8 March 2006

Founder/Executive Director of Virginia Holocaust Museum to speak at Longwood

Jay Ipson, the founder and executive director of the Virginia Holocaust Museum, will speak at Longwood University for the seventh annual Diversity Days, a week-long celebration of multiculturalism.

Ipson, one of the Richmond area's youngest Holocaust survivors, will speak Tuesday, March 21, at 12:30 p.m. in the Lewis Room of Dorrill Dining Hall. This year's theme for Diversity Days is The New Pluralism in America: Building Community.

The Virginia Holocaust Museum, whose motto is Tolerance Through Education, opened in 1997 in a few unoccupied rooms in Temple Beth-El, a synagogue on Grove Avenue in Richmond. After the state donated a former tobacco warehouse in Shockoe Bottom in 2001, volunteers cleaned it up and opened the new museum, at 2000 E. Cary St., in April 2003 on Yom Ha'Shoa, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Ipson grew up on the outskirts of Kovno, then the capital of Lithuania, of which about one-fourth of the people were Jewish. He was only six in August 1941 when his family was forced into the Kovno Ghetto, where they were among 16 people living in a three-room house. In late November 1943 he and his parents (but not his six-month-old sister, who died of illness) escaped the ghetto, by cutting through barbed wire at the foot of a bridge, and fled to a farm 28 miles outside Kovno owned by a family acquainted with his mother's uncle.

"Like many farms in the area, it had a deep shaft for storing potatoes," he said. "For three months, while we hid in a barn and in the woods, my father dug a tunnel and excavated a room, and he dug another tunnel to another potato hole. Then for the next six months thirteen of us lived underground like moles."

Their underground home - 12 feet long, nine feet wide and four feet high - is recreated in a permanent exhibit at the Museum. "To check out Ipson's hiding place, visitors have to get on their hands and knees to crawl to the potato hole," said a 2003 newspaper article. "The effect is absolutely chilling and demonstrates the power of the human spirit." Another exhibit recreates the family's escape from the Kovno Ghetto; visitors "need to bend and duck through a barbed wire fence to run for cover," the article said.

Ipson's family was liberated by the Russian Army in July 1944 and returned to their home. In June 1947 Ipson, then 12, emigrated with his family to the United States and settled in Richmond. Two years ago he returned to Lithuania and visited the farm where he and his family hid, which is still owned by the same family.