United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - History

History

On November 1, 1978, President Jimmy Carter established the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, chaired by Elie Wiesel, a prominent author and Holocaust survivor. Its mandate was to investigate the creation and maintenance of a memorial to victims of the Holocaust and an appropriate annual commemoration to them. On September 27, 1979, the Commission presented its report to the President, recommending the establishment of a national Holocaust memorial museum in Washington, D.C. with three main components: a national museum/memorial, an educational foundation, and a Committee on Conscience.

After a unanimous vote by the United States Congress in 1980 to establish the museum, the federal government made available 1.9 acres (0.77 ha) of land adjacent to the Washington Monument for construction. Under Director Jeshajahu Weinberg and Chairman Miles Lerman, nearly $190 million was raised from private sources for building design, artifact acquisition, and exhibition creation. In October 1988, President Ronald Reagan helped lay the cornerstone of the building, designed by the architect James Ingo Freed. Dedication ceremonies on April 22, 1993 included speeches by American President Bill Clinton, Israeli President Chaim Herzog, Chairman Harvey Meyerhoff, and Elie Wiesel. On April 26, 1993, the Museum opened to the general public. Its first visitor was the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet.

In 1999, the Museum’s governing body, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, elected Sara J. Bloomfield to be the USHMM’s second director. Under Bloomfield’s leadership, the Museum has created programs including the National Institute for Holocaust Education, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, and Academy for Genocide Prevention. She has also played leading roles in opening the International Tracing Service archive, negotiating the first-ever loan of Anne Frank’s original writings, and professionally advising museums and groups such as the Jewish Museum Berlin, the Argentine government’s memorial to the Dirty War, the Holocaust museum in Buenos Aires, the memorial committee at Ground Zero in New York, and the Iraq Memory Foundation.

The museum has been the target of a planned attack and of a fatal shooting. In 2002, a federal jury convicted White supremacists Leo Felton and Erica Chase of planning to bomb a series of institutions associated with American black and Jewish communities, including the USHMM. On June 10, 2009, 88-year-old James von Brunn, an anti-Semite, shot Museum security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns. Johns and von Brunn were both seriously wounded and transported by ambulance to the George Washington University Hospital. Johns later died of his injuries; he is permanently honored in an official memorial at the USHMM. Von Brunn, who had a previous criminal record, had been disowned by his family. He was being tried in federal court when he died on January 6, 2010 in Butner federal prison in North Carolina.