In the opening paragraphs of a long profile that ran in the Reader five years ago this week, architect Stanley Tigerman told journalist Mara Tapp how devoted he was to a project he’d started work on a few years earlier—a museum and education center for the Skokie-based Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois. “I want to build this, I want to build it bad,” said Tigerman, then 73. “I have never built for my own kind. I’ve never done a synagogue, a temple. Nothing.” He added that he’d told foundation officials “it would be the project not only of a lifetime, but it would be the project I’ve been waiting for.”
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It was a chilly morning. Clutching notebooks and video cams and wearing obligatory hard hats (though work in the immediate area had been halted), media types huddled outside the center, which is just west of the Old Orchard shopping mall, next to the massive glass towers of the Optima condominium complex. Years ago, after protests from prospective neighbors in a more residential location, the project was brought here, to land purchased from the Cook County Forest Preserve that butts up against the Edens Expressway. Cars whooshed and trucks thundered past as officials took turns at the microphone that had been set up in front of the complex, a pair of conjoined buildings—one dark and one light, fronted by two steel mesh cylinders that might at first glance suggest smokestacks.
Pausing in a long, windowless, cinder-block exhibition-hall-to-be, Berenbaum explained that the display will be narrative-driven and “linear,” taking visitors through the story of the Holocaust and exploring the question of “how a democratic government can move to a totalitarian government.” They’ll see depictions of Kristallnacht and a ghetto, and enter a real German railroad car of the period. After that come liberation, a displaced persons camp, resettlement, and finally the testimony of survivors—which Berenbaum said will confer on visitors the responsibility of becoming a “witness of the witnesses.”
He declined comment, offering only that after eight years of working on a building “you lose some cachet.”
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