Thursday, May 15, 2003 | 11:29 a.m.
Tours of the Warsaw Ghetto Remembrance Garden at Temple Beth Sholom will be available by appointment. Call Temple Beth Sholom at 804-1333.
Holocaust survivor Henry Kronberg, 83, wishes these stones could talk.
Looking at the cobblestones from the Warsaw Ghetto that have become part of a new local remembrance garden, the Las Vegas resident of 42 years said, "The stories they could tell of heroism. The blood that was spilled on those stones sent a message that the human spirit is indomitable and that ultimately good wins out over evil."
As was recently recounted in the Academy Award-winning movie "The Pianist," the Nazis forced all Jews in Warsaw to move to a neighborhood that was then walled off from the rest of the city.
Soon thereafter, trainloads of Polish Jews were moved from the ghetto to concentration camps.
In 1943 ghetto residents began refusing to be deported to the death camps and fought against the more heavily armed Germans.
Friday marks the 60th anniversary of the end of the nearly five-week uprising. The stand ended when the Nazis burned the ghetto, killed many of the rebels and sent tens of thousands of other ghetto residents to death camps.
To honor their memory, the Warsaw Ghetto Remembrance Garden will be dedicated 11 a.m. Sunday at Temple Beth Sholom, 10700 Havenwood Lane in Summerlin.
A news conference was scheduled today to give Las Vegas a first look at the walk-in, open-air circular monument that features cobblestones from the Warsaw Ghetto.
Kronberg was a teenager in Poland's Krakow Ghetto. Krakow's Jews also were rounded up and isolated from the rest of their city's population in a walled-in, prison-like community where they were rationed very little food and barely survived.
But there was no uprising in Krakow.
"In the Warsaw Ghetto they were better organized than we were," recalled Kronberg, who survived the Gross Rosen and Nord Housen camps and was being transported to another camp when he was liberated by Gen. George Patton's troops on April 11, 1945.
"Maybe the Warsaw Ghetto had a little more help than we had, such as people smuggling in guns to them. And definitely they had a lot more strength and courage than we had."
Marek Edelman, the only surviving commander of the Warsaw uprising, recalled in his memoir the rebel's victory at the intersection of Mita and Zamenhofa streets:
"The Germans attempted a retreat, but their path was cut. German dead soon littered the street. ... The 'glorious' SS therefore called tanks into action. ... The first was burned out by one of our incendiary bottles, the rest did not approach our positions. ... Not a single German left this area alive."
Edelman today is 82 and lives in Lodz, Poland. An edited version of his memoir will be presented to guests at Sunday's dedication as a souvenir of the event.
The keynote address will be delivered by Michael Berenbaum, a nationally acclaimed educator and film consultant who is considered a leading authority on the Warsaw Ghetto revolt.
The president of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Berenbaum has served as historical consultant on such films as the documentary, "The Last Days," which won an Academy Award, and "One Survivor Remembers: The Gerda Weismann Klein Story," which won both an Oscar and an Emmy.
Other scheduled speakers at the ceremony inside the synagogue of the oldest Jewish congregation in Las Vegas include Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., and Rabbi Felipe Goodman.
After the ceremony, which is scheduled to include a performance by the Temple Beth Sholom Youth Choir and Cantor Daniel Friedman, there will be a tour of the garden that will include the lighting of memorial candles and the Kaddish, a prayer for the dead.
The monument is called a garden because initial plans called for ivy vines to cover the walls. But all forms of vegetation eventually were rejected because they would draw birds that would leave droppings, creating health and aesthetic problems, temple officials said.
The structure's tall walls and heavy iron gates are designed to create a sense of confinement, said Irwin Goldberg, president of the Temple Beth Sholom Men's Club who conceived the idea for the memorial.
"Its design is reminiscent of the restricted atmosphere of the ghetto," Goldberg said, noting that Clark County building officials denied a request for razor wire atop the walls. The ghetto's 10-foot walls were capped with broken glass and barbed wire. The monument, instead, is capped with a lattice design.
Goldberg and fellow men's club member Mark Scheiner obtained permission from the synagogue to go ahead with the project, then led efforts to raise $300,000 to build it.
"The garden incorporates the last remaining original paving stones" from the streets of the ghetto, Goldberg said.
The cobblestones, in irregular block shapes, were acquired from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. They were not on display there but rather were stacked on pallets in the museum's warehouse in Maryland, Goldberg said.
"Because of the weight of the stones, it cost $4,000 just to ship them to Las Vegas," he said.
The cobblestones are mounted against walls that are divided by six pillars, each featuring a waterfall and eternal flame. The waterfalls empty into a circular pool.
"The six pillars represent the estimated 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II," project spokeswoman Gillian Silver said.
"The flames are symbolic not only of everlasting light but also of the fires the Nazis set to burn the ghetto and end the uprising."
The memorial was designed by Chuck Jones and Brad Friedmutter of the Friedmutter Group, architects of the temple. They donated their services to the Warsaw project, Silver said.
Jones said the design is intended to "bring to life a space of texture, movement and elements which serve as a living testament to an extraordinary event of courage."
The garden will provide a unique educational outreach for the synagogue, Robert Mirisch, the temple's executive director, said.
"The message we want to get out to the schoolchildren, seniors and others who will tour the garden is that the issue is universal," Mirisch said. "This is not restricted to any one group. Many people have been oppressed.
"We want this memorial to be as meaningful to a Latin child as it is to a Jewish child. And we believe it will become a major cultural attraction to visitors as well as locals."
Goldberg, 74, said: "I would hope this garden gives the public a better understanding of Jewish people and what we have endured."
"It demonstrates that even when things are hopeless people can find within themselves a self worth -- that people can make their lives count."
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