U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is the official memorial of the United States to the Holocaust. The Museum provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history. It is dedicated to helping people confront hatred, prevent genocide, promote human dignity, and strengthen democracy.
Since its dedication in 1993, the Museum has welcomed more than 47 million visitors, including 100 heads of state and more than 11 million school-age children. The Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia is the world’s leading online authority on the Holocaust. It’s available in 19 languages and was visited in 2021 by more than 21 million people representing 238 countries and territories.
Washington Post columnist George Will said this of the museum on the occasion of its 25th anniversary in 2018:
[T]he museum presents human nature’s noblest as well as vilest manifestation. *** Located just off the Mall, one of the world’s most pleasant urban spaces and the epicenter of American politics, the museum inflicts an assaultive, excruciating knowing: Nothing — nothing — is unthinkable, and political institutions by themselves provide no permanent safety from barbarism, which permanently lurks beneath civilization’s thin, brittle crust. This is why the Holocaust is the dark sun into which this democracy should peer.
Admission to the museum is free. However, timed-entry tickets are required to enter the permanent exhibition. If you can’t book in advance, same-day tickets are available in limited quantity online each day at 7 a.m. ET.
The Museum is open every day except on Yom Kippur and Christmas Day.
My father, Abram Enzel, survived the Holocaust. His oral history is available online through the Museum.
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”
