Remembering America's First Holocaust Museum
Neither the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles nor the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the capital – both opened in 1993 – was America’s first institution dedicated to the Shoah. That distinction belongs to Yaakov (Jacob) Riz, a Philadelphia Jew originally from Poland, who maintained a “miniature Jewish Identity Center and Yad Vashem, the only one in America” [1], in the basement of his home at 1453 Levick Street during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. “He is about five feet tall and can’t weigh much more than 100 pounds,” a 1971 Philadelphia Inquirer profile related, also noting, “He talks incessantly lapsing at times into Russian and translating into English, singing Yiddish songs, quoting jokes and Jewish stories from memory and citing newspaper and magazine articles.” [2] More somber than jovial in the bulk of his public activism, however, Riz purports to have been “sentenced to death in Soviet Russia as an anti-Communist and Zionist” but inste