United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Established	April 22, 1993
Location	100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW Washington, D.C.
Type	Holocaust museum
Visitors	15,000,000 (2006)
Director	Sara J. Bloomfield
Public transit access	Smithsonian Metro station
Website	www.ushmm.org

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is the United States' living memorial to The Holocaust. Adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the USHMM is dedicated to help leaders and citizens of the world to confront hatred, prevent genocide, promote human dignity, and strengthen democracy.

In 1980, the U.S. Congress authorized the creation of the Museum based on the 1979 report of the President's Commission of the Holocaust established by Jimmy Carter. With the support of Miles Lerman, the Museum raised approximately $190 million dollars for the construction of the Museum and acquisition of artifacts. The Museum building was designed by James Ingo Freed (a Jewish survivor of Nazi Germany), of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. Additionally, Maurice N. Finegold of Finegold Alexander + Associates Inc was a consulting architect on the project. Though the outside of the building is monumental with clean lines, in keeping with the large governmental buildings in the immediate context, the interior was meant to provoke more intimate and visceral responses.

Since its dedication in 1993, the Museum has welcomed nearly 30 million visitors, including more than 8 million school children and 85 heads of state. Today 90 percent of the Museum’s visitors are not Jewish, and their website, the world’s leading online authority on the Holocaust, received 15 million visits in 2006 from an average of 100 different countries daily.

Collection

Permanent Exhibition

Interior of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The Permanent Exhibition of the USHMM occupies the majority of the floor space of the Museum, beginning on the fourth floor and ending on the second floor. It is the chronological history of the Holocaust through more than 900 artifacts, 70 video monitors, and four theaters that include historic film footage and eyewitness testimonies. The fourth floor covers the years 1933 to 1940, focusing on the exclusion of Jews from European society to the buildup to the Second World War with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. The third floor covers the years 1940 to 1945 focusing on the Final Solution - particularly the concentration camps, extermination camps, and ghettos. The second floor focuses on resistance, rescue, liberation, and the post-war years. At the end of the exhibition is a testimony film of Holocaust survivors that runs continuously. Most first-time visitors spend an average of two to three hours in this self-guided exhibition and it is recommended for visitors 11 years of age and older.

Tower of Faces

The Tower of Faces is part of the Permanent Exhibition of the Museum. It forms a three-story tower within the building, and is lined with about a thousand photographs of everyday life before the Holocaust in the small Lithuania shtetl (village) of Eišiškės. There are photographs of family groups, weddings, picnics, swimming parties, sporting events, holiday celebrations, gardening, bicycling and other aspects of daily life. Before the war, the shtetl population was about 3,500, almost all Jewish. In September 1941, German SS, assisted by Lithuanian auxiliaries, rounded up the people of the shtetl, along with about a thousand Jews from the surrounding area, and systematically killed them all.

Replica of a Holocaust train boxcar used by Nazi Germany to transport Jews and other victims during The Holocaust.

The photographs were taken by Yitzhak Uri Katz and his associates. They are part of the Yaffa Eliach Shtetl Collection. Eliach lived in Eišiškės as a young child, and is the granddaughter of Yitzhak Uri Katz.

Identification cards

Before entering the Permanent Exhibition, a visitor receives an "Identification Card" that explains the story of a Holocaust victim or survivor of the event. The Museum considers a Holocaust victim or survivor as whatever person, Jewish or non-Jewish, that was displaced, persecuted, or discriminated against for political, social, racial, religious, and ethnic reasons by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Ex-prisoners of concentration camps, ghettos, and jails are also included along with refugees and people under hiding during this period.

To enter the Permanent Exhibition between March and August, visitors must acquire a free timed pass, which are available from the museum on the day of the visit or online for a service fee.

Remember the Children: Daniel's Story

Because of the strong images in the Permanent Exhibition, the USHMM has an exhibition focused on explaining the Holocaust to children. Remember the Children: Daniel's Story presents the story of Daniel, a fictionalized child based on a collection of true stories about children during the Holocaust. Daniel's Story was opened in 1993, but due to its popularity among families, it still is open to the public.

Hall of Remembrance

Panoramic view of the Hall of Remembrance

The Hall of Remembrance is the official memorial to the victims and survivors of the Holocaust in the Museum. It is possible to light candles in remembrance of the victims of the event in this room and is the place which dignitaries visit when they come to the Museum.

Temporary exhibitions

The USHMM has numerous rotating exhibitions open to the public that deal with various topics including, but not limited to, anti-semitism, genocide in Darfur, and Nazi propaganda.

