Auschwitz Exhibition Reveals Shofar Once Sounded During Holocaust

LOWER MANHATTAN, NY — A historic artifact secretly used during Jewish High Holiday services in the Auschwitz concentration camp has been revealed publicly for the first time as a part of a groundbreaking new exhibition in Lower Manhattan.

The instrument — a ram's horn known as a shofar — was once used in religious services at the concentration camp 75 years ago. The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan has now put the historic artifact on display publicly for the first time this week.

"Each object we display in the exhibition has its own historical echo, its own voice," Luis Ferreiro, director of the Auschwitz exhibition, said in a statement. The shofar is blown on Rosh Hashanah and in the final moment of Yom Kippur —and will be sounded once again at two Upper East Side synagogues this year.

"This shofar will bring our visitors the sound of spiritual resistance and human dignity, and a story and echo we very much need to hear today," Ferreiro said.

The shofar will join hundreds of artifacts and photos in the exhibition, which opened at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in May.

"Every artifact in this exhibition tells a story — of pain, of potential cut short, or of spiritual resistance — and presenting this shofar on the cusp of our High Holy Days illustrates that signs of hope can exist during even the darkest of times," the chairman of the museum's board of trustees, Bruce Ratner, said.

Chaskel Tydor, an Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor, gave the shofar to his daughter, Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, who is the director of The Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research.

She said her father managed to save hundreds of lives during his years in Nazi camps and helped to arrange for those imprisoned to be able to sound the shofar without attracting attention — and was later passed on the shofar to take with him.

The instrument has since been passed on in Tydor's family after he died in 1993, the museum says.

"The shofar was a symbol of his powerful belief which he never lost throughout his years in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and his spiritual resistance. He always looked forward, never backward," Baumel-Schwartz said.

The exhibition, "Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away." is on display until Jan. 3, 2020.

The museum is open at 36 Battery Place Sunday through Thursday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday (April to October) 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Friday (November to March) 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and is closed Saturdays, Jewish holidays and Thanksgiving.