U.s. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Holocaust Memorial Museum)
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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. 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. 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. 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.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 designed 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, Farsi, Urdu, Greek, and Mandarin. 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 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.

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.

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.

Its purpose is to share archives and help spread the knowledge that each organization has, creating an integrated, globalized network of information. 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.