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ATLANTIC CITY - If the people who enter a new contest to design the city's planned Boardwalk Holocaust Memorial are anywhere near as talented as the contest's judges, the city could end up with something special.

The committee planning the memorial announced Thursday that the jurors who will pick the winner of a worldwide design contest include the chief planner in the rebuilding of New York's World Trade Center site, Daniel Liebeskind, and the designer of the Getty Center in Los Angeles, Richard Meier.

The two internationally famed architects are among six designers and Holocaust experts who will choose the final winner of an online contest set to end March 15. The committee planning the memorial, which members hope to open by 2012, has invited designers to submit their plans for a memorial through its Web site:

www.acbhm.org

The Atlantic City Boardwalk Holocaust Memorial committee made the first open announcement of the contest Thursday morning, although registrations started through the Web site in October. The planners also named the design-contest judges in a news conference at Mayor Lorenzo Langford's office.

Dr. Jon Fox, of Linwood, the chairman of the contest, said about 35 people have registered so far, but no one has submitted a design yet for a memorial set to replace what is now a simple Boardwalk pavilion between New York and Kentucky avenues. Fox said the committee expects to get about 600 entries in the competition - about the same number the New England Holocaust Memorial got in a contest to design a memorial that was dedicated in Boston in 1995.

"But we might be surprised," Fox added, because that contest 15 years ago didn't take its applications online - entrants had to send in their designs on cardboard, he says. "It is immensely easier to run a contest like this now digitally than it would be to collect posters."

Fox said that after the local committee announced its competition on several architecture-related Web sites, traffic on the ACBHM's site shot up to 7,000 visitors, from just a trickle before that.

"So we presume most of those 7,000 were architects and designers," Fox says.

The jurors are scheduled to visit Atlantic City next August to select among six finalists culled in earlier rounds of judging from among all the online entries. The finalists will win $2,500 apiece to turn their computer designs into models, and the memorial committee plans to show off those models publicly - in one or more venues around the Atlantic City area - for about two months before the judges come to town.

The committee has been planning a memorial on the Boardwalk for more than five years, members said. The committee's president, Rabbi Gordon Geller of Temple Emeth Shalom in Margate, said the group is also actively raising money for a project expected to cost "several million dollars, no question. But (the cost) all depends on the design that's picked."

Geller said one of the prime attractions of a Boardwalk location for the memorial to the Holocaust - the Nazis' murder of 6 million Jews and others during World War II - is the number of people who will pass it and be able to learn from it.

He told the story of a meeting he had on the local project with the director of Yad Vashem, the international Holocaust museum and memorial in Jerusalem. Geller said he mentioned the "10 million unique annual visitors" that Atlantic City's Boardwalk draws.

"(The official) said, 'Rabbi, when you build it, do it world-class,'" Geller said Thursday.

The planners hope to do that, and they believe the contest jury they attracted will help their cause.

Along with Liebeskind and Meier, who have designed numerous building projects throughout the United States, Europe and Asia, the other judges and some of their credentials include:

The Boardwalk pavilion the Atlantic City memorial will replace is about 60 by 40 feet. The City Council voted unanimously to give the pavilion to the committee for its memorial, but the group will use all private money to build the beachfront memorial.

Contact Martin DeAngelis:

609-272-7237

MDeangelis@pressofac.com

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