The only high school museum in the United States and one of the first Holocaust museums in the world.

Started by Dr. Stuart S. Elenko (a history teacher of the same high school) in 1977, the Museum today has grown to house many Holocaust artifacts, valued at a little over two million dollars. The museum features propaganda posters (pro-Nazi and anti-Nazi), documents (passports, correspondence between Nazi officials), Nazi uniforms and many other interesting objects related to the Holocaust.

The Museum is run almost completely by the students, with supervision given by Dr. Elenko. They take dictation, change security tapes, repair broken equipment and even sell raffle tickets to raise funds for the museum. The students all volunteer to work at the museum primarily because it looks nice on their college applications.

The Museum has been visited by about 60,000 people since its opening. Many ministers of education from all around the world (East Asia particularly, for some reason) have been known to visit as well as other notable people such as Professor Elie Wiesel, Justice Antonin Scalia, New York Governor George Pataki (although I have never seen him; always seemed to send his assistants instead) and First Lady Barbara Bush just to name a few. Of course, there is the occasional high school student although not as many as one might think. I can safely say that we got more visitors from outside of the high school than from Bronx Science high school students themselves. Go figure.

Dr. Elenko has since "retired", basically forced out by Principal Stanley Blumenstein, who was apparently less than fond of Dr. Elenko giving so much freedom with the museum to a bunch of high school kids. I still loathe that man to this day.

The high school administration's stance on the museum is confusing. They don't know what to do with such a resource, basically. While boasting about having a Museum to the world (Bronx Science's two features are the Holocaust Museum and having a couple of Nobel Laureate graduates way back in World War II times.), privately, they refuse to support the Museum in anyway (financially and others). To this day, the Museum is located in a tiny backroom in the library, smaller than an average college dorm room.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.