CLEVELAND — Placing a rock at the Kol Israel Holocaust Memorial is just one way that Robert Zelwin honors the victims of the Holocaust.
What You Need To Know
- The Kol Israel Holocaust Memorial is dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust
- It was commissioned by Kol Israel Foundation, an organization that was founded by Holocaust survivors who settled in Cleveland
- The group’s president, Robert Zelwin, and his board members want the monument to be recognized as a national memorial
“The memorial was built in 1961, dedicated to the memory of those members of the Cleveland area — survivors whose families were perished in the Holocaust,” Zelwin said.
Below the pavement of the memorial that Zelwin walked on are the remains of people who died at three concentration camps.
“It serves as a destination for those people who do not know where their family members and friends were buried,” he said.
According to its website, the Kol Israel Foundation, an organization that was created by Holocaust survivors who settled in the Cleveland area after World War II, commissioned the memorial.
“Before the people really had a chance to start being successful in their own lives, they thought about the people who had perished in the Holocaust — their family members and their friends,” Zelwin said.
As the current president of the foundation, Zelwin doesn’t just come to the memorial to maintain it. He comes to remember his own loved ones.
“This is my family, Zelwin family, and my mother’s family, the Duszkin family,” Zelwin said while pointing at names inscribed along the wall of the memorial.
Zelwin’s family members were among the 6 million Jewish people who died during the Holocaust.
“My dad lost his entire family,” Zelwin said. “He is the only survivor. My mother and her brother were the only two of her family that survived.”
He said his parents lived in the woods for mroe than three years to escape Nazi German forces.
“Doing what they had to do, they joined the Bielski partisan group when there was 24 members of the group, and they exited the woods in that July of 1944, where they had 1,200 members of the group,” said Zelwin. “And today, there are over 20,000 of their descendants, like me, that are alive.”
Before arriving at Ellis Island in New York City, he said his parents lived in a displaced persons camp.
“They asked my parents where they wanted to go, and my father said, well, he had a cousin in Cleveland, and they came to Cleveland and lived here for the rest of their lives until they passed away,” Zelwin said.
Keeping the stories alive is what Zelwin said he dedicates his life to doing.
“The stories need to be told. People have to know what happened. If the stories aren’t told, people will forget, and people will deny that it ever took place,” Zelwin said as he drove around Zion Memorial Park, where the foundation’s monument is located.
Stopping at a section in the cemetery, Zelwin got out of his car and noticed some familiar names on the gravesites.
“I look around. I see all these people that I knew as a young kid, growing up, and they were friendly with my parents. It’s just a, it’s really, it’s a real Holocaust cemetery,” Zelwin said. “A lot of Holocaust survivors are buried in this cemetery.”
Zelwin said he couldn’t believe it when news broke March 1 that a Russian missile hit near Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, a site its website said honored the more than 70,000 Jewish people Nazis shot there in Kyiv.
“It desecrates their memories, trying to bomb a memorial,” Zelwin said. “It just makes no sense, that just, there’s really no answer to it.”
Looking down at the graves, he imagined what it would be like if something similar happened at Zion Memorial Park.
“It would be like bombing the monument that we have here, you know, it would have the same feeling to, to those people,” Zelwin said.
Zelwin said he and his board members want to get the monument recognized as a national memorial and part of the nation’s parks system to help protect it.
