Menachem Z. Rosensaft
Menachem Z. Rosensaft (born 1948 in Bergen-Belsen, Germany) an attorney in New York and the Founding Chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Survivors, is a leader of the Second Generation movement of children of survivors, and has been described on the front page of the "New York Times" as one of the most prominent of the survivors' sons and daughters. He also served as National President of the Labor Zionist Alliance, and was active in the early stages of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. As psychologist Eva Fogelman has written: "Menachem Rosensaft's moral voice has gone beyond the responsibility he felt as a child of survivors to remember and educate. He felt the need to promote peace and a tolerant State of Israel as well. He wanted to bring to justice Nazi war criminals, to fight racism and bigotry, and to work toward the continuity of the Jewish people".
Menachem Z. Rosensaft
In the winter of 2002, Rosensaft sharply attacked the Jewish Museum in New York for trivializing the Holocaust in its exhibition, "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art," by including a display of six lifelike busts of the notorious Auschwitz SS doctor Josef Mengele and such works as "Prada Deathcamp" and the "Giftgas Giftset" of poison gas canisters packaged with Chanel, Hermes and Tiffany& Co. logos. "For a Holocaust survivor to hear that a bust of Mengele is on display at the Jewish Museum will at the least cause nightmares," Rosensaft told Alan Cooperman of the Washington Post. "It's the functional equivalent of painting pornography on Torah scrolls and exhibiting it as art. It may well be art. But it is also offensive to many, many people. ... The intellectual reasons of displaying deliberately provocative art have to give way to the far more real pain that this is going to cause for thousands of Holocaust survivors who are still alive."