History
The museum was co-founded by Al Rosenbaum, Jay M. Ipson and Mark Fetter in 1997. Rosenbaum created the sculpture of the menorah used in the museum's logo. The museum opened its doors at the current location (2000 E. Cary Street, Richmond, Virginia) on Yom HaShoah in April 2003. There are currently 28 exhibits, with more in the planning.
In the first year of operation, over 10,000 visitors toured the museum. People came from almost every state in the U.S., as well as countries in Europe, Asia and South America. The museum has hundreds of school groups visit the museum each year. Already more than 150,000 people have visited the Virginia Holocaust Museum, about 70 percent are students.
On May 11th 2010 Jay M. Ipson will be the first US-citizen to receive the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award. Austrian Ambassador to the United States of America Dr. Christian Prosl will officially visit the Virginia Holocaust Museum and present this prestigious award.
Read more about this topic: Virginia Holocaust Museum
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)