ABOUT US 

The Holocaust Documentation and Education Center, founded in 1980 as a nonsectarian, non-profit, multifaceted organization, is housed in Hollywood, Florida at 2031 Harrison Street and will feature the first South Florida Holocaust Museum. The museum will put names and faces to the victims and will raise the sounds of their moral voices of conscience to mute the noise of prejudice and hatred.

The museum, which will be the first in the country to teach the story in English and Spanish, will teach the universal lessons of the Holocaust. These lessons are a significant moral tool in teaching values, pluralism, responsibility, and respect for human dignity, decency, and life to this and future generations. In preparation for school class tours, the museum will provide information for teachers to help prepare their students.

The Center