APTOS — Since 1993, the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles has provided an array of multimedia exhibits detailing historical atrocities like the Holocaust and segregation in the Deep South as well as lessons aimed at confronting racism, prejudice and hate.
For a long time, the only way people could see these exhibits was by visiting the museum in LA. However, since 2020, the museum has been bringing its lessons in condensed form on the road with its Mobile Museum of Tolerance. The mobile museum — a bus with screens inside projecting lessons on everything from the Civil Rights Movement to the lessons of Anne Frank’s diary — launched in Illinois and has expanded to six other states, including California. On Tuesday, the bus came to Aptos High School for the first of a two-week stay to provide lessons in the Pajaro Valley Unified School District.
The Mobile Museum of Tolerance visits schools by request, which can take up a year to be fulfilled. However, a request was made by Jewish community members like Gil Stein, Rob Shorenstein and Lauren Leff — all of whom were present Tuesday — to bring the bus to campuses even earlier. The request was due to comments made at the Pajaro Valley unified Board of Trustees’ April 16, 2025, meeting in which trustees made remarks that were viewed as antisemitic.
“The museum agreed that this kind of thing shouldn’t wait, so they moved us up on the list a little,” said Stein. “I’m really happy that they were able to do it, that the district is cooperating and the museum has realized how important it is that they come up here.”
Geisler and Morales provided some history on the Museum of Tolerance itself. It was founded in LA in 1993 and located kitty-corner to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the headquarters of a human rights organization aimed at combating antisemitism and named for a Holocaust survivor who was dubbed a “Nazi hunter” for his efforts to track down former Nazi officials and bring them to trial after World War II.
“We teach people about tolerance through history,” said Geisler. “We use the history of the Holocaust to show students what we have done in the past and what we can continue to do so that it doesn’t happen again.”
However, Geisler said the museum was not strictly devoted to the Holocaust — emphasizing that LA has a dedicated Holocaust Museum in Pan Pacific Park — but a host of other topics, including the American Civil Rights Movement, genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and a current exhibit on Mendez v. Westminster, a landmark 1947 U.S. Appeals Court ruling that found separate schools for Mexican American students to be unconstitutional, setting the stage for Brown v. the Board of Education at the national level.
“When students come to the museum, we talk about how everybody has prejudice, how can we break it down (and) let’s examine our own assumptions,” said Geisler.
To deliver some of the museum’s lessons to those who might not be able to make the trip to LA, the Museum of Tolerance launched its mobile museum in Illinois in 2020, which was followed by additional buses in Florida, New York, California, Hawaii and Ontario, Canada, as well as another bus to launch in Massachusetts at the end of February. Geisler estimated that the California bus has served approximately 30,000 students and is currently booked for the next two years. This week’s visit was the first to the Santa Cruz area.
“We get to see all kinds of students from every corner of California,” said Geisler.
Morales shared her story of growing up in El Salvador, becoming a citizen, working in the entertainment industry — including coordinating the postproduction for the HBO series “The Last of Us” — and initially feeling ashamed about speaking English in front of people because of her accent.
“Little by little, I’ve been embracing that accent,” she said. “I’ve been understanding that it makes me who I am, and at the end of the day, it is a superpower because I can communicate in two languages. Now I’m learning a third language: I’m learning Italian.”
Following discussions on prejudice, stereotypes and the different attributes that shape people’s identities, the educators showed a short film about the Civil Rights Movement. The film included interviews with those who grew up in the Jim Crow South, videos of the marches, speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, newspaper headlines about the killing of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers and the fatal bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, audio of Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s infamous “segregation forever” speech and video of Black teen Jimmy Webb’s confrontation with a hostile police officer at a Selma march.
Geisler talked about the young people who were a major part of the Civil Rights Movement — including not only Webb but also Ruby Bridges and the Little Rock Nine — and how a major theme throughout their stories was bravery in the face of malevolence.
“It’s important not to judge, but it’s also important to be brave and courageous, to stand up against what is wrong,” she said.
Morales told the Sentinel that the mobile museum has given students an opportunity to share their stories, including Jewish students feeling afraid to wear the Star of David because of fears of antisemitism or a Black student who told her the material was unsurprising because “it’s something that I live every day.”
“We still need to work in creating more acceptance and to see the difference in people,” said Morales. “Once we start looking at humans like human beings without any difference and not by the color of their skin, I think we will at the end really conquer what we have been fighting for a long time.”
Contreras enjoyed how enthusiastic students were about the mobile museum, with some enjoying seeing footage of King — the day after his namesake federal holiday, no less — and a teacher commenting about how it would be great to take a field trip to see the full museum in LA.
“It’s great to see how it inspires next steps,” she said.
Twin sisters Lily and Lucy Becker, both juniors at Aptos High, visited the museum alongside their peers in Aurora Pacheco’s Spanish 3 class and appreciated being able to dive deep into history.
“I thought it was really important teaching kids about civil rights and your identity, especially because they aren’t things we usually learn in school,” said Lily Becker. “It’s really important for us to go in depth about the personal things that we don’t really go into.”
For Lucy Becker, it was eye-opening learning “how hard older generations had to fight for the right to vote.”
“It makes me more appreciative of what I have,” she said.
The bus will visit Pajaro Valley High School Jan. 26 to 30, with Watsonville High School students allowed to participate.
Tuesday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day which will be observed in Santa Cruz County with a communitywide commemoration 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. at the Home of Peace Cemetery, 422 Meder St., Santa Cruz. Rabbi Debbie Israel will lead attendees in a Kaddish, followed by laying stones on the memorial to remember the victims of the Holocaust. Attendees may bring photos of loved ones if they wish.
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