NEW YORK — Stanley Stern found one half of a tefillin set in a pile of refuse at the Buchenwald concentration camp and traded for the other half with a Gypsy.
So it was hard for Stern, a Czechoslovakian-born survivor of Buchenwald, to part with the holy items he carried to the United States in 1946.
But he donated them to The Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York for the same reason that has motivated him to deliver lectures on the Holocaust to Jewish schools for the past 40 years.
“I want to expose them to the future generations,” says Stern, 74, who lives in Riverdale, N.Y.
The Museum of Jewish Heritage, which opened Monday, takes a personal approach to the Shoah, evident in the videotaped memoirs of survivors and thousands of individuals’ photographs, says David Altshuler, the museum’s director.
The museum’s proximity to the world’s largest Jewish community, including many survivors, facilitated the collecting of wartime artifacts and possessions, he says.
“The survivors have a huge voice here,” and serve as trustees, historical advisers and contributors of artifacts, says Altshuler. Contributors “were comfortable that the Jewish community would protect” their treasured items.
The museum gathered some 13,000 items, 800 of which are on permanent display in the 30,000-square-foot building.
These items range from a Hitler Youth uniform and copies of the Nazis’ Der Sturmer newspaper to a Torah scroll rescued from a Hamburg synagogue on Kristallnacht and boots worn by an American soldier who helped liberate a concentration camp.
Stern, who was born into a Chassidic family, served on a work detail and lived in a Budapest “safe house” established by Raoul Wallenberg before being shipped to Buchenwald in December 1944.
His own tefillin and prayer book were taken away immediately.
Within a week, walking past a pile of Judaica being burned by the Nazis, he noticed a small, black leather strap and box — half of a set of tefillin. He put it in his pocket and hid it under his barracks mattress.
A few days later, a Gypsy inmate passed Stern’s bed, holding a similar piece of leather — the other half of a complete set of tefillin. He bartered it for a sweater.
Word spread quickly. The next morning, prisoners “who were really religious” came to Stern’s bed to put on the tefillin and say a quick prayer. “They lined up, in the open,” he says.
A half dozen men borrowed the set daily until Stern was shipped to an auxiliary camp of Buchenwald.
He was liberated in March 1945.
Stern had the tefillin inspected by a Torah scribe after he immigrated to the United States. Waterlogged, they were deemed unfit for use. He bought a new set and kept the old pair in a suede bag sewn by his wife.
Approached by the museum two years ago to donate them, he reluctantly agreed.
Now they are in a display case on the museum’s second floor, part of an exhibit titled “Living in the Shadow of Death,” accompanied by an old photograph of Stern and a label telling the set’s history.
He donated the tefillin, he says, for the sake of his relatives who died in the Holocaust. “I wanted to have something as a memorial,” he says.
The museum, whose hexagonal shape symbolizes the Star of David and the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, presents the Shoah in a historical context, says Altshuler.
“We contextualize the story of the Holocaust by telling the larger story of Jewish life in the 20th century. And we tell the Holocaust story in a way that I believe has not been done before — namely, principally through the eyes of victims and survivors.”
Two of its three floors are devoted to Jewish culture — the prewar Jewish life affected and destroyed by the Holocaust and the postwar rebirth around the world.
From the museum’s top floor, visitors can easily see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, landmarks that define New York as the nation’s port of entry for refugees.
The building is a scaled-down version of the five-story, 80,000-square-foot structure that was first proposed in the 1980s. A downturn in the local real estate market, many of whose executives were early supporters of the museum, led to a scaling down of the early plans.
The construction and acquisitions budget was $21.5 million, cut from figures that had gone as high as $70 million.
The Battery Park City Authority, to which the museum relinquished some of the rights to develop the rest of the prime land on which it is located, gave $10 million to the museum. The remainder was raised from private donations.