It's the Holocaust for the computer age. With an overwhelming array of television screens, computer monitors, cutting-edge multi-media information systems and deft "animatronic" recreations of events, the Wiesenthal Center's newly opened Beit HaShoah/Museum of Tolerance seeks to rescue the Holocaust from public indifference. And by making entrance free to school groups from throughout Southern California, the museum's directors hope to attract local students not normally exposed to the darker side of human nature in their civics classes. At one exhibit, for instance, visitors are treated to a reenactment of the 1941 Wannsee Conference, where 14 Nazi officials sealed the fate of millions of Jews with the depth of emotion normally reserved for moving investments around in a stock portfolio. In another hall, visitors are treated, by means of a wraparound screen, to the full resounding spectacle of the Nuremberg Rally. "For the first time," said a journalistic colleague who personally witnessed the rally as a child, "you get the sense of how people get caught up in something like this. It's like 10 Super Bowls rolled into one. You don't usually get that watching clips." And in what may be the most emotionally powerful section of the museum, visitors conclude their nearly two-hour trek by passing through a replica of the gates of Auschwitz into the "Hall of Testimony," where films recounting stories of individual courage and sacrifice are screened. The computer-synchronized exhibits are designed to bring home, in the most visceral manner possible, how a thoroughly modern, industrial country used its technological prowess to snuff out the lives of millions.

And the result is a triumph. Nowhere else, even at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, are the sobering consequences of man's inhumanity to man made so accessible or explored with such a deft and devastating effect. And nowhere else is the Holocaust so effectively shown to be a phenomenon of universal concern, not only of interest to Jews or historians. "The Holocaust is a contemporary event," observed Washington Post Los Angeles bureau chief Lou Cannon, a Christian, after completing a tour of the museum. "You can see glimpses of it anywhere you look, whether in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia or here, in Los Angeles after the riots. This place makes people understand that hate and bigotry and prejudice are a continuum that the Holocaust can't be isolated in time." Indeed, the museum deals innovatively with wider issues of racism and bigotry in America and elsewhere. One exhibit documents the genocide of Armenians and Cambodians and South American Indians. Another offers a masterful film collage chronicling the American civil rights movement. Elsewhere, a wall-sized, computer-interactive map documents the 250 hate groups active in America. A walk through a "Whispering Gallery" shows how words can be used as bludgeons. The state-of-the-art approach has its critics, particularly among survivors. "We survivors are being frozen out," laments Mel Mermelstein. "The Holocaust is being used and abused everywhere. And now we are being replaced by computers." But more typical is the reaction of Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, a museum supporter. "In my life, I have never, ever, been as moved as I was going through this museum," Katzenberg told The Jerusalem Report. "Its use of technology is extraordinary. But the brilliance of this place is that it's not about show and glitz. It's about recognizing our responsibilities to each other as human beings who share this planet."