as a national commemorative project. By then Berenbaum had developed an intellectual formula for making Holocaust remembrances inclusive without diminishing the distinctiveness of the Jewish experience.

“You couldn’t deal with the concentration camps without dealing with political prisoners, dissidents, trade unionists and communists for whom the camps were developed,” he told me. “You couldn’t deal with gassing without dealing with the murder of the handicapped, because gassing was first introduced as part of a so-called euthanasia program. It’s in the interest of everybody to include all the victimization, because that’s the only way to understand what happened to the Jews. Since then, everyone’s done it precisely that way.”

He became the museum’s project director, overseeing its creation through 1993, then led its academic and research institute until 1997. That year he left to become president of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, established by Steven Spielberg, which conducted more than 50,000 interviews of survivors of Nazi genocide. He stayed there until 1999.

He began consulting on museum design in 2000. Today he charges $2,000 a day or $350 an hour, and calls on a small cadre of independent architects, archivists, historians and filmmakers to fill out his professional team as needed.

Berenbaum museums tend to have certain elements in common. One is the presence of what he calls “a localized element” that aims to make the museum more resonant for the hometown audience.

Some critics have argued that the result is an audience-participation “gimmick,” to quote the writer Philip Gourevitch, a chronicler of the Rwanda genocide, the son of Holocaust refugees and the author of a blistering 1993 assessment of the Washington museum. Gourevitch disdained the museum for, among other things, beginning the exhibition with the U.S. liberation of the death camps, as if to compliment Americans for their valor.

Berenbaum says that’s because the designers knew their audience would be not only the Jewish community, but a broad American public unfamiliar with much of the Holocaust narrative. “We began with liberation because that was seen through American eyes,” he says. “But we tell the truth, that Americans were accidental liberators — they liberated the camps not because that was their target, but because the camps were on the route to capturing Berlin.”

In a larger sense, he maintains, one must accept that “the place from which you remember an event shapes how you remember it. You remember the Holocaust one way in Berlin and another way in Warsaw and a third way in Jerusalem and a fourth in the U.S.” The local vantage point is crucial to fully understanding the event.

For example, the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, which has a large population of survivors, makes rich use of recorded interviews with residents of that community and from across the Midwest.

“Michael also had an intuitive hunch that there was a great deal of original material, personal artifacts, documents, letters, dolls, books, that belonged to survivors and their families and living in their attics, basements, keepsake drawers, and that our challenge was simply to ask,” says the museum’s executive director, Richard S. Hirschhaut.

Local rabbis were enlisted to make the appeal at High Holy Days services starting in 2004. “The amount of material that has come in is staggering,” Hirschhaut says. Artifacts from the collection are displayed in the museum’s permanent exhibit.

Yet that sort of living history will soon become an artifact itself. “We’re in a transitional moment,” Berenbaum says. “The last survivor is soon going to die, and then we go from living memory to historical memory.”

His own role as an intermediary between historical events and the present will have to change too, though perhaps not in its essence: “I am in one sense a translator,” he says. “Every translator tries to do justice to the original, but also tries to navigate and negotiate with the culture to which it speaks.”

Michael Hiltzik’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Reach him at [email protected], read past columns at latimes.com/hiltzik, check out facebook.com/hiltzik, and follow @latimeshiltzik on Twitter.