Holocaust Commission at Work

President Carter’s Commission on the Holocaust, headed by author Elie Wiesel, has received a flood of suggestions ranging from sculptural proposals to educational curricula to meet the three-point program it is charged to complete by next July 15.

When Carter named the 24-member Commission last Nov. I, he stipulated that it should complete its work six months after its first meeting. That session is scheduled for tomorrow. It will begin in the Roosevelt Room at the White House and continue in the library of the old Executive Office Building.

In addition to the Commission’s membership named by the President, five U.S. Representatives and five Senators are to work with it. In addition, an advisory group of 27 members will assist in the project.

A spontaneous outpouring from individuals and institutions came to the Commission since Carter’s enouncement of its formation. In addition, the Commission and the advisory group members are soliciting opinions .Preliminary suggestions have varied from a museum and monument to a “living memorial” to the victims of the Holocaust and have toughed on areas from research and teaching to curricula, the arts and the media. The Commission has emphasized that no decisions have been made. Neither the scope of the project nor its nature have been determined, it said.

In searching for advice , Rabbi Irving Greenberg, who heads the National Jewish Conference Center in New York and-the Commission’s small staff here , said he has expressed hope that the commemoration and memorialization of the Holocaust ” will take a form that emphasizes not only the particular Jewish experience of genocide , persecution and human anguish, but the universal themes of which the Holocaust was an expression– that is systematic and bureaucratic extermination, radical evil and banal evil, indifference to evil and racism.