In the Basement of a School Known for Science, a Holocaust Museum

The Bronx High School of Science has produced more scientific leaders than many countries, including eight Nobel Prize winners in physics and chemistry.

But when New York City’s premier science magnet school decided to honor its legacy, it spent more than a dozen years and $1 million on a project that had no connection to string theory or the periodic table: a Holocaust museum.

The new Holocaust museum and studies center opened Friday in the school’s basement, a testament to the single-minded dedication of school leaders and a high-powered alumni network at a time of shrinking school budgets.

Though Bronx Science started in 1938 as an all-boys school that served primarily Eastern European Jewish families in the Bronx, its nearly 3,000 students today are more likely to be Asian and come from Queens and across the city.

“Why would the Bronx High School of Science invest not in electron microscopes but in a museum of Jewish history when 62 percent of our kids are Asian?” asked Valerie J. Reidy, the principal. “The answer is that we believe education doesn’t only happen in the classroom. Great scientists have to be ethical people, and so what we’re investing in is the future.”

While many schools teach Holocaust courses, few if any have assembled a trove of 900 artifacts, most of which were donated by alumni and local residents or bought at auctions over more than three decades. The 1,000-square-foot museum will include three exhibition galleries, an archive and a classroom. It is just steps away from the boys’ locker room that has been in the spotlight since three students on the boy’s track team were accused this winter of hazing a freshman teammate.

In the exhibition galleries, framed war propaganda posters cover the walls, including one in German that was plastered on the windows of Jewish-owned stores with the message: “Germans Defend Yourselves. Don’t Buy From Jews.” Nazi military helmets, uniforms and a swastika flag are preserved under glass, along with a rusted canister with a skull-and-bones label that held Zyklon B, a poisonous gas used in the concentration camps.

Not everything is so dark. One of the most poignant exhibits is a worn Torah cover that was stitched after the war by Jewish survivors at the former Bergen-Belsen camp. Somehow they found precious gold thread for the Hebrew lettering.

“It was significant because they still had their religion, they still had hope,” said Shoshana Shapiro, 17, a senior who helped research the artifacts.

The Holocaust museum was inspired by the late Stuart Elenko, a teacher who brought an unusual level of passion to his course on the Holocaust. In 1978, Mr. Elenko started displaying Holocaust artifacts in a former microfilm room in the back of the school library. He ran bagel sales to raise money for the collection and recruited students to give tours.

“I think Mr. Elenko’s idea originally was to make history come alive for his students,” said Sophia Sapozhnikov, who currently teaches the Holocaust course. She noted that Mr. Elenko even held mock Nuremberg trials in his classroom to encourage students to explore the meaning of justice and moral responsibility.

But as the collection grew over the years, supported in part by state and city funds, the school ran out of room to display all the items. Many had to be placed in storage. “This is an enormous collection that was inaccessible because it was not organized for research or learning,” said Jill Vexler, the curator at the new museum. “You had to know it to learn from it. What we’ve done is inverted that so you are learning as it is revealed.”

The funding for the museum includes $300,000 from the school’s budget, $150,000 from the City Council, and hundreds of thousands more from alumni. “I see it as a centerpiece for embracing diversity, for learning about the horrors that can come from scapegoating, and stereotyping, and creating common enemies,” Ms. Reidy said.

For instance, Ms. Reidy said, students taking the Holocaust course will be able to retrace the lives of individual refugees through passports and visas at the museum. Foreign language classes can translate war propaganda. Biology classes may research the medical experiments conducted on Jews in the camps. The museum will be open to other schools and community groups by appointment.

In a pointed reminder that intolerance is not just a German problem, the museum includes a white Ku Klux Klan hood. Albert Einstein’s cautionary words are suspended above a life-size photograph of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto being sent to the camps: “The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”

The Holocaust lessons have spilled over into the students’ lives in recent years. A Korean student pointed out to her classmates that in another part of the world, the Japanese were killing Koreans and Chinese. Another student saw a modern-day parallel in the genocide in Darfur and led efforts to raise $2,000 for Darfur schoolchildren by selling bracelets.

Mariah Maldonado, 18, a senior who has taken the Holocaust course for three years, said that she has become more aware of prejudice and discrimination in the world around her. When her non-Jewish friends ask why she keeps taking the course, she tells them that “there’s always something to relate to.”

“I think it’s really important to recognize how those things happen and can be prevented,” said Ms. Maldonado, who hopes to study human rights at Columbia University in the fall. “Being in the class helped me learn about my own history.”