NEW YORK -- The bright and bouncy baby was named Ziv which, in Hebrew, means clear and shining light. At the child's circumcision, Rabbi Irving Greenberg asked why the unusual name had been chosen.
"The grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, said he had a younger sister who was 5 when his family hid from the Nazis," recalled Rabbi Greenberg, head of the National Jewish Center for Leadership and Learning here. "The sister was too young to hide in the forest, so they placed her in the home of a sympathetic farmer.
"Someone informed on the farmer and soldiers stormed his house. The girl was killed on the spot. That was 51 years ago. Her name was Clara -- which means light.
"You may think the killers won, but her brother remembered. Now this new child will carry her name."
Now, more than 50 years since World War II -- at a time when many survivors, like Ziv's grandfather, are growing old -- there is a mounting urgency to safeguard the memory of the Holocaust. For eons, Jews honored the dead by recalling their good deeds (( and by naming their children for them. But when 6 million died in the Holocaust -- the systematic Nazi extermination of European Jewry from 1933 to 1945 -- the list of names was too long, the horror too raw to simply fall back on the old ways.
Today's Jews are making use of the old ways and finding new ways, too, to remember the 6 million. In more than 100 communities nationwide, there are Holocaust monuments, memorials and research centers. There are oral history collections, survivors' groups and Holocaust studies courses. Moreover, there are yearly public commemorations.
Yom Ha'Shoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, is celebrated April 11 worldwide by those who wish to honor the heroes and martyrs of World War II. In the United States, during the Days of Remembrance, April 7 to 14, thousands of commemorations will be held in schools, synagogues and civic centers.
But even as these memorials occur, a haunting slew of questions arises: How will the survivors' legacy be maintained? Is the memory of the Holocaust best served by costly museums now under construction in New York, Washington and Los Angeles? Are American Jews in danger of making the Holocaust the focus of their communal life?
"The Holocaust should not overshadow everything else," said Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose works recount memories of the Nazi devastation. "There is a danger of us becoming a morbid generation."
Mr. Wiesel helped focus Americans' attention on the Holocaust -- as did the televised trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1963 and Israel's Six-Day War in 1967. American Jews began to see the past in a continuum with the present: Yesterday's victims were today's warriors.
By the 1970s, campuses had introduced Holocaust studies; Holocaust memorials had sprung up in scores of communities and a television miniseries, "The Holocaust," had been aired.
The survivors themselves were the strongest advocates for preserving the past.
"The people who have built the centers and who have been the driving force behind them are the survivors," said Rabbi Keith Stern, president-elect of the Dallas Memorial Center for Holocaust Studies. "In Dallas, it was the survivors who said, 'We have a promise to keep.' "
That promise takes on the coloring of the country the survivors call home, noted Judith Miller in her recent book, "One by One by One."
"Americans are far removed, morally and geographically, from the scene of the genocide," wrote Ms. Miller, a journalist for the New York Times. "While this distance has enabled many American Jews to confront the Holocaust, for many it has become an obsession. It is they who have been most enraged by the efforts to erase or alter the memory of what happened.
"They have a practical stake in keeping memory of the Holocaust alive, as a way of maintaining American support for Israel and as a talisman in fighting discrimination against themselves and other minorities."
The commingling of Holocaust memories and American themes is graphically illustrated by three new museums. These museums view the Holocaust refracted through an American lens.
"The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., looks at the Holocaust on behalf of all Americans. The Holocaust becomes a denial of human rights, something which happened in a faraway land from which survivors would escape to this land of liberty," said Lawrence Young, professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Dr. Young continued: "The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York wants to put the Holocaust in a larger Jewish context, since New York has the largest Jewish community in the world. It looks at the European Jewish community which was lost in the war, Israel and the American Jewish community which flourished after the war."
In Los Angeles, Beit Hashoah-Museum of Tolerance is being built by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
"The museum addresses itself to racism, bigotry and prejudice in the context of the American scene, and it challenges the individual as to his own potential for bigotry," said Dr. Gerald Margolis, the museum's director. "The second part of the museum is the story of the Holocaust from the Weimar Republic to the establishment of the state of Israel."
Are three multimillion-dollar museums too many?
Supporters say no. Each museum has a lesson to teach if it remembers Judaism's central tenet: the affirmation of life.
But critics wonder if too much time and money is being devoted to projects that either trivialize the Holocaust as yet another example of prejudice or which exaggerate its centrality to Judaism.
"My feeling is a museum dedicated to the memory of the tragedy can be a sanctuary or an abomination,"said Mr. Wiesel, formerly head of the U.S. Holocaust Commission and an honorary chairman of the Museum of Jewish Heritage. "Once you introduce an element of compromise -- political considerations, things to attract people -- it is an abomination."
Mr. Wiesel declined to specifically criticize projects under construction.
Other critics say the Washington museum dilutes the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust with stories of other persecuted minorities. They fault the Los Angeles museum for sensationalist tactics and the New York project for distorting Jewish history by wrapping it around the Holocaust. Still others are less critical of the individual museums than the commemorative trend.
"I am concerned about the tremendous financial resources from the Jewish community going into the museums," said Howard Husock, director of case studies at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. "I would rather see the money going to settlement houses to help poor children or to tikkun olam -- the Jewish notion of repairing the world."
Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun, a Jewish magazine of politics and culture, wonders whether the museums will portray the Holocaust as an example of inexplicable evil or if they will examine the social forces that led to Nazism.
"What could be good about the Holocaust museums is if they are a spur to look at pain and oppression," he said. "A fitting memorial to the 6 million would have people asking what made it possible for racist, chauvinist and xenophobic forces to triumph?"
Museum directors say that question is central to their mission.
"I think when people are confronted with stories like the Dutch housewife who saved 22 Jews, they will realize the world just wasn't divided between victim and perpetrators," said Jeshayahu "Shaike" Weinberg, director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. "The overwhelming moral problem was that of the bystander.
"Even if you are a bystander, you have a moral commitment to do good and to fight evil. This is not abstract. It was a dilemma for millions of Germans, and it is the most important ethical conclusion I would like people to take away."
The emphasis on action is echoed by rabbis who see the museums as a starting point for Jews who want to preserve the memory of the dead.
"It's important to have monuments and museums," said Rabbi Lynne Landsberg, associate director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington, D.C. "But we must also remember those who died in the Holocaust with positive, life-affirming deeds."
Planned museums
U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum
Where: Washington
Opening: April 1993
Cost: $147 million,
including endowment
Architect: James I. Freedof Pei Cobb Freed and Partners
Goal: To serve the nation as a permanent reminder
that humankind must guard against another Holocaust.
Features:
*Teacher training programs
*Hall of Remembrance memorial
*Interactive computer center
*Holocaust Research Institute
*Two auditoriums
Beit Hashoah-Museum
of Tolerance
Where: 9786 W. Pico, Los Angeles
Opening: January 1992
Cost: $50 million
.' Architect: James Gardner Studios
of London
C7 Goal: To challenge Americans on racism and prejudice;
tell the story of the Holocaust
Features:
*Interactive computer displays
*Multimedia presentations
*Light-and-sound tableaux
*325-seat auditorium
*Memorial garden
*Archives
# *Oral history project
Museum of Jewish Heritage
Where: Battery Park City, New York
Opening: 1993
Cost: $50 million
.' Architect: James Stewart Polshek
and Partners
Goal: A memorial to the 6 million Jews who perished that will address the world before the Holocaust, its aftermath, and renewal in America.
Features:
*Video and computer center
' *Biographical information
on 2.5 million victims
*400-seat auditorium
*Ongoing oral history project
Memorial hall