Former Nashua alderman Teeboom, Holocaust Memorial, featured on CNN.com

NASHUA – CNN.com put the spotlight on former alderman Fred Teeboom and his efforts to build a Holocaust Memorial at Rotary Common on Monday. The feature, titled, “Hiding Hanukkah: Holocaust Survivor Remembers and Honors Victims of War” was a CNN iReport, which invites citizen journalists to share “stories you care about and an opportunity to be a part of a global community of men and women who are as passionate about the news as you are,” according to its website. Teeboom grew up in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. He told The Telegraph in 2010 that he estimates he lost as many as 75 members of his extended family in the Holocaust. Teeboom’s memorial project began with fundraising in 2009, and had its foundation laid by the end of 2011. He first envisioned a memorial when he visited the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. “It’s a memory that I will never forget,” Teeboom told The Telegraph. “You smelled death going into that place. Walking through the gate, somehow it triggered something in me.” The Holocaust Memorial, the first in the state, features a set of six granite stones, which weigh up to five tons each and are inscribed with the name of a Holocaust extermination camp.