Steve Boymel was not quite 3 years old the day in May 1949 when his parents walked him through Union Terminal’s concourse as they arrived in Cincinnati. The family of Russian Jews had been fleeing the horrors of the Nazis since 1942 and the aftermath of that devastation for years afterward.
Today, Boymel, now a board member of Cincinnati’s Holocaust & Humanity Center, stood in the same building to take part in a new journey — the groundbreaking for the HHC’s new home.
It’s a fitting destination for a center that works to keep the lessons of the Holocaust alive while celebrating the deep resilience of the human spirit, Boymel says.
“That walk was the beginning of a new life,” he said of his first steps in Cincinnati through the train station. At the time, his mother and father had just one suitcase and $7 to their name — the latter given to them by two sailors when the family got off a boat New York City because they were taken by Boymel’s smile.
The Boymels had experienced horrific hardships during World War II, and they were far from the only ones. The Nazis killed an estimated 6 million Jews in concentration camps between 1939 and 1945, according to historians, including about 1.3 million in Russia. All told, about 7 million Russian citizens perished in the war and the Nazi’s campaign of terror against Jews and other minority groups.
Boymel’s family suffered greatly. His parents came from large families, but most of their siblings perished during the Holocaust.
Following the war, the Boymels lived in a displaced persons camp near Munich, Germany, where Boymel was born. They were finally able to leave for America four years after the war ended.
After they arrived in Cincinnati, the family found its footing. Boymel’s father got work at a local meat processing facility in the West End, and his mother made extra money babysitting. Later, his parents purchased a nursing home in Middletown. As the family rose, they remembered the lessons they had learned, giving to a number of charities supporting children.
Boymel, now the president of a health care management company, says he was immediately on board when HHC Executive Director Sarah Weiss pitched the idea of moving the center into Union Terminal
The center, currently headquartered on Montgomery Road in Kenwood, works to teach new generations about the lessons of the Holocaust via exhibitions, educational programing and by sharing the stories of local survivors. HHC’s 12,000-square-foot new home will include innovative galleries, theaters, offices and archival space.
“Trains are a painful reminder of this chapter of Holocaust history,” Weiss says. “However, we can tell the story of trains to freedom. That’s what this location represents to the hundreds of survivors who arrived in Cincinnati through Union Terminal. This is the reason this location is so fitting. We will be able to explore one of the darkest moments of humanity, while at the same time sharing and showcasing the strength of humanity.”
(Weiss described in a CityBeat story from earlier this year what the exhibit space will look like at the new Union Terminal location.)
HHC currently gets more than 100,000 visitors a year — a number that is likely to rise when it moves into Union Terminal. The terminal is home to the Cincinnati Museum Center, which gets more than 1.4 million visitors a year.
Several local Holocaust survivors, HHC staff, funders and volunteers, along with Cincinnati City Council members David Mann and Jeff Pastor, representatives from the Cincinnati Museum Center and other partners, crowded into the unfinished space in the terminal’s lower level July 5 to officially celebrate the groundbreaking for the new space. Many took small hammers to a wall set up to ceremonially begin construction on the HHC’s new home.
“Union Terminal has a storied history of those who enlisted to fight injustice in World War II and those who escaped the horrors of the Holocaust and arrived here to build a new life in Cincinnati,” Whitney Owens, chief learning officer at the Cincinnati Museum Center, said during the event. “These walls still echo with their stories.”
The historic 1931 Art Deco train station is currently undergoing a $224 million renovation, due to be completed this fall. HHC’s new space should open in January 2019.
The coming move is the work of a number of HHC employees, volunteers and supporters. The center engaged philanthropists to raise more than $13.7 million for the new location, including a large contribution from primary donors Nancy and David Wolf. Turner Construction, GBBN, Berenbaum Jacobs Associates and Jack Rouse Associates are all involved in designing and building the project.
“The Museum Center is the cultural destination in Cincinnati,” said George Vincent, a member of HHC’s capital campaign committee and a past president of the Museum Center. “To have a chance for the HHC to share in all the visitors here is an unbelievable opportunity. It’s a rare gift to be able to bring these two institutions together.”
Weiss says that HHC’s mission is more important now than ever, as rising tides of anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance increasingly roil national and local political discourse. Just last year, for example, Clifton’s Hebrew Union College, the former home of the HHC, was vandalized with anti-Semitic messages. White nationalist and neo-Nazi movements have become increasingly high-profile across the country and here in Ohio.
In some ways, the state has been an epicenter for resurgent hate groups. Ohio is home to 35 organizations the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as hate groups — the fifth-most in the country behind much more populous states like Texas and California. Kentucky has 23 and Indiana 26, which include six in the immediate Tristate area.
Several high-profile national leaders of those groups have lived in or operated from the Buckeye State. They include Traditionalist Workers Party founder Matthew Heimbach and Andrew Anglin, who founded The Daily Stormer, which billed itself “the world’s most genocidal Republican website.” It is perhaps the country’s most influential outlet for hateful, neo-Nazi and white supremacist material.
Anglin built the Daily Stormer from an unassuming office building in Worthington, Ohio beginning in 2013. In just four short years, the site grew to attract more than 10 million page views and half-a-million visitors a month, riffing on news stories and current events with a youth-centered, meme-heavy approach that is violently racist and anti-semitic in tone.
And at least two former Greater Cincinnati residents with ties to neo-Nazi groups have been charged with crimes stemming from a now-infamous “Unite the Right” rally last summer in Charlottesville, Virginia that left one anti-racism activist dead. Virginia prosecutors are trying former Northern Kentucky resident James Andrew Fields on murder charges after he allegedly ran his car into a group of protesters, killing demonstrator Heather Heyer and injuring others. Fields also faces federal hate crimes charges in connection with the incident. Another local man, Dan Borden, faced assault charges in connection with a separate incident involving the beating of a black anti-racism protester. Borden was filmed at the rally wearing a helmet with Nazi insignias.
In the current political atmosphere, those like Boymel with personal connections to the Holocaust say putting the work of the HHC front and center is a vital task.
“This isn’t just being done for today,” he says of the HHC’s new location. “This is being done in perpetuity. Most of the witnesses are dead now. If we don’t do something for our community, this history is lost, and then the revisionists can have their way.”
This article appears in Jul 4-11, 2018.
