The opening yesterday of a month-long exhibit of a model for a memorial to the 6,000,000 Jews annihilated by the Nazis in Europe publicly revealed a controversy concerning the erection of the monument.
The model, which is on exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art here, was executed by Percival Goodman, a professor of architecture at Columbia University. It was rejected by the Parks Department and, subsequently, by the judging committee appointed by the American Memorial to 6,000,000 Jews of Europe. The same committee accepted it, at first.
Prof. Goodman’s model provides for a large flagstone area terminating at a wall 120 feet long, twenty-five feet high. In front of the wall is a platform on which an altar can be erected, while at one side is a Menorah, twenty feet across and twelve feet high, mounted on a forty-foot-high granite pedestal. A Museum spokesman has praised the memorial as “probably one of the best monuments of this kind developed in this country in recent years.”
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