MEMORIALS

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Type: Physical memorial
Location: Washington DC
Country: United States
Creator: James Ingo Freed
Dedication year: 1993

Added: 8/12/2009
Updated: 10/18/2010 10:27:10 PM

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is the United States‘ official memorial to the Holocaust. Adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the USHMM provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history. It is dedicated to helping leaders and citizens of the world confront hatred, prevent genocide, promote human dignity, and strengthen democracy.

With an operating budget of just under $79.7 million ($47.3 million from Federal sources and $31.4 million from private donations) in 2008, the Museum has a staff of about 400 employees, 125 contractors, 650 volunteers, 91 Holocaust survivors, and 175,000 members. It has local offices in New York, Boston, Boca Raton, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Dallas.

Since its dedication on April 22, 1993, the Museum has welcomed nearly 30 million visitors, including more than 8 million school children. It has also welcomed 88 heads of state and more than 3,500 foreign officials from over 132 countries. The Museum’s visitors come from all over the world, and more than 90 percent of the Museum’s visitors are not Jewish. Its website had 25 million visits in 2008 from an average of 100 different countries daily. 35% of these visits were from outside the United States, including more than 238,000 visits from Muslim-majority countries.

The USHMM’s collections contain more than 12,750 artifacts, 49 million pages of archival documents, 80,000 historical photographs, 200,000 registered survivors, 1,000 hour of archival footage, 84,000 library items, and 9,000 oral history testimonies. It also has teacher fellows in every state in the United States and has welcomed almost 400 university fellows from 26 countries since 1994.

Source: wikipedia
Website: www.ushmm.org

POSTED BY JON BRUNBERG ON 8/12/2009