New England Holocaust Memorial (Boston, Massachusetts)

USA / Massachusetts / Boston / Boston, Massachusetts
 memorial, trail, Holocaust, interesting place
The New England Holocaust Memorial is a memorial dedicated to the Jews that lost their lives in the Holocaust during World War II, located in Boston, Massachusetts.

Designed by Stanley Saitowitz and erected in 1995, the memorial consists of six glass towers that the visitor can walk under. Engraved on the towers are six million numbers that symbolize the six million killed in the Holocaust. There are also random messages on the towers. Underneath the towers, steam rises up through metal grates from a dark floor with twinkling lights on it.[1]

Each tower symbolizes a different major concentration camp (Majdanek, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, and Auschwitz-Birkenau), but can also be taken to be menorah candles, the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust (one million per column), and the six years that the mass extermination took place, 1939-1945.

Each tower consists of twenty-four individual panels of glass. Twenty-two of the panels are inscribed with seven digit numbers and two of the panels are inscribed with messages. In total there are 132 panels from the six towers inscribed with numbers, however each panel is identical. A single panel contains 17,280 unique numbers which are subsequently repeated throughout the memorial. Numbers are arranged in eight by ten blocks, with each block consisting of sets of six numbers arranged in a six by six grid. In total there are 2,280,960 non-unique numbers listed on the 132 panels.

The New England Holocaust Memorial is located near the Freedom Trail, and is only a few steps off the trail, making it a popular tourist attraction.[2]

The site is maintained by the Boston National Historic Park and is located in Carmen Park, near Faneuil Hall. Carmen Park was named in recognition of William Carmen's service to the community and his vision and leadership in creating the New England Holocaust Memorial.[1]

The Memorial was targeted for destruction in the 2002 white supremacist terror plot.
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_Holocaust_Memorial
Nearby cities:
Coordinates:   42°21'40"N   71°3'26"W

Comments

  • Next time you are in the memorial and looking at all the numbers, pick one thats easy to locate and remember, then go to the next tower. Same number will be in the same spot. They just repeated the glass plates. No Lie. So Shitty...Way to go boston.
  • I saw the same thing!
This article was last modified 12 years ago