National Capital Commission
An artist’s rendering of the memorial to victims of the Holocaust.The National Capital Commission’s board of directors recently approved redesign plans for the National Holocaust Monument to be built on LeBreton Flats, across the street from the Canadian War Museum at the corner of Booth and Wellington streets.
The team working on planning, structural design, and fundraising consists of professionals in art and urban design, a Holocaust survivor and the National Holocaust Monument Development Council.
Redesigns had to be submitted for approval by the NCC because the original construction tender done in March 2015 came in well over budget.
As a result, the NCC provided suggestions to the design team, one of which was to make alterations to the structure of the monument to help cut costs.
The monument is designed as a space for the public to gather and reflect on the Holocaust. The general structure consists of a set of concrete walls, arranged at different angles so that it looks like the Star of David from an aerial perspective.
Some of the changes include: reduced wall thickness, removal of the snow-melt system by roughly 50 per cent, an elimination of a staircase along Wellington, change in fabrication of photographs from photo-embedded concrete to a photo-realist mural technique, and the elimination of most of the more complex concrete walls.
“Despite these modifications, the monument will keep its original intentions in terms of design,” says Cedric Pelletier, a representative from the NCC.
“It’s really to keep the project on budget,” said Pelletier. The changes reduced the overall cost of the monument, bringing it back down to the original estimate of about $8.5 million.
The construction of the monument was supposed to start in the spring of 2014 and end in the fall of 2015. The construction is now expected to finish by the spring of 2017.
The main risk regarding scheduling is that the monument may only be partially built in time for the planned Yom HaShoah unveiling ceremony on April 24, 2017.
Yom HaShoah, also known as Holocaust Remembrance Day, is a day of commemoration for the millions of Jews who perished during the Holocaust as a result of actions carried out by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.
“Canada is the only allied country without a Holocaust monument or museum in its capital,” says Richard Marceau, a representative from the Canadian Jewish Congress. “Canada played such an important role in the Second World War, freeing the Jews and welcoming the survivors, about 40,000 after the war.”
Marceau says that the National Holocaust Monument is important not only to Jewish Canadians, but to all Canadians.
“The messages of the Holocaust have to be, unfortunately, repeated,” says Marceau.
“Racism, oppression, dehumanization and discrimination of entire groups of people still exists and we see it around the world,” says Marceau. “It is a message that needs to be repeated, learnt and the monument will help with that.”
Rabbi Anna Maranta, a local religious leader who is part of the Jewish Renewal movement, says that the monument is being built at an important time in Canada’s history. She says that Canada needs to recognize our role in not preventing the Holocaust and to recognize that we had an opportunity to bring in Jewish refugees and we failed to do so.
“I think it’s really timely to have this memorial being built at a time when we’re struggling over whether to bring in Syrian refugees, and if so, how many and who,” says Maranta.
“It’s a really good opportunity to look back in our history and decide how we want to be perceived by the world.”