Construction work on the new Montreal Holocaust Museum began on Tuesday, La Presse Canadienne learned first.
Work is expected to continue until the end of 2025. The new establishment will be inaugurated at the beginning of 2026 at 3535, boulevard Saint-Laurent, in the Plateau Mont-Royal borough, if everything goes as planned.
“It is a symbol of our conviction that the fight against anti-Semitism requires education, and our museum has this education as its fundamental vocation,” said the president of the Montreal Holocaust Museum, Jacques Saada. We will be able to serve more people, more students, to make them aware of the Holocaust and genocide in general. »
The project was launched in February 2022, after a gestation period of several years.
The new museum will be located at the junction of the museum corridor and the Quartier des spectacles, on 20,000 square feet of land. The building will, however, have an area of 45,000 square feet, since it will rise on more than one floor.
It will notably have larger permanent and temporary exhibition spaces, a youth area, a room dedicated to interactive hologram testimonies, state-of-the-art classrooms, an auditorium of 150 squares, a memorial space and a memorial garden.
The new museum will place greater emphasis on technology and interactivity, in order to capture the attention of a young audience. Around three million dollars will be spent on this aspect alone, out of a total budget of around 120 million.
The Montreal Holocaust Museum has some 13,500 objects in its collection, but the space it had until now only allowed it to present a tiny fraction of them, 350.
The launch of the work takes on a whole new meaning in the current international context, at a time when the conflict between Israel and Hamas is giving rise to gestures of anti-Semitism across the world, said Mr. Saada.
“Anti-Semitism has no explanation, it only has pretexts,” he said. The Middle East question is a pretext for an explosion of anti-Semitism in the world in general, but in Canada in particular. And so this highlights even more the need to use the main instrument that we have to fight against anti-Semitism which is education, and education is the vocation of the museum. »
In November 2023, the Montreal Holocaust Museum recorded the highest number of visitors in its history.
It is estimated that some 35,000 Holocaust survivors have rebuilt their lives in Canada, including 9,000 who have settled in Montreal.