From Holocaust Museum to 9/11

Alice M. Greenwald To Oversee Planned Trade Center Facility

Greenwald helped conceive the Holocaust museum exhibition. (Carl Cox - AP)

Alice M. Greenwald, who helped conceptualize the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, yesterday was named director of the World Trade Center Memorial Museum, a controversial facility to be built in Lower Manhattan.

Greenwald, 54, associate director for museum programs at the Holocaust museum, said the complex mix of history, loss, pain and personal investment she dealt with in the subject matter at the Washington institution provided many lessons for her new post.

"The experience I have had here has been a unique preparation, with all of the struggles we encountered and all the questions we asked," Greenwald said. "In my 19 years here, it has been a front-row seat to the most meaningful life work one can imagine. The question was whether or not to contribute to a project that had the same level of moral significance that this museum has."

In the years since Sept. 11, 2001, the question of how to remember those who perished when the terrorists destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center has been much debated. Greenwald will be working with an array of interested parties, from the WTC Memorial Foundation, the not-for-profit corporation that is raising money and building the museum, to the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., the public entity that is overseeing the rebuilding of the area, to the victims' families. Last September, after families protested, New York Gov. George Pataki canceled a planned International Freedom Center.

"The impetus is to memorialize. And as a result, there are a lot of competing issues, all valid issues. That is a normal process," Greenwald said.

The museum, which is to be built next to the memorial that marks the towers' footprints, will be called "Reflecting Absence." Greenwald said the name has a number of meanings. "The buildings were the signature image of the city. The space, by paying homage, reflects their absence. We long for what they meant -- the dynamism and the vitality of the city -- yet we have to accept that they are gone," Greenwald said. "It will honor in perpetuity those whose lives were lost and demonstrate to all who visit the World Trade Center site for years to come, the healing power of memory in retelling their story."

The area set aside for the museum is about 100,000 square feet, with about 65,000 square feet reserved for exhibitions. It is to open in 2009.

Greenwald grew up in Cedarhurst, on Long Island, and has degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Chicago Divinity School. She has worked at museums for 30 years, serving as the executive director of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia and acting director at the Hebrew Union College Skirball Museum in Los Angeles.

In 1986 she became a consultant for the Holocaust museum and worked with the original design team on the museum's award-winning exhibitions. She joined the museum full time in December 2000. Since its opening in 1993, the museum has had 22.8 million visitors and has become a model for other living memorials.

Museum Director Sara J. Bloomfield said Greenwald worked as part of a team that had to find "the intersection of history, memory and meaning. And within a living memorial, find a way to present that to the public."

Greenwald said that more than anything the World Trade Center museum will be a museum of memory. "This will be a world-class institution that will help people deal with loss and serve that memory," she said.