The noted Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman, grandson of a Talmudic scholar, has long been associated with things Jewish.
He’s probably the only designer to publicly ponder why Jewish mothers don’t say, “my son, the architect” as they do, “my son, the lawyer” or “my son, the doctor.” And then there was his memorable, if not entirely accurate, line about the religious identity of the architects who in the 1980s abandoned stripped-down modernism for layered-on decoration.
“Postmodernism,” Tigerman quipped, “is a Jewish movement.”
Oddly, however, the 71-year-old architect has never designed a synagogue, a Jewish day school or even a Jewish community center. But he is now working on a project sure to capture the attention of both Jews and non-Jews — a Holocaust museum, the largest in the Midwest, which would be located in north suburban Skokie, where local neo-Nazis sought to hold a controversial march in the late 1970s.
“I’ve never done a building for my own kind — ever,” said Tigerman in a recent interview in his office at 444 N. Wells St. “And then, you get the best project of all — this project.”
His design, which is slated to be built on what is now a playing field just east of the Edens Expressway and south of Howard Street, calls for interconnected, side-by-side structures — one dark and menacing, the other light and welcoming. They are, in effect, a single building split into two — a rupture, Tigerman said, that represents Adolf Hitler’s attempt to kill the Jews and their history.
Plan commission support
Despite objections from some neighboring homeowners who say the museum will cause traffic jams, the Skokie planning commission voted 8-0 on Oct. 4 to recommend that the project be approved by the suburb’s village board.
This Sunday, the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois, the non-profit group backing the proposed building, is to hold a fundraising dinner at the Hyatt Regency Chicago at which Tigerman will be honored. About $6 million has been raised for the $15 million project, including a $5 million contribution from the State of Illinois. Construction could start by 2003, according to Marlene Stern, a member of the foundation’s board and the daughter of Holocaust survivors.
“I hope it’s fast because I want the survivors to be here to teach the children,” Stern said Monday afternoon, standing at the grassy site of the proposed museum. Many of them, she went on to explain, are in their 70s and 80s and are “passing with each day.”
The location of the proposed museum in Skokie, rather than some other suburb or downtown Chicago, is no accident. Local neo-Nazis sought to demonstrate in the suburb, home to many Jews and the largest number of Holocaust survivors in the country, in 1977. While civil libertarians won their court battle against the Skokie ordinance that banned the march, the neo-Nazis decided not to demonstrate there after all.
There is a “resonance” to placing the museum in Skokie, Tigerman said.
A humble, two-story building
Organized in 1981, largely in response to the controversy over the march, the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. The foundation is now located in a humble two-story office building at 4255 W. Main St. in Skokie, next to a tavern.
Each year, more than 20,000 Midwestern schoolchildren visit the tiny but impressive existing Holocaust museum on the building’s first floor, where the walls display artifacts, such as the yellow stars the Nazis forced Jews to wear so they could be easily singled out, and tributes to the “righteous Christians” who risked their lives by secretly harboring Jews during World War II. There are, as well, quotations from Chicago-area Jews who survived the concentration camps.
Says one: “The nights at Auschwitz, we could never really sleep because they would come at night and empty out the barracks and take people to the gas chamber. We would hear the screaming all around us. We never knew when it would be our turn.”
Because of the foundation’s efforts, Illinois in 1990 became the first state in the nation to mandate the study of the Holocaust in all public elementary and high schools. Yet while major Holocaust museums now exist in New York City, Los Angeles, Houston and Washington, D.C., where the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was dedicated in 1993, Chicago’s is the last large metropolitan area to ponder building such a facility.
Cramped for space
So tight is space in the foundation’s present home that a closet-size restroom has been turned into a makeshift storage area. Among the objects stuffed in a cardboard box: Transcripts of the Nuremberg trials, where German leaders were tried from 1945 to 1949 for war crimes that included the murder of 6 million Jews.
Beyond adding space, however, the foundation wants to construct a bigger building as a monument to memory, a substantial structure that will, through its very presence, underscore the Holocaust’s historic importance — and refute revisionist historians who say it never happened.
“We can’t have a humble museum by a tavern,” Stern said. “You can’t have that and do work that is strong enough to deny the deniers.”
Reflecting Tigerman’s penchant for imbuing his designs with metaphors, one of the buildings in his museum would be a dark metal structure; curving air ducts protruding from its side would symbolize the gas chambers of the concentration camps. The other building would be white and far more open to the outside than its non-identical twin.
Adding a further layer of complexity, the white building would face directly eastward, recalling the physical orientation of the destroyed temple built by King Solomon in ancient Jerusalem. The dark building, meanwhile, would face southeast toward Jerusalem, symbolizing how Jews scattered around the world still turn to the Temple Mount, on which the second temple stood.
Symbolizing the rupture
The split between the buildings, Tigerman said, symbolizes how Jewish history was “ruptured by a Holocaust of unprecedented proportion.”
Visitors would enter the dark building and come into a square, tall-ceilinged lecture hall. Then they would descend through a mazelike series of narrow, dark corridors lined with Holocaust artifacts.
They would next encounter a semi-circular space, dedicated to the memory of Holocaust victims, that would form a kind of hinge between the two buildings.
Finally, they would ascend into the light-filled white building, where they would be able to choose among several paths as they wend past a cylinder-shaped library with an all-glass roof.
The sequence of contrasting spaces — from darkness to light, from falling to rising, from a sense of imprisonment to a feeling of freedom — is deliberate.
While Tigerman admires the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, he finds fault with it because visitors enter and exit at the same place. Instead, he wants people to make a journey that leads them to both a new physical place and a new understanding of the Holocaust. His design, he said, “bears the promise of a future denoted by knowledge.”
“One exits,” he said, “into a world informed by healing.”
