United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: America’s tribute to a tragedy
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is America’s national institution for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history, and serves as this country’s memorial to the millions of people murdered during the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Although Jews were the primary victims—six million were murdered – a great many others were targeted by the Nazis for persecution and murder.
The museum’s three-floor main exhibition presents a comprehensive history through artifacts, photographs, films and eyewitness testimonies. Divided into three sections presented chronologically, it begins with life before the Holocaust in the early 1930s, continues through the Nazi rise to power and the subsequent tyranny and genocide, and concludes with liberation and the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust.
Special exhibitions are presented in the Sidney Kimmel and Rena Rowan Exhibition Gallery and the Gonda Education Center. Committee on Conscience displays are located outside the Meyerhoff Theater.
The hexagonal Hall of Remembrance with its eternal flame is the nation’s memorial to victims of the Holocaust. The 1.5 million children murdered in the Holocaust are memorialized at the Wall of Remembrance (Children’s Tile Wall). American schoolchildren painted more than 3,000 tiles that encompass the wall.
At the Wexner Learning Center, visitors explore different aspects of the Holocaust by accessing text, photographs, maps, films, oral testimonies and music on touch-screen computers. The Meed Survivors Registry encourages all who lived under the Nazi regime to record their history.
A listing of daily programs is available at the Information Desk, in the center of the Hall of Witness on the first floor, also the location of the Wilf Pass Desk where timed, same-day passes to the permanent exhibition are distributed. Advance passes are available from www.tickets.com or 800-400-9373. The museum shop offers a variety of books, videos, compact discs, posters, and other materials that relate to the Holocaust and other genocides. The museum café is open from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily.
Posted by Jim Brown
