Construction began on the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in the city’s Pan Pacific Park.
The $20 million project, which broke ground Oct. 13 and is scheduled to open in 2010, will include exhibits, a library and an archive in a 15,000 square feet building, which will be integrated with the six stark black granite columns of the existing Holocaust Martyrs Memorial.
LAMH president E. Randol Schoenberg said he eventually expects 50,000 visitors a year, the bulk from public, private and parochial schools in Southern California. Holocaust survivors or their direct descendants will serve as guides.
The new museum originated with a group of Holocaust survivors in 1961, but has been located in a series of temporary quarters until now. It is distinct from the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance, also in Los Angeles, which started as a Holocaust museum but has now branched out to include genocides and persecutions, past and present, throughout the world.
By contrast, LAMH will focus solely on the Holocaust, starting with the pre-Hitler era in 1932, through the murder of the Six Million, and up to the rebirth of Israel in 1948.
Some questions have been raised in the Jewish community whether money spent on Holocaust memorials and education would not be put to better use fighting poverty, disease and myriad other causes.
Schoenberg responded that “You can ask the same question about money given to art and music. Life is more than just physical survival.” He then quoted Jona Goldrich, a survivor and major supporter of the new museum, that “If you built a monument on every street corner in Los Angeles, you couldn’t tell the whole story.”
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