History
Ground was broken for the Holocaust Memorial Center on the property of the Jewish Community Campus at Maple and Drake Roads in West Bloomfield, Michigan December 6, 1981. Almost three years later, in October 1984, the Holocaust Memorial Center was dedicated and opened.
Since then, the HMC has welcomed more than one million visitors from all over the world. Tens of thousands of schoolchildren tour the museum each year and have the unique experience of speaking with a survivor of the Holocaust. The Detroit News has rated the Holocaust Memorial Center as "Michigan's #1 historical tourist attraction."
The Holocaust Memorial Center (HMC), the first free-standing institution of its kind in the United States, is the fulfillment of a dream nurtured by Founder and C.E.O. Rabbi Charles H. Rosenzveig and embraced by his fellow members of Shaarit Haplaytah ("the Remnant," survivors of the Holocaust). It took nearly twenty years of planning and grassroots fundraising before Shaarit Haplaytah was ready to build. Rabbi Charles H. Rosenzveig, a dynamic visionary passed on December 11, 2008 in Royal Oak, Michigan at Beaumont Hospital as the result of heart failure.
The organization opened their new Holocaust Memorial Center at 28123 Orchard Lake Road in Farmington Hills, expanding and adapting the former Old Orchard movie theater. The Center's new design received front-page coverage in the Wall Street Journal, with a headline asking, "Should a Museum Look as Disturbing as What it Portrays?"
The Holocaust Memorial Center is a partner organization of the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service, making it possible for Austrian men to work abroad as an intern instead of their conscription at the military.
The HMC built a new museum on the grounds of the Old Orchard Theatre. The expansion on the new site consists of an expanded Holocaust Center and two new museums:
Read more about this topic: Holocaust Memorial Center
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