Al Rosenbaum, co-founder of Virginia Holocaust Museum, dies

In 1999, Collegiate High School senior Rachel Rosenbaum hit upon the idea of collecting pennies -- 6 million of them -- to try to grasp the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust during World War II.

Her grandfather Al Rosenbaum was, with Jay Ipson and Mark Fetter, one of the founders of the Virginia Holocaust Museum, now located in Shockoe Bottom in Richmond. His sculpture of a menorah with six eternal candles stands in the museum and is the center of the museum's logo. Each candle represents 1 million Jewish dead.

Mr. Rosenbaum, who lived in Richmond, died Saturday. He was 82.

His funeral will be held today, Monday, at 11 a.m. at the Bliley Funeral Homes Central Chapel, 3801 Augusta Avenue. Burial will be in the Beth El Cemetery section of Forest Lawn.

Mr. Rosenbaum was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1926. He and wife Sylvia moved to Richmond in 1960, and he retired from the janitorial business in 1989.

Mr. Rosenbaum was interested in art glass and began taking glass-blowing and casting classes at Virginia Commonwealth University. He said for him, as for many Jewish artists, "the idea came and made itself present [in images of barbed wire and broken glass]. Then it just led me. It was something that had to come out," he said in an interview in 1996.

One of his sculptures is the 6-foot-tall "Shoah" -- Hebrew for "holocaust" -- first shown at the Weinstein JCC and now on permanent display in the Holocaust Museum. Mr. Rosenbaum combined wrought iron reminiscent of concentration-camp gates, glass to symbolize Kristallnacht -- the "Night of Broken Glass" in 1938, when Jewish business and homes were attacked in Germany -- wood, rocks and a rotating "searchlight" in the piece. He said reactions varied "from the little ones trying to climb inside to the tears of the elderly."

Mr. Rosenbaum produced a one-man show at the Valentine Museum in 1997, and he won awards in art shows as far away as Pennsylvania and Michigan, according to biographical information from the Holocaust Museum.

The new Holocaust Museum in a renovated warehouse at 2000 E. Cary St. was dedicated in April 2003. It had occupied several rooms at Temple Beth El on Roseneath Road since 1997.

In addition to his wife and granddaughter, survivors include two sons, Norman Rosenbaum of Glen Allen and Mark Rosenbaum of Denver.