Montreal Holocaust Memorial Center, Holocaust museum in Montreal, Canada
The Montreal Holocaust Memorial Center is a museum in Montreal, Canada, dedicated to preserving the memory of those persecuted under Nazism, through artifacts, documents, photographs, and personal accounts. The galleries take visitors through the events of the Holocaust in a structured way, moving from prewar Jewish life to the war years and their aftermath.
The Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre was founded in 1979 by members of the Association of Survivors of Nazi Oppression and young members of Montreal's Jewish community, led by Steven Cummings, and opened in the Allied Jewish Community Services building. A 2003 renovation funded by government grants and private and corporate donations expanded the collection and launched the permanent exhibit "To Learn, To Feel, To Remember". The centre was renamed the Montreal Holocaust Museum in 2016.
The museum's name changed in 2016 from the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre to the Montreal Holocaust Museum, reflecting its public mandate as Canada's only recognized Holocaust museum. Each year it hosts public Yom Hashoah and Kristallnacht commemorations attended by survivors, Jewish community members and dignitaries. Its oral history program, begun in 1994, has recorded over 800 survivor testimonies.
The museum sits in the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood and is reachable by public transit without difficulty. Plan for a visit of at least a couple of hours, as the content is dense and worth moving through slowly.
The Heart from Auschwitz is a heart-shaped book of birthday wishes made by young women in Auschwitz and given to Fania Fainer, who smuggled it out of the camp and later donated it to the museum. Director Carl Leblanc made the 2010 documentary The Heart of Auschwitz about it, and published the novel Artefact in 2012.
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