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Former name | Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust |
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Established | 1961 |
Location | Pan Pacific Park 100 S The Grove Dr Fairfax District, Los Angeles, CA 90036 |
Coordinates | 34°04′29″N118°21′22″W / 34.074609°N 118.356230°W |
Type | Holocaust/history museum |
Visitors | 500,000 |
Director | Beth Kean |
Website | www |
Holocaust Museum LA, formerly known as Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, is a museum located in Pan Pacific Park within the Fairfax district of Los Angeles, California. [1] Founded in 1961 by Holocaust survivors, Holocaust Museum LA is the oldest museum of its kind in the United States. Its mission is to commemorate those murdered in the Holocaust, honor those who survived, educate about the Holocaust, and inspire a more dignified and humane world.
Holocaust Museum LA is the oldest museum founded by Holocaust survivors [2] in the United States. In 1961, a group of Holocaust survivors in an English as a second language class at Hollywood High School met and realized their deep connection and drive to steward the past. [2] They began meeting to discuss their personal experiences, and the importance of commemorating their lost relatives and friends and educating future generations. They all had primary sources, such as photographs, artifacts, documents, and memories, and they decided that these objects needed a permanent home –a sanctuary for documentation, commemoration, preservation, and education.
Holocaust Museum LA opened its permanent subterranean building in Pan Pacific Park in October, 2010. Since then, it has had over 500,000 visitors.
Public programs: Museum admission is free for all students and California residents. Visitors can explore the museum independently and take a self-guided tour using the museum's free audio guide. Staff and docents also offer guided tours throughout the week. The museum offers public events, in-person and online, including conversations with Holocaust survivors, lectures, film screenings and concerts. In 2020, the museum launched "Building Bridges," [1] a cross-cultural discussion series that brings together leaders from diverse communities for conversations about working toward common social justice goals.
Student education: Museum tours are designed to conform to the California State's curriculum, legislation, and academic standards regarding Holocaust education. In cooperation with teachers, museum staff customize each tour to fit the age level, prior knowledge, background and interests of the students. The museum uses personal narratives, artifact-rich exhibits, and technology to provide access to this history. The “Art & Memory” creative educational programs annually connect survivors with teens, who learn about their own heritage, retell the survivors’ stories, and share their reflections through different art mediums such as film, theatre and photography.
In 2010, the President of the Museum Board, [3] Randy Schoenberg, led the museum to move into its permanent home, designed by renowned architect Hagy Belzberg. [3] Schoenberg's story of litigating the return of the Klimt painting, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, from Austria was featured in the film Woman in Gold.
The juxtaposition of the physical building and the surrounding park is a key component in the architectural design of the building. [4] The museum is divided into three spaces: the internal museum space, the Goldrich Family Foundation Children's Memorial, and the outdoor Martyrs Memorial.
As visitors move through the internal museum the light and space change, mirroring the change of time through history. The galleries are organized chronologically and cover Jewish life before the Holocaust, as well as key historical events between 1933 and 1945. The museum features a collection of primary sources, and Holocaust Museum LA holds one of the largest collections in the United States of artifacts from the Holocaust period. [5]
The Children's Memorial is an outdoor reflective space where the approximately 1.5 million children who were murdered in the Holocaust are remembered. There are 1.2 million holes of various sizes in the walls of the Children's Memorial, and visitors can write messages to the children. A small Garden of the Righteous pays homage to non-Jews who risked their lives to save others.
Finally, the Martyr's Memorial monument, which was built in the early 1990s, consists of six 18-foot-high (5.5 m) triangular, black granite pillars. Each one honors the 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. These pillars are also meant to symbolize the crematoria smokestacks. [6]
The building design received the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission Design Honor Award, the Green Building Design Award, and a Gold LEED rating [7] –the national standard of sustainable architecture. The award-winning interior and exterior architecture reflect the poignant history covered in the museum's galleries.
Because the number of visitors to the museum increased by 400% since 2011, an expansion was planned in 2021. The Jona Goldrich Campus will be designed by architect Hagy Belzberg, [16] with new indoor and outdoor spaces that will double its footprint in Pan Pacific Park. The museum hopes to amplify its reach and impact and increase its visibility. [17] In June 2022, Susan and Eric Smidt donated $5 million toward the development of the Jona Goldrich Campus. [18]
A new Learning Center Pavilion along The Grove Drive, adjacent to the existing building, will include a dedicated theater for USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony. This 200-seat theater will be used for film screenings, concerts, conferences and public programs. The Learning Center Pavilion will also have outdoor reflective spaces, two classrooms for large student groups and programs for younger audiences, and 2,500 sq. ft. of special exhibit space. In addition, a new Boxcar Pavilion built to house an authentic boxcar found outside of Majdanek death camp in Poland will be constructed on top of the existing building. [19]
Shoah is a 1985 French documentary film about the Holocaust, directed by Claude Lanzmann. Over nine hours long and 11 years in the making, the film presents Lanzmann's interviews with survivors, witnesses and perpetrators during visits to German Holocaust sites across Poland, including extermination camps.