Outreach

Holocaust Encyclopedia

On its website, the Museum publishes the Holocaust Encyclopedia, an online, multilingual encyclopedia detailing the events surrounding the Holocaust. It is published in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, Portuguese, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Greek, and Mandarin. The encyclopedia contains thousands of entries and includes copies of the Identification Card profiles that a visitor receives when visiting the Permanent Exhibition.

Traveling exhibitions

The USHMM also has traveling exhibitions for communities all over the United States. From the smallest town to the largest city, it is possible to request and host exhibitions created by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. There are various topics to choose from including "The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936", "Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals", and others depending on what a community desires.

Registry of Holocaust survivors

The Museum also includes the Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry of Holocaust Survivors, one of the world's largest Holocaust survivor databases that now contains more than 196,000 names of survivors and their families worldwide. This database can be accessed at the Museum and partner organization of the Museum worldwide. The USHMM continues to search for survivors all over the world. The Registry is named after Benjamin and Vladka Meed, founder of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants.

Technology

The Museum believes that technological outreach is an important aspect to Holocaust education and the prevention of genocide. The USHMM has a partnership with Apple Inc. to publish free podcasts on iTunes about the Holocaust, anti-semitism, and genocide prevention. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum also has its own channel on YouTube that provides free videos to viewers, its own official account on Facebook, a Twitter page, and is willing to provide e-mail updates to those who are learning about the Holocaust and human rights violations in the world today.

The Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative is a collaboration between the USHMM and Google Earth. It seeks to collect, share and visually present to the world critical information on emerging crises that may lead to genocide or related crimes against humanity. While this initiative focuses on the Darfur Conflict, the Museum wishes to broaden its scope to all human rights violations. The USHMM wants to build an interactive “global crisis map," a new tool to share and understand information quickly, to "see the situation" when dealing with human rights abuses, enabling more effective prevention and response by the world.

Research

The dedication plaque outside the Museum.

Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies

The Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (CAHS), established in 1998, is one of the leading scholarship and publishing institutions in the world in terms of Holocaust research and education. Along with Oxford University Press, the CAHS publishes "Holocaust and Genocide Studies", a scholarly journal on Holocaust studies. The Center also collects and preserves Holocaust-related archival materials previously unsearchable, sponsors fellows to help prepare material for publishing, and provides workshops for faculty at college and university levels to learn how to teach about the Holocaust. The Center's visiting scholar programs, research initiatives, archival collection program, seminars for faculty, research workshops, publications, symposia and other activities have made the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum one of the world's principal venues for Holocaust scholarship.

Committee on Conscience

The Museum houses the offices of the Committee on Conscience (CoC), a joint United States government and privately funded think tank, which by presidential mandate engages in human rights research in all areas of the world. Using the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, approved by the United Nations in 1948 and ratified by the United States in 1988, the Committee of Conscience recently has established itself as a leading non-partisan commenter on the Darfur Genocide in the nation of Sudan, as well as on the war-torn region of Chechnya in Russia, a zone that the Committee believes has the capacity to produce genocidal atrocities. However, the committee does not have policy-making powers, and serves solely as an advisory institution to the United States government and those of other nations who seek its services.

Task Force for International Cooperation

The Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research is an organization consisting of representatives from governments, as well as governmental and non-governmental organizations all over the world, based on trying to unify Holocaust museums and organizations. Its purpose is to share archives and help spread the knowledge that each organization has, creating an integrated, globalized network of information. Currently the task force is composed of twenty-seven member countries: Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States and is looking for more governments to join.

Incidents

In the 2002 White supremacist terror plot, a group of White supremacists were convicted of planning to bomb a series of institutions associated with the black and Jewish communities including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Shooting at Holocaust Museum

Main article: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting

On June 10, 2009, a lone gunman shot a museum security guard, Stephen Tyrone Johns. Johns and the gunman were both gravely wounded and were transported by ambulance to the George Washington University Hospital, the nearest trauma center to the museum, which is located near many prominent landmarks. Johns later died of his injuries at the hospital. The alleged shooter, having been shot by security staff, was identified as 88-year old James von Brunn, a white supremacist with a well-known criminal history.

See also

• Holocaust memorials
• Miles Lerman
• Museum of Tolerance

Further reading

• Berenbaum, Michael, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Little, Brown and Company, Boston-New York-London 1993.
• Freed, James Ingo, "The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum," Assemblage 9 (June 1989), 58-79.
• Linenthal, Edward T. Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum, Viking, New York 1995.
• Ochsner, Jeffrey Karl, "Understanding the Holocaust through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum," JAE: Journal of Architectural Education 48 (May 1995), 240-249.
• Sorkin, Michael, "The Holocaust Museum: Between Beauty and Horror," Progressive Architecture 74 (February 1993).
• Young, James E., The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1993.

External links

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum