Snapshots of diversity

Walk among the photos in "A Homeland in the West" exhibit and you see for yourself that Utah's history has always been one of diversity.

Here is portrait of a Jewish photographer, an explorer with John C. Fremont, who spent several years in the Utah Territory during the 1850s.

Over there is a mine owner who is Jewish and female. She's on horseback, sitting erect and proud, dressed in the style of the 1880s. And on this wall are photos of Utahns who came to this country after surviving the concentration camps of the Holocaust.

And here are portraits of men who were soldiers in the Second World War and who liberated France — or saw the liberation of Dachau.

Eileen Hallet Stone is the curator of the exhibit, which runs through Sunday at the Utah Museum of Art and History, 125 S. Main. Stone collected the photos several years ago and took some of her own photos as well, as she was writing a book of oral histories. The book, "A Homeland in the West: Utah Jews Remember," was published by the University of Utah Press in 2001. The photo exhibit won an award in 2002, during the Cultural Olympiad.

If you're lucky, Stone will be there when you visit the museum. She has often been on hand to give tours to elementary school classes. When she does the tours, her basic premise is that we — man or woman, Mormon or Muslim or Jew or Catholic — are all part of the same human family.

Stone loves to tell the children the stories behind the photos. She emphasizes the qualities of independence, fortitude and zest for life. Within the elementary classes, Stone sees a number of first-generation Americans. She is especially eager for these children to identify with the earlier pioneers.

Stone says she had a hard time holding still when she was a child. So that's why she keeps the kids busy as they view the exhibit. She often has them act out a scene from the era of the trade wars, when Jewish merchants wrote a letter to Brigham Young to ask him to buy them out. Stone also likes to make the kids role-play a Jewish mother and a Christian mother, both of them wondering if their children will be harmed if they are allowed to play together.

At the end of her tour, Stone asks the students to choose a photo that speaks to them and write a paragraph about why they chose that photo. She wants them to "find a relationship to the past," a relationship to someone of a different ethnic or religious background.