For its 65th anniversary and Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center in Elkins Park is aiming to immerse students in the history of the Holocaust.
A cattle car exhibit, called Hate Ends Now, will be “housed inside an exact replica of a World War II-era cattle car,” according to a HAMEC email about the event. Inside, it will show a video with documentary evidence and survivors sharing their stories, as well as a collection of 25 artifacts.
The exhibit will stand at Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel on Old York Road on April 14 from 7 a.m.-11 p.m., according to the email. Abington High School students will visit from noon to 1 p.m., followed by Cheltenham High School students from 1-2 p.m. The exhibit will be open to the public between 2:30 and 6:30 p.m.
The cattle car display is operated by Hate Ends Now, a nonprofit organization. Hate Ends Now aims to reinforce Holocaust education by packing 20-25 students into a replica of the cattle cars that transported Jews to concentration camps. Students are packed in tight, which helps them understand the effect this would have had on the 80-100 Jews who were crammed in during the Holocaust.
Hate Ends Now also came to Philly in 2023, during an exhibit led by the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation at the Horwitz-Wasserman Holocaust Memorial Plaza on the Ben Franklin Parkway.
“It’s a powerful experience of what that was like,” said Lise Marlowe, HAMEC’s education director.
The Holocaust Awareness Museum, located inside KI, claims to be the first Holocaust awareness museum in the United States. Known for organizing survivor talks at Philadelphia-area schools, HAMEC held about 300 programs a year with 40 survivors in rotation before COVID.
Today, the museum only has about six survivors available. As survivors continue to pass on, Marlowe and her team have turned to second and third-generation speakers.
So far, the approach has worked.
HAMEC hosted 217 Holocaust remembrance events during the 2024-25 school year. A March 2025 Philadelphia Jewish Exponent story detailed how HAMEC programming had increased 80% since Oct. 7, 2023. In July 2025, the organization named Fabulous Flores as its first CEO.
Marlowe described the cattle car exhibit as a continuation of the museum’s mission.
“Even though they are gone, their stories are continuing on in this format,” she said. “Our mission’s going to continue to the second generation and the third generation and the fourth generation.”
Marlowe has a memory from her own school days of teachers showing graphic footage from the Holocaust. The education director believes that students must see the harsh reality.
“It’s so hard to believe that this actually happened that you have to see the pictures to know that it did,” she said.
Inside the cattle car, students get to see, through the documentary images, feel, by standing in the cattle car, and hear, through the survivor stories playing on the screen, this history.
“You get it when you leave,” Marlowe said.
Marlowe started planning the exhibit after she got an email from Hate Ends Now, gauging her interest. She saw that it was going to be in Harrisburg at the Pennsylvania State Capitol on the night of April 13. She responded by saying that the next day would be perfect for a visit to Old York Road.
“It’s going to hopefully be a big draw,” Marlowe said.
During the 2025-26 school year, HAMEC is closing in on 240 Holocaust remembrance programs. And despite the diminishing number of survivors, it is now up to about 40 regular speakers, just like it was before COVID.
Along with the cattle car exhibit, it’s not a bad way to mark the 65th anniversary of the oldest Holocaust awareness museum in the country.
“We’re very proud of the work we’ve done,” Marlowe said.