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The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is a national institution situated in a prominent location adjacent to The National Mall in Washington, DC (in between 14th and 15th streets SW); however, it is not a constituent institution of the Smithsonian Institution . The museum is dedicated to documenting, studying, and interpreting the history of the Holocaust . It also serves as the United States ' official memorial to the millions of European Jew s and others killed during the Holocaust under directives of Nazi Germany . While the United States government provided some funding for both the building and continued operations of the museum, a majority of the funding comes from private sources, Jewish Movie Director Steven Spielberg being amongst the most notable donors. The street that the museum is located on is named Raoul Wallenberg Place, after the Swedish diplomat who is believed to have saved 100,000 Jews in Hungary during the Second World War . The museum building sits on land that previously belonged to the United States Department Of Agriculture . Two of the three annex buildings that sat on this property were demolished to build a museum whose design would be wholly about the Holocaust. The US Congress authorized the creation of the museum in 1980 , based on the 1979 report of the President's Commission on the Holocaust, established by Jimmy Carter. The museum was charged with maintaining a Committee on Conscience, to monitor and issue an "'institutional scream' to alert the conscience of the world and spark public outcry" at the earliest signs of genocidal intent. The building was designed by James Ingo Freed , of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners . Additionally, Maurice N Finegold, FAIA, of Finegold Alexander + Associates Inc , was a consulting architect on the project. Though the building on the outside is rather monumental with clean lines, in keeping with the large governmental buildings in the immediate context, the interior was meant to provoke more intimate and visceral responses. The facilities house a number of exhibitions, artworks, publications, and Artifacts relating to the Holocaust. The museum collects and preserves material evidence, distributes educational materials, and produces public programming. The Holocaust Museum also holds annual Holocaust commemorations and remembrances. THE PERMANENT EXHIBITION The Permanent Exhibition at the museum, designed by museum design firm Ralph Appelbaum Associates , is a chronological history of the Holocaust. It begins in 1933 with Adolf Hitler 's rise to power, and ends with the liberation of the Camps, and the opening of Israel . The exhibition is broken up into three floors covering different years. The fourth floor (the beginning of the exhibition) covers the years 1933 to 1939 focusing on the exclusion of Jews from society and the buildup to the Second World War ending with the invasion of Poland by Germany . The third floor covers the years 1940 to 1945 focusing on the Concentration Camps , Killing Centers, and Ghettos . The second floor focuses on resistance, rescue, and liberation, and the post-war years. At the end of the exhibition there is a testimony film of Holocaust survivors that runs continuously. The Tower of Faces is part of the permanent exhibition of the museum. It forms a three-story tower within the building, and is lined with about one thousand photographs of everyday life before the Holocaust in the small Lithuanian shtetl (village) of Eisiskes. There are photographs of family groups, weddings, picnics, swimming parties, sporting events, holiday celebrations, gardening, bicycling and other aspects of daily life. Before the war, the shtetl population was about 3,500, almost all Jewish. In September 1941, German SS, assisted by Lithuanian auxiliaries, rounded up the people of the shtetl, along with about one thousand Jews from the surrounding area, and systematically killed them all. |
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