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Admission:
- Free for FHM members and children 6 and under
- $12 per adult
- $6 students under 18
Hours:
Monday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with the last admission at 4 p.m.
The Florida Holocaust Museum is closed on Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Museum Promotes Inherent Worth and Dignity of Human Life:
Sharing his vision of a memorial to those who suffered and perished in the Holocaust, St. Petersburg businessman and philanthropist Walter P. Loebenberg discovered others in the community who wanted to take steps to preclude future genocides.
As philosopher and poet George Santayana wrote in Reason in Common Sense, “Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.”
Loebenberg, who escaped Nazi Germany in 1939 and served in the U.S. Army during World War II, recruited community leaders and businessmen as well as internationally recognized Holocaust scholars in developing the center. Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s List, joined the board of advisors and Elie Weisel was named honorary chairman of this Holocaust Center.
In 1992, the museum hosted its inaugural exhibition on the property of the Jewish Community Center of Pinellas County in Madeira Beach. More than 24,000 visitors viewed Anne Frank in the World, a comprehensive study of a young Jewish girl’s childhood in Holland, her teenage years spent hiding from the Nazis and her death at Bergen-Belsen.
The 4,000-square-foot Holocaust Center ultimately outgrew its facility in Madeira Beach and, in 1996, plans were made to move to a considerably larger building in St. Petersburg.
The new museum opened in February 1998, welcoming more than 65,000 visitors in its first year. The museum is home to an ever-expanding print and audio-visual library, a photographic archive and a research facility for educators and scholars.
Past exhibits have included:
- Judy Chicago’s Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light
- Michael Smuss: Reflections of a Holocaust Survivor
- Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Stealing Home: How Jackie Robinson Changed America
- Robert O. Fisch: Light from a Yellow Star
The museum has taken an active role in developing legislation that mandates Holocaust education in Florida public schools. From its beginning, the museum has worked in concert with Tampa Bay area schools, creating classroom study guides, offering teacher training programs and making available staff and Holocaust survivors for presentations.
Today, the museum continues to inform and enlighten its visitors by presenting engaging and edifying exhibitions, by challenging those who promote hatred and intolerance and by underscoring the value of human life.