I engaged with Thomas Lutz on different projects over the last 20 years, sometimes it would be just asking for his advice, other times developing big ideas. His knowledge and understanding of the international landscape of memorial sites, their evolution and their political intricacies is unsurpassed.
When I worked at Yad Vashem, we were a small working group of Germans and Israelis reflecting over several years on how different the representations of the Holocaust in Germany and Israel are, and then developed interventions aimed to generate multiperspectivism into the work of memorial sites. Thomas deeply understands the complexity of memory and the role it plays in shaping our images of the past.
He represents a rare combination of values, pragmatism and backbone, a strategist, observing the field in which we operate and setting goals to fulfill values shared by many of us, and having the perseverance to see it through.
Yariv Lapid ist Senior Strategy Advisor für das United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Zuvor war er unter anderem für Yad Vashem, die KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen und das Ghetto Fighters House Museum tätig.