Holocaust Museum LA facts for kids
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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 |
| Visitors | 253,000 |
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. Founded in 1961 by Holocaust survivors, Holocaust Museum LA is the oldest museum of its kind in the United States.
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History
Holocaust Museum LA is the oldest museum founded by Holocaust survivors 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. They began meeting to discuss their personal experiences, the importance of commemorating their lost relatives and friends, and educating future generations. They each possessed primary sources, such as photographs, artifacts, documents and memories and 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, where it has since had over 250,000 visitors.
Architecture
In 2010, led by past board member, Randy Schoenberg (whose story of litigating the return of the Klimt painting, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, from Austria was featured in the film Woman in Gold), the museum moved into its permanent home designed by renowned architect Hagy Belzberg.
The Museum's architecture allows the physical building to be fully integrated into the surrounding park landscape. The architecture of the main Museum building is also designed to immerse the visitor in the horror and darkness of the Holocaust, as the ceilings are lower and the rooms darker in the galleries discussing the concentration camps. While the visitor is submerged in the history of the Holocaust, park-life continues outside of the Museum. In a similar way, there were people outside the ghettos and camps, either neighbors or those halfway across the world, who either did not know or chose to ignore the ways Jews and other targeted groups were victimized and killed during the Holocaust. This juxtaposition is a key component in the architectural design of the building.
The building design received the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission Design Honor Award, the Green Building Design Award, and a Gold LEED rating – the national standard of sustainable architecture. The award-winning interior and exterior architecture reflects the poignant history covered in the Museum's galleries. As visitors move through the Museum, light and space change, mirroring the time in 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 rich collection of primary sources, and Holocaust Museum LA holds one of the largest collections in the United States of artifacts from the Holocaust period.
The Museum is divided into three spaces: the internal Museum space, the Goldrich Family Foundation Children's Memorial, and the outdoor Martyrs Memorial. The Children's Memorial is an outdoor reflective space where the approximately 1.5 million children who perished 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 who perished. A small Garden of the Righteous pays homage to non-Jews who risked their lives to save.
The Museum's design also incorporates the Martyr's Memorial monument, which was built in the early 1990s. This monument consists of six 18-foot high, black, triangular, granite pillars, each one honoring the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. These pillars are also meant to symbolize the crematoria smoke stacks.
Exhibitions
- Tree of Testimony: In collaboration with the USC Shoah Foundation, Holocaust Museum LA installed a 70-screen video sculpture that displays the 52,000 survivor testimonies from the USC Shoah database. Visitors can use their audio guides to listen to any of the 70 testimonies that are being highlighted. Since there are over 50,000 stories and only 70 screens, each Survivor is guaranteed to be shown at least once a year, ensuring that each visitor experiences a different testimony. At any given time, there are survivors speaking in as many as 32 different languages.
- The Sobibor Model: Sobibor was one of the six main death camps established by the Nazis and was part of the Operation Reinhard plan to murder all the Jews of Poland. Survivor Thomas Blatt built a model of the Sobibor Extermination camp solely from memory, and it is permanently displayed at Holocaust Museum LA. There is also a video screen above the model where Blatt talks about his experience in the camp. Blatt was a part of the 250 prisoners who carefully planned and executed their escape from Sobibor. Only about 50 survived, and Blatt was one of them.
- Symbols of Hate
- Childhood Left at the Station
- Children's Memorial
Collections
- To Paint is to Live: Erich Lichtblau-Leskly
- Auschwitz Artifacts
