CANDLES Holocaust Museum & Education Center

CANDLES Holocaust Museum & Education Center is Indiana’s only Holocaust museum.

CANDLES is an acronym meaning, Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors. It was founded in 1995 by Eva Mozes Kor, who survived the Holocaust with her twin sister, Miriam, both of whom were experimented on by Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele.

CANDLES’ mission is to help prevent prejudice, hatred, and genocide by teaching about the Holocaust Eva’s story, and the story of Mengele twins and other survivors. In 2003, the museum was destroyed by an arsonist; but Eva vowed to rebuild and received overwhelming public support. The museum reopened in 2005.

In Danny’s own words:

Our great relationship with CANDLES started after I hung up the phone on Kiel Majewski. A crazy story!   

In May 2010 our Foundation acquired two famous (infamous) 1944 letters written by the Nazi Doctor Josef Mengele to his wife while he was stationed at Auschwitz. Our Foundation wanted to keep the acquisition discreet, and though we used Glenn and Debbi Spungen as the donors, we thought we did a pretty good job it off the radar.

At the time, Kiel was the Executive Director at CANDLES. He was on the hunt to find out who got the letters from the auction house. Through a mutual contact related to a Federal Government Unity Day event I had attended in Washington D.C., Kiel was able to find out that I acquired the two letters. In June 2010 Kiel called me and shortly after, I hung up on him. It’s a bit fuzzy how things improved from there, but after looking up CANDLES, I called him back. Kiel, being very outgoing and aggressively determined, wanted to come to Chicago and meet. The timing was interesting because we were developing a strong relationship with Danny Marquer, who had recently donated a Torah fragment used as a postal (parcel) wrapper. I invited Kiel to come up and meet the family while were meeting with Danny and Maria Marquer on July 2, 2010. My mother (Florence) was very intrigued by Kiel, who was a Polish American Catholic working for a Holocaust survivor in the middle of Indiana!

With the encouragement of Florence, our relationship developed quickly and, just as quickly, the Foundation split into the “Forgiveness vs. Revenge” factions.  In April 2010, the Foundation was instrumental in getting Eva Kor an important audience in the Chicago area, alongside Helen Rappaport, another Mengele twin survivor (so long as long as Eva did not talk about forgiveness.) From that day on, Helen considered Eva her younger sister. Florence and Helen visited CANDLES for the first time on May 1, 2011.

The Foundation has since facilitated many survivors to speak at CANDLES, including Magda Brown, Anita Gray, Aaron Elster, Sam Harris, Ida Kersz, and Agnes Schwartz. In addition to arranging and encouraging several Illinois Holocaust Museum docents to visit CANDLES, the Foundation is very happy that the Skokie and Terre Haute museums work closely together. Our Foundation was represented on the CANDLES Board from 2013-2018 and presently from 2021-2026. Our focus with CANDLES has been programming support, and providing scholarships for first time students and teachers going with CANDLES to Poland on educational trips.