Pittsfield — In partnership with the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires and local educational resource organization Berkshire Educational Resources K-12 (BERK12), area students are about to receive a unique type of history lesson from a classroom on wheels.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Mobile Museums of Tolerance (MMOT) is parked in Pittsfield to offer the community a chance to tour the traveling interactive program that aims “to confront hate and inspire action.” Begun in Los Angeles, the two local entities launched the project in Pittsfield with a November 5 open house, during which team members addressed how the museum will be used in the Berkshires and provided a sample of one of its four courses that focuses on Anne Frank.
For neighborhood resident Barbara Mahony, who walked into the museum after having seen an event posting, the project may be the sole means of imparting Jewish history, the Holocaust in particular, to some members of the public. “Young people aren’t aware of what happened in the Holocaust really,” the senior citizen said. “They just don’t have that sense, and I just think it’s so important that we have young people educated about this.”
Mahony recalled her visit to Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and the tour she made to Germany years ago, advocating the program as a way of confirming the existence of the Holocaust for some who are naysayers to the atrocities. “I can’t believe that people don’t realize what went on,” she said.
Melissa Mott, executive vice president for education programs and strategy at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, described the museum as an “interactive laboratory for conversation and dialogue, learning about critical thinking skills, and media literacy.” She said the exhibit pays homage to the center’s cornerstone, “the lessons of the Holocaust and looking at history through the lens of how we can be better moving forward.”
The Massachusetts MMOT marks the ninth educational bus for the center, with others in California, Florida, Illinois, and New York. The project was created in 2021 in Illinois “in response to the rising tide of extremism, holistically,” Mott said, and not a function of one “particular inciting event other than a continued need to be able to bring transformative educational experiences to schools and to students, especially those who are outside of the radius of cultural institutions and museums.” “So that was the genesis of it—to be able to get to places where it wasn’t as easy to access the [United States] Holocaust Memorial Museum [in Washington, D.C.],” she said.
Although the museum was situated on South Street during the open house, its mobility allows for the program to be transported to schools, events, and sites across the Commonwealth, currently booking out about a year in advance, Mott said, adding that most of the mobile museums are now scheduling into 2027.
How the MMOT works
With the museum parked outside of a school, students enter the mobile classroom and are guided by a trained educator who operates the classroom, interacting with the children on a one-on-one basis. “It is literally a field trip,” Mott said of the interactive program that employs screens, interactive tablets, and film clips. “They are immersed in a very different world than in their school.”
The program is geared toward middle and high school students, she said, with its length aligned to the school’s bell schedule, about 45 minutes, allowing teachers to more easily incorporate the project into their curriculum. Educators can choose a workshop from four options: “Combat Hate: A Digital Media Literacy Workshop” for grades seven through 12 that teaches children how to keep safe online and recognize misinformation; “The Anne Frank Story” for grades five through eight that reaches youth who see themselves in a young person’s story; “Power of Ordinary People” for grades seven through 12 that explores the actions “ordinary people” took during the rise of Nazi terror including factors that influenced reactions as well as how young folks can bring positive action into their schools; and “Civil Rights Workshop” for grades five through 12 that delves into non-violence resistance and the interfaith coalitions created during that time in history.
The museum is open to non-students as it travels to public libraries, sporting events and serves as a host to community conversations for adults.
The building and operating cost of each museum tallies just shy of $1 million, Mott said, but allocations in the state budget provided funding for the Massachusetts program. The program is free to use.
How the MMOT can be used in Berkshire County
Berkshire County District Attorney Timothy Shugrue was on hand to address ways the project can be implemented in the region, in light of recent hate incidences in Dalton, Great Barrington, and Lenox. His office formed a task force comprised of Jewish Federation of the Berkshires representatives and local educators to combat bias and hatred.
“We felt we wanted to address the issue as a community not just as individuals,” Shugrue said. The group meets every five or six weeks to offer programs in the area such as the “Hate Has No Home Here” campaign that began earlier this year and peer-training program, “Changemakers for Good,” enacted in eight local school districts, he said.
“That’s why I think this Museum of Tolerance is such a great addition to all of the collaborative efforts that we’ve done,” Executive Director Dara Kaufman added. “Because I think that’s just the Berkshire way.”
With Kaufman and BERK12’s Coordinator of Professional Development William Ballen, Shugrue brainstormed how his constituency could best use the museum, including parking the facility at Pittsfield’s First Friday celebrations or at Berkshire Pride events in addition to school sessions. “We’ve got to get to the kids because they are our future and if we don’t get to them now, the cycle [of hate] will continue,” Shugrue said.
Ballen’s goal focuses on fostering a climate in the community that does not involve hate. “We’re not interested in just parachuting a program in when there’s an incident,” he said. “We want to build a culture of respect in the schools so the kids can address these issues when they come up as peers.”
Kaufman agrees, with the museum’s program “part of our mandate as a [Jewish] Federation.” “Instead of just being a resource for when something happens and we’re called in to say, ‘This happened, what do we do, how do we respond, what are the resources out there,’ we’ve taken a really proactive approach as a federation and as a Jewish community to partner and to figure out how do we do this and support our young people,” she said.
With the rise in local and national acts of antisemitism, Arlene Schiff, president of the Board of Trustees for the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires, said the program is crucial for its sharing of antibias training with students, discussions relevant to the consequences of being a bystander to such actions, focus on the Civil Rights Movement, and the history behind antisemitism, especially for its impact on all communities, not just the Jewish diaspora.
According to the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires, “religiously motivated hate crimes have more than doubled since 2020, with anti-Jewish-motivated crimes accounting for over 60 percent of those reported.” In 2023, Massachusetts saw a 189 percent increase in antisemitic incidents, year over year, with acts of harassment up 444 percent, physical assaults doubled, and vandalism skyrocketing to a 70 percent uptick. That year, the Commonwealth was cited as having the fifth highest number of incidents in the country.
Schiff is hopeful that educating youth on what a diverse society is and why that idea is important might result in “more people feel[ing] comfortable standing up, and maybe hate will go away or at least diminish at some point.”
Schiff advocated that the program’s exploration of the Civil Rights Movement, as with the Holocaust, illustrates allies have always existed to help those subjected to hateful events. “I think people need to understand that minority groups have been supported throughout time and lifted up by others,” she said. “And that’s not a new concept. That’s something that anybody can do as well.”
Educators and others can make reservations for the museum here.
