Unspecified/General

In the Museum District of Houston, the Holocaust Museum Houston is the fourth-largest Holocaust museum in the United States and one of the most significant centres devoted to remembrance, education and human rights in the South. Founded in 1996 by a coalition of local Holocaust survivors and community leaders, the museum operates in a thoughtfully redesigned and expanded campus that reopened in 2019 following a 33.7 million dollar transformation that more than doubled the museum's exhibition space. The permanent exhibition, Bearing Witness: A Community Remembers, traces the rise of Nazism, the experience of the Holocaust and its lessons for contemporary life, with particular emphasis on the testimonies of Houston-area survivors and liberators whose stories anchor the galleries. Personal artefacts, photographs, films and immersive media bring the events of the 1930s and 1940s vividly to life for visitors of all backgrounds. A second permanent exhibition, the Lyric Centre Theater, presents the powerful Defiance: Treasures of Resistance and Survival, focusing on Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and survivors' lives in the years afterwards. The museum also houses a striking authentic 1942 railcar of the type used to deport Jews to the death camps, displayed in a dedicated outdoor pavilion as one of only a handful of such cars on permanent display in the United States. Beyond the Holocaust, the museum has expanded its mission to address broader issues of human rights and genocide. Galleries devoted to the Armenian Genocide, the Holodomor, the Rwandan, Bosnian and Cambodian genocides and contemporary issues of racial discrimination, antisemitism and human trafficking lend the museum a contemporary relevance well beyond historical commemoration. Free public events, robust educational programmes for schools, and a sobering Memorial Gallery with an eternal flame round out the experience. Tickets are modestly priced, with regular free-admission times and combined passes for several of the Museum District's institutions offered.

Type: Tourist Attraction

Address: 5401 Caroline Street, Houston, TX, United States

Telephone: 713-942-8000

Website: hmh.org

Opening Date: 03/03/1996