Elie Wiesel led the creation of the US Holocaust Museum

Person: Elie Wiesel
Lived: 1928–2016
Field: Writing
From: Romanian-American

The story

In the 1970s the United States had no national memorial to the six million Jews and the other victims of Nazi persecution. On November 1, 1978, President Jimmy Carter established the President's Commission on the Holocaust and named Elie Wiesel its chairman. Its task was to recommend how the country should build and maintain a memorial and mark an annual day of remembrance.

On September 27, 1979, the commission presented its report. It proposed a national Holocaust memorial museum in Washington, D.C., with three parts: a museum and memorial, an educational foundation, and a Committee on Conscience. In 1980 Congress voted unanimously to create the museum, and the government provided 1.9 acres of land next to the Washington Monument. Wiesel became founding chairman of the new United States Holocaust Memorial Council and led it until 1986. His close friend and confidant Sigmund Strochlitz supported him throughout those years.

The project took more than a decade to complete. Nearly $190 million was raised from private donors for the building, artefacts and exhibitions. President Ronald Reagan helped lay the cornerstone of James Ingo Freed's building in October 1988. At the dedication on April 22, 1993, Wiesel spoke alongside President Bill Clinton and Israel's President Chaim Herzog. The museum opened to the public four days later, and its first visitor was the Dalai Lama.

In the years Wiesel chaired the effort he also received the Congressional Gold Medal and, in 1986, the Nobel Peace Prize, the same year his chairmanship ended.

By 2024 the museum had welcomed nearly 50 million visitors, including more than 11 million schoolchildren and 120 heads of state, and fewer than one in ten visitors is Jewish. Its archives hold tens of millions of pages of documents and thousands of survivor testimonies. The museum presents the Elie Wiesel Award to internationally prominent people whose actions have advanced its vision of a world where people confront hatred, prevent genocide and promote human dignity.

Why it matters

The museum Wiesel helped create has taught tens of millions of visitors, most of them not Jewish, about the Holocaust and works to prevent genocide around the world.