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Holocaust museum has new director

By MARY JANE PARK
Published March 8, 2006

ST. PETERSBURG - After nearly three years in transition, the Florida Holocaust Museum has hired David Schafer as its new executive director.

The former head of State of Israel Bonds in Ohio and Kentucky began work in January. Among his primary responsibilities are building a better public understanding of the organization and increasing its public visibility.

"We're known as the "silent museum of St. Petersburg,' " he said. "People view us as a "Jewish museum.' We are not."

The institution's mandate is to focus on all races and cultures, he said, "to remember the past and build a brighter, more tolerant tomorrow. We dream here every day of communities that are more tolerant."

The museum has a lending library of sorts of educational materials. It dispatches trunks filled with information, targeted to people of various ages and learning levels, throughout the country.

The museum is "looking to expand services and fulfill its potential," Schafer said. "It has outgrown the current space."

The museum was founded in 1990 and took shape in the old Jewish Community Center of Pinellas County near Madeira Beach. It moved to its current headquarters, 55 Fifth St. S, in 1998.

Larry Wasser, the son of Holocaust survivors, was involved from the beginning and became executive director in 1997. After his unexpected death in 2003, the museum had a series of interim leaders.

Toni Rinde, president of the Jewish Federation of Pinellas County and a member of the museum's executive board, served on the search committee. Schafer's selection is a "tremendous accomplishment and a tremendous comfort," she said.

Schafer, 51, is "a warm, caring human being with tremendous sensitivities to people, with the museum's best interests at heart," she said. "A museum is a business like any other business, but we are in the business of people and caring about people."

The museum's current exhibition, "Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo," focuses on the infamous slave traders who brought Africans to the Americas. The nearly 10-million Africans who survived the voyages were but a third of those who were packed into the sailing vessels as chattel; another 20-million did not survive.

"We need never to forget those crimes," Schafer said.

Rinde said the museum's focus is to spread the word of acceptance of all people throughout the world. Current estimates are that genocide claims the life of one person every 24 seconds.

Schafer and his wife, Orna, have two children.

[Last modified March 8, 2006, 01:42:19]