Yad Vashem is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered; echoing the stories of the survivors; honoring Jews who fought against their Nazi oppressors and gentiles who selflessly aided Jews in need; and researching the phenomenon of the Holocaust in particular and genocide in general, with the aim of avoiding such events in the future. Yad Vashem's vision, as stated on its website, is: "To lead the documentation, research, education and commemoration of the Holocaust, and to convey the chronicles of this singular Jewish and human event to every person in Israel, to the Jewish people, and to every significant and relevant audience worldwide."
Sobibor was an extermination camp built and operated by Nazi Germany as part of Operation Reinhard. It was located in the forest near the village of Żłobek Duży in the General Government region of German-occupied Poland.
Drancy internment camp was an assembly and detention camp for confining Jews who were later deported to the extermination camps during the German occupation of France during World War II. Originally conceived and built as a modernist urban community under the name La Cité de la Muette, it was located in Drancy, a northeastern suburb of Paris, France.
The Austrian Service Abroad is a non-profit organization funded by the Austrian government which sends young Austrians to work in partner institutions worldwide serving Holocaust commemoration in form of the Gedenkdienst, supporting vulnerable social groups and sustainability initiatives in form of the Austrian Social Service and realizing projects of peace within the framework of the Austrian Peace Service. The Austrian Service Abroad is the issuer of the annually conferred Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award.
The Holocaust Museum Houston is located in Houston's Museum District, in Texas. It is the fourth largest holocaust museum in the U.S. It was opened in 1996.
Thomas "Toivi" Blatt was a Holocaust survivor, writer of mémoires, and public speaker, who at the age of 16 escaped from the Sobibór extermination camp during the uprising staged by the Jewish prisoners in October 1943. The escape was attempted by about 300 inmates, many of whom were recaptured and killed by the German search squads. Following World War II Blatt lived in Communist Poland until the Polish October. In 1957, he emigrated to Israel, and in 1958 settled in the United States.
The Florida Holocaust Museum is a Holocaust museum located at 55 Fifth Street South in St. Petersburg, Florida. Founded in 1992, it moved to its current location in 1998. Formerly known as the Holocaust Center, the museum officially changed to its current name in 1999. It is one of the largest Holocaust museums in the United States. It was founded by Walter and Edith Lobenberg both of whom were German Jews who escaped persecution in Nazi Germany by immigrating to the United States. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel served as Honorary Chairman and cut the ribbon at the 1998 opening ceremony. The Florida Holocaust Museum is one of three Holocaust Museums that are accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. The museum works with the local community and survivors of the Holocaust to spread awareness and to educate the public on the history of the Holocaust.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, or the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, is an international memorial day on 27 January that commemorates the victims of the Holocaust, which resulted in the genocide of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, an attempt to implement its "final solution" to the Jewish question. 27 January was chosen to commemorate the date when the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945.
The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum is a history education museum in Dallas, Texas, in the West End Historic District at the southeast corner of N. Houston Street and Ross Avenue. Its mission is to teach the history of the Holocaust and advance human rights to combat prejudice, hatred, and indifference. It features climate-controlled archives and a research library to expand education.
USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education, formerly Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making audio-visual interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust a compelling voice for education and action. It was established by Steven Spielberg in 1994, one year after completing his Academy Award-winning film Schindler's List. In January 2006, the foundation partnered with and relocated to the University of Southern California (USC) and was renamed the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education. In March 2019, the institute opened their new global headquarters on USC's campus.
Belzberg Architects is an architecture and interior design firm located in the City of Santa Monica, California founded by Hagy Belzberg, FAIA OAA.
Sigi Ziering was a German-born American business executive, scientist, playwright, and philanthropist. A Holocaust survivor, he immigrated to the United States with his family, earned a doctorate in theoretical physics in 1958, and worked for a time as an industrial physicist. In 1973 he became president of the Diagnostic Products Corporation, a tiny startup company that was developing advanced tests used for medical diagnosis. By the time of Ziering's death, the company had 1700 employees and marketed more than 400 immunodiagnostic tests. In 2006, the company was acquired by Siemens for 1.86 billion dollars (US) and became a subsidiary, of Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics. In later life, Ziering was an active philanthropist in Los Angeles, California.
Jona Goldrich was an American real estate developer and philanthropist. Born in Lviv, he emigrated to Israel in the midst of World War II, where he served in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and worked for a labor union. By the 1950s, he emigrated to the United States, and he became a real estate developer and investor in Los Angeles County. A Holocaust survivor, he supported Jewish causes in Israel and the United States.
A UK Holocaust Memorial and learning centre was first proposed in 2015 to preserve the testimony of British Holocaust survivors and concentration camp liberators and to honour Jewish and other victims of Nazi persecution, including Roma, homosexual, and disabled people.
Hagy Belzberg, FAIA, OAA, is an American architect based in Santa Monica, California. He is the founding partner of the architecture and interior design firm Belzberg Architects.
Renée Firestone is a Hungarian-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and educator, who became known for her fashion designs in the 1960s after she immigrated to the United States.
Edward Mosberg was a Polish-born American Holocaust survivor, educator, and philanthropist. During the Holocaust, he was held by the Nazis from 14 years of age in Kraków Ghetto, Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, Auschwitz concentration camp, Mauthausen concentration camp, and a slave labor camp in Linz, Austria, that was liberated by the US Army in 1945. Nearly all of his family were murdered in the Holocaust.