MAN'S HOLOCAUST TRIBUTE TO LIVE ON.

Byline: DENNIS McCARTHY 

His tools are a pocketknife, a handsaw and some glue -- all kept in a box on a workbench in a corner of his tiny kitchen.

It is here where Irving Belfer has spent the last 32 years carving and building more than 400 primitive, yet powerful, pieces of art that fill every room of his small Burbank home.

Here where the 93-year-old Holocaust survivor opened his doors the last 20 years to hundreds of local schoolchildren and adults to visit his museum and learn.

Here where I sat with him last November and watched him cry because he thought his homemade tribute to Holocaust victims -- including his own wife and young son -- would die with him.

It won't.

The Irving Belfer Jewish History Museum will live on at the Kadima Hebrew Academy campus in West Hills.

"The day after your column on Mr. Belfer appeared in the paper one of our students, Avi Ram, brought it in as a current event, and we were all immediately touched by it," said Barbara Gereboff, head of school of Kadima Hebrew Academy.

"We visited with Mr. Belfer and told him we would be honored to give his museum a home after he was gone. He began to cry."

With the assistance of Milken Community High School, which also was interested in giving Irving's artwork a home, an interactive museum will open this fall.

The guest of honor will be Irving Belfer. He decided he wanted to be around to see his homemade museum go big time, open for all the public to see.

"I'm 93, how much longer do I have?" he said Monday. "I want to be there to see for myself, maybe give a tour or two. I'm really excited about it."

The museum will include 360-degree panoramic images -- a virtual tour allowing visitors to have a sense of the original museum Belfer erected in his home.

"We want it to be a museum about how people use the arts as a way to cope with horrific events," Gereboff said.

She's talking about the room of tears in Irving's home-based museum. A room that got its name because no one leaves it without tears in their eyes.

It's a concentration camp with soldiers looking down from towers at 600 Stars of David lined up in rows and surrounded by barbed wire.

It took Irving two years, day and night, to build it, and even now -- more than 65 years after he spent exactly 951 days in four concentration camps just like it -- Irving still can't talk about the camps without crying.

Not for himself. For his wife, Eva, and their son, Baruch, who died in those camps.

A few synagogues, libraries, and universities have offered to take part of Irving's homemade museum, but not the entire thing.

Irving wouldn't break it up. You don't break up history into bits and pieces. You take it all, no matter how horrific some of it may be.

"It is important that future generations see it all, not just parts," he said.

And now they will, all of it.

"In one corner of the museum we're going to have his kitchen table and chair, what he calls his factory," Gereboff said.

Where Irving Belfer has spent the last 32 years with a pocketknife, a handsaw and some glue making sure people never forget.

dennis.mccarthy(at)dailynews.com

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Photo:

Irving Belfer, a Holocaust survivor, has opened his home for the last 30 years to people to come in and see his pocketknife carvings of tributes to the 6 million Jews who died in concentration camps.

David Sprague/Staff Photographer