General
Information for Visiting the Museum
Opened in April 1993, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., summons all who enter its portals to rise to an important and extraordinary challenge: to remember and immortalize the 6 million Jews and millions of other Nazi victims of World War II -- Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, the handicapped, Jehovah's Witnesses, political and religious dissidents, Soviet prisoners of war -- who were murdered in the most horrifying event of our time: the Holocaust.
The main task of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is to present the facts of the Holocaust, to tell the American public as clearly and comprehensively as possible what happened in that darkest chapter of human history. To this end, the Museum has reconstructed the history of the Holocaust through multiple media: the meaningful arrangement of objects as well as the presentation of documentary photographic and cinematographic materials. This museum holds the world's largest and most diversified collection of Holocaust-related objects; but in its display it is a "conceptual museum" rather than a traditional, object-oriented one: its primary purpose is to communicate concepts, complex information, and knowledge, rather than merely to display objects of the Holocaust, unrelated to the historical context of each individual exhibit.
A visit to the museum will be an interesting and challenging learning experience but, at the same time, it also will be a thought-provoking, disturbing, and personally upsetting one. And so it should be.
Jeshajahu Weinberg, Director of the Museum, from the publication The World Must Know
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General
Information for Visiting the Museum
Association
of Holocaust Organizations
For educational information, write to education@ushmm.org.
For information or comments on this Web site, contact Arnold Kramer at akramer@ushmm.org
These pages last updated on 31 March, 1995