A new Holocaust Museum, larger, more interactive and more modern than the current institution, will open its doors in the fall of 2025 on Saint-Laurent Boulevard, in the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough, in the heart of Montreal.
If all goes as planned, 80 years will have passed since the liberation of the Auschwitz camp when the new version of the museum will be inaugurated, and it is clear that the memory of this dark period is beginning to fade.
” Some [visiteurs] do not know this tragic part of history, which justifies even more the need for a museum, both to welcome them and to be able to make them aware of this reality”, said the director, Daniel Amar.
The new museum will be located at the junction of the museum corridor and the Quartier des spectacles, on a 20,000 square foot lot.
In particular, it will be equipped with larger permanent and temporary exhibition spaces, a youth space, a room dedicated to interactive hologram testimonials, state-of-the-art classrooms, a 150-person auditorium squares, a commemorative space and a memory garden.
“The number of survivors is dwindling, unfortunately, and in a few years very few will be able to testify,” Mr. Amar said of the use of holograms. And through this technology, we will be able to preserve their memory in perpetuity, to allow young people to question them, even if they are no longer there, and to have answers. »
Technology is also essential if we want to successfully hold the attention of the school groups that the new museum will be able to accommodate, he added. That is why some three million dollars will be spent on this aspect alone.
Already very present online, the institution “must further enrich this offer to ensure that we are able to capture the interest of this new clientele”, underlined Mr. Amar.
Studies conducted in the United States show that young people who visit museums dedicated to the Holocaust develop “immediately a form of empathy, understanding, sensitivity in relation not only to the Shoah, but to all other forms of discrimination,” said Jacques Saada, who is a board member of the Montreal Holocaust Museum.
“The effect is positive and it is immediate,” he assured.
Symbolic location
The Montreal Holocaust Museum has some 13,500 objects in its collection, but the space it currently has only allows it to display a tiny fraction, namely 350.
Temporary exhibitions will also be possible, which is not the case at the moment, due to lack of space.
His installation on Saint-Laurent Street is rich in symbolism. Once the home of Montreal’s Jewish community, the artery is also often perceived as the demarcation between the French-speaking east and the English-speaking west of the metropolis.
“It is obvious that the fact of being, say, on the border between French-speaking Montreal and English-speaking Montreal only reinforced our desire to be a link between the linguistic communities and the ethnic communities, the cultural communities,” said Mr. Amar.
“It is our ambition to be both a thematic museum, but also a community museum, a place of exchange and gathering for all communities and especially for all communities who are victims of genocide. We want them, symbolically, to perceive it as their museum as well. »
In the making since 2017, the $80 million project is made possible in particular thanks to contributions from the Quebec Ministry of Culture and Communications, up to $20 million, the Azrieli Foundation, up to $15 million, and multiple private contributors.
The firm of architects selected for the design of the new museum will be unveiled in July 2022, following an international architectural competition launched in the fall of 2021 and to which some forty firms responded.
It is estimated that some 35,000 Holocaust survivors have rebuilt their lives in Canada, including 9,000 who have settled in Montreal.