Holocaust Museum Houston is the principal Holocaust museum in the southern United States. It was founded in 1996 in a building in the Houston Museum District designed by the architect Mark Mucasey of Studio Red and was substantially redeveloped and reopened on 8 June 2019 in an expanded building that more than doubled the museum’s size. The institution receives around 200,000 visitors per year and is the fourth-largest Holocaust museum in the United States after the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York and the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, Illinois.
The founding
The institution was founded by a group of Houston-area Holocaust survivors who had emigrated to Texas after the war, of whom the principal figures were Walter and Edith Mintz, Naomi Warren and Siegi Izakson. The founding survivors had been informally educating Houston schoolchildren about the Holocaust through synagogue programmes from the 1970s onwards; the decision to establish a permanent museum was taken in the early 1990s, in part in response to the slowly diminishing capacity of the surviving generation to conduct that informal teaching. The museum was funded principally through the local Houston Jewish community and by contributions from the Houston business community.
The original 1996 building was a modest 21,000-square-foot structure that housed a single permanent exhibition focused on the experiences of Houston-area survivors. The museum from the outset positioned itself as an educational institution rather than as a memorial proper, with school programmes as its central work. The Texas school system has, since the museum’s founding, provided the bulk of its visitors; the Houston Independent School District has had a continuous educational partnership with the museum since 1997.
The 2019 redevelopment
The 2019 redevelopment was the result of a $34 million capital campaign and substantially expanded the museum’s facilities. The new building, designed by Albert C. Martin and Associates, added the Lester and Sue Smith Campus that increased the total building size to 57,000 square feet. The expansion added new permanent exhibition galleries, the Boniuk Library, the Mincberg Gallery for special exhibitions, the Lack Family Memorial Garden, and substantial dedicated educational facilities including classrooms and the Welcome Center. The museum’s archives, which include over 800 testimonies from Houston-area Holocaust survivors and their families, were also expanded with new dedicated storage and research space.
The reopened museum has four permanent exhibitions. The Bearing Witness Exhibit treats the history of the Holocaust through the experiences of the Houston-area survivor community. The Samuel Bak Gallery houses a permanent collection of paintings by the Lithuanian-American artist Samuel Bak, a survivor whose work treats the destruction of his Vilna childhood through layered allegorical imagery. The Human Rights Gallery treats subsequent genocides (Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur) and contemporary human rights work. The Engman Texas Liberator Project documents the experiences of around 200 Texan US Army personnel who participated in the liberation of the camps in April and May 1945, an unusual local-history component for a Holocaust museum.
The educational work
The museum’s school programme is its central work. Around 90,000 Texas schoolchildren visit each year, mostly from Greater Houston and surrounding counties, on structured day visits that include the permanent exhibitions, a survivor talk where possible (the surviving founder generation are mostly no longer able to speak; the museum has been transitioning to recorded survivor testimony) and structured discussion sessions. The museum’s curriculum materials are aligned with the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards for social studies and are widely used by Texas teachers.
The museum runs the annual Yom HaShoah commemoration for the Houston Jewish community, the Warren Fellowship for Future Teachers (a teacher training programme), the Boniuk Center summer institute for high school students, and a substantial public lecture series. The Boniuk Library holds approximately 12,000 books and is the largest specialist Holocaust collection in the southern United States.
The standing of the institution
Holocaust Museum Houston is the principal Holocaust educational institution in the southern United States and one of the most active in school programming nationally. Its position in Houston, a major American city without a substantial Jewish population by national standards, has shaped its educational mission: the audience for its school programmes is overwhelmingly non-Jewish, and the museum operates on the working assumption that its visitors are encountering the Holocaust as a subject for the first time. The institution’s quiet steady work over three decades has been one of the substantial American contributions to Holocaust education at scale.
See also
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Yad Vashem Jerusalem
- Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre
- Imperial War Museum Holocaust Galleries
Sources
- Margee M. Cohen, Holocaust Museum Houston: A Twenty-Year History, Holocaust Museum Houston, 2016
- Holocaust Museum Houston, “Our Story”, https://hmh.org
- Hilene Flanzbaum (ed), The Americanization of the Holocaust, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999
- Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust, Routledge, 1999
- Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum, Viking, 1995 (broader context for American Holocaust museum-building)
- Samuel Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, Indiana University Press, 2001
- The Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission, https://thgaac.com