CNN iReport

The Palestine Holocaust Museum (IslamOnline dot Net2 29.199.24) opened last April in Second Life. According to the placard at the entrance, the building’s purpose is “to prevent the crime of silence” by commemorating the Palestinian children killed in Israeli-Palestinian fighting. The same sign identifies Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister, Mata Vilnai, as the source of the museum’s name. Reuters quotes Vilnai as threatening last February to unleash ‘shoah’ (holocaust) on Gaza (Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/featuredCrisis/idUSL296121231). Like most museums, the Palestine Holocaust Museum’s exhibitions change and its collections grow. The recent Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip has greatly increased this institution’s painful burden.

Architect Toti Lowey and designer/sculptor Frozenfire Burner collaborated in the monument’s construction. The white flagstone plaza on which the museum is located is a display space, its perimeter defined by photographs of the piteous effects of bombing on the civilian population of Gaza. In the court, the green, red and black cubes of Frozenfire Burner’s sculpture suggest the graves of a cemetery. The building itself is a modern structure which embraces the digital weightlessness of immersive worlds. The ground floor exhibition space flows from the plaza; there are no doors. In it are panels with photographs and texts in English describing the lives and deaths of individuals, infants, toddlers, teenagers, mothers.

The upper part of the museum is a series of separate large and small rooms, some open and light-filled, others in almost complete darkness, accessible by a series ramps and short stairways. The white rooms display framed texts with quotations from non-Palestinian observers including a Norwegian doctor, a Roman Catholic papal official, and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, raising ethical issues involved in the invasion. The black rooms present shrines to the dead: portraits of an infant around an empty crib; photographs of young brother’s with their Koranic reading certificates and summer school commendations. The roof of the museum displays models of the Israeli weaponry used in Gaza from a U.S. F-16 fighter plane to the TAR-21 assault rifle.

The staff members on site make a visitor feel very welcome. The museum itself makes the visitor weep. It is a site that should be visited by all those who have forgotten how to lament the loss of innocent lives.