Illinois Holocaust Museum

The Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie was born from a direct provocation. In nineteen seventy-seven, neo-Nazis announced a march through Skokie, a suburb where thousands of Holocaust survivors had settled after the war. The survivors fought the march in court, and although the courts upheld the neo-Nazis' right to march, the group never held its march in Skokie and rallied in Chicago instead.

But rather than simply move on, a group of those survivors founded the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois and opened a small storefront museum to replace silence with education. That original five-thousand-square-foot space on Main Street opened in nineteen eighty-four. Over three decades of sustained work by the survivor community, it grew into the sixty-five-thousand-square-foot museum that opened in two thousand nine.

The institution holds the principle, embedded in its founding, that remembrance is not passive. It is a response to those who would rather see the past erased.