United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Miles Lerman's involvement with the United States Holocaust Museum can be traced to 1979. That year, United States President Jimmy Carter named Lerman to the President’s Commission advisory board on the Holocaust. One of the Commission's main tasks was the creation of a museum dedicated to the remembrance of the Holocaust.
The United States Congress passed a legislation granting land on the National Mall in Washington D.C. for the purpose of building the museum. However, all funds for the construction of the museum had to be raised privately.
Lerman, who became chairman of the Campaign to Remember, and the committee managed to raise $190 million dollars in order to construct and endow the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He also served simultaneously as the chairman of the future museum's International Relations Committee, which was charged with negotiating with Eastern European nations in order to obtain artifacts focusing on Jewish life and the Holocaust for the museum's permanent collection. Lerman's IR Committee managed to obtain a number of important artifacts, including actual barracks from the Birkenau concentration camp, a railroad boxcar used to transport Jewish prisoners to Treblinka, over 5,000 shoes from Majdanek and various toothbrushes, suitcases and other personal items from Auschwitz.
Lerman served as chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's governing board from the time of its opening on April 22, 1993, until he left the museum in 2000. Additionally, Lerman helped to found the museum's Committee on Conscience, which works to draw attention to contemporary genocide issues, such as the current Darfur crisis.
Lerman, who spoke several languages, returned to his native Poland following his departure from the museum in 2000. There he campaigned for a proper memorial for his family members, as well as the other estimated 500,000 Jews who died at the Belzec extermination camp. The existing Communist era memorial, which stood in a former garbage dump, made no mention of Jewish Holocaust victims. Lerman raised approximately 5 million dollars to build a new memorial by teaming up with the Polish government and the American Jewish Committee.
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