S.F. Added to Cities with Holocaust Memorials on Public Property

San Francisco has been added to the small number of cities with Holocaust memorials on public property. The planned memorial will be financed by public contributions. The San Francisco Recreation and Parks commission has approved a site in front of the Palace of Honor in Lincoln Park, which overlooks the Golden Gate Bridge.

Rhoda Goldman, chairman of Mayor Dianne Feinstein’s Committee for a Memorial to the Six Million Victims of the Holocaust, said the memorial monument will be in the form of a massive sculpture.

Although planning for the memorial began some time ago, fund-raising was postponed until the Lincoln Park site was confirmed. Mrs. Goldman said the Mayor’s committee estimated the project would cost about $750,000.

She said $150,000 would be raised within the Holocaust survivor community in the Bay area. The rest will be raised through 36 individual gifts of $15,000 each, a plan based on the Talmudic legend of the 36 “just men” who always live on earth.

Mrs. Goldman said the committee has proposed that the manument be not “just a statue, but on environment; not just a manument to the horror of the past, but a reminder of the hope of the future.”

Six noted artists and sculptors have been invited to submit monument designs. Mrs. Goldman expressed hope the project would be completed within the next two years. She said the committee also would seek to raise at least $250,000 for an educational program for Bay area public and private schools.

In addition to being a memorial for the Holo-caust victims and facal point of the educational project, the sculpture will be a “legacy” to San Francisco, a gift of a public art object with more than one purpose, Mrs. Goldman declared. She said the educational project will be organized to seek to show Bay area students how the Nazis tried to wipe out entire peoples solely because of what they were.