Holocaust museum raising money after fire

In the five months since a Holocaust museum in Indiana was burned to the ground in an arson, museum officials say they have raised about half the money they need to start rebuilding. Mary Wright, education director for the CANDLES Holocaust Museum in Terre Haute said Thursday the total rebuilding cost was estimated at $500,000.\n"We're about half way to where we need to be," Wright said. "We still need another couple hundred thousand dollars."\nThe Seligman Family Foundation of Southfield, Mich., has made a "significant gift" toward the project, the museum announced Thursday. And insurance money has helped the organization as well.\nThe money will help rebuild the gutted structure along U.S. 41 south of the city's downtown, which is currently stripped down to bare walls. It will also provide for better exhibits than the ones in the old museum, said Wright, who declined to release the size of the Seligman donation.\nOfficials at the CANDLES museum said they wanted to build at the same site so people would not forget the fire. CANDLES, which stands for Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Experiments Survivors, was founded in 1995 by Holocaust survivor Eva Kor. She and her identical twin sister were subjected to ghastly medical experiments conducted by Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. Kor has been active since the Nov. 18 fire in promoting the rebuilding effort.\n"We feel there's history there because of what happened," Wright said. "It would be hard to walk away and leave that."\nWright has been running the museum from her back bedroom after the building burnt down, but nearly all the artifacts, books and pictures collected by Kor were destroyed in the fire.The museum is soliciting donations of books and artifacts from other survivors and organizations, and has also asked for general World War II artifacts like ration stamps. Investigators believe the fire was arson because an accelerant was found and a brick was thrown through the window. The words "Remember Timmy McVeigh" were spray-painted on the building. McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber who shared sympathies with white supremacists, was executed at a federal prison outside Terre Haute in 2001.\nNo one has been charged with the arson, but police arrested a man on an unrelated federal firearms charge as they were investigating the fire. Authorities have said Joseph Stockett, convicted in 1976 of setting a fire to a Planned Parenthood building in Oregon, wanted to trade a car for a police informant's handgun and money. Police say the car is similar to one seen near the museum when it was set on fire. Stockett has denied having anything to do with the museum fire.