Meštrovic’s Moses: Public Holocaust Remembrance in the United States Post-World War II

Thesis completed for Distinctions in History and Art History and the graduation requirements for the Renée Crown University Honors Program

Ivan Meštrović. Moses, 1952 (cast 1991). Syracuse, New York.

This project aimed to reinterpret and piece together a cohesive narrative of the first attempt to create an American monument dedicated to the Holocaust in New York City through a wealth of surviving plaster reliefs, correspondence, preliminary drawings, memos, and contracts that are the only remnants of this untold story. My goal was to reveal how the Jewish Memorial and in particular, Croatian-American artist Ivan Meštrovic’s Moses (currently the centerpiece of Syracuse University’s Sculpture Garden) was entangled in a web of bureaucracy and patronage that eventually compromised the plan to institute a memorial in post-WWII America. A monument that paid homage to the collective memory of an unprecedented tragedy in the western world, the memorial raised questions about the American-ness of Jewish American identity and the difficulty of making that identity visible in a public space.