Governor dedicates Holocaust center

Gov. Phil Murphy, D-N.J., signed the top of the wall of visitors as he helped dedicate Kittatinny Regional High School’s new Holocaust and Genocide Research Center on Monday, March 31.

The center is the brainchild of Mary Houghtaling, the 2024 Sussex County Teacher of the Year, and Holocaust survivor Maud Dahme, who hosted the governor’s visit.

Students helped design and stock the center, which takes up part of the school’s library complex.

Featured in the center is a 2,000-volume collection of books of the late Oscar Pinkus, some dating to when he was a child in Germany.

”My husband and I stacked them in the back of his pickup and brought them to the school,” Houghtaling said as she talked about the beginnings of the center.

Also included - and available by appointment - is a cabinet full of Pinkus’ bound notes about what is in those books.

Houghtaling said the idea of a Holocaust memorial came out of a class trip to the Jewish Museum in New York City with some students.

Work on the museum picked up steam as she worked on her second master’s degree.

The center is the only one of its kind in the nation.

In addition to the books for research, it contains portraiture by Holocaust survivors or their descendants.

Among the artwork are renditions of Kristallnacht, which occurred Nov. 9-10, 1938, when Germans attacked Jewish people and property throughout the country.

The word means “broken glass” and refers to the streets littered with broken windows, pottery, even glassware stolen from Jewish homes.

Another piece is a representation of Anne Frank, a teenaged girl who kept a diary as she and her family hid from the Nazis from June 1942 to August 1944 in Amsterdam. The diary and collection of letters was found in her hiding place in 1947.

Recent genocides

The center doesn’t focus solely on the Holocaust, the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people before and during World War II.

It also highlights more recent genocides throughout the world.

One wall has a timeline of when genocides have occurred and a big map of where they have occurred.

The ceiling is decorated with paper butterflies, each done in memory of ancestors who died in the Holocaust.

Kittatinny Superintendent Craig Hutcheson said the school is working on a schedule for the public to view the center and museum and for researchers to use its resources.

After signing the wall, Murphy called the displays “really impressive.”

He pointed out that he was the U.S. ambassador to Germany from 2009 to 2013 under President Barack Obama.

He, first lady Tammy Murphy, and New Jersey State Police Col. Patrick Callahan will travel to Poland to participate in the International March of the Living on Thursday, April 24 in commemoration of Yom HaShoah, known as Holocaust Remembrance Day

The three-kilometer march will begin at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Oświęcim and end in Birkenau, the largest concentration and extermination camp built by the Nazis during World War II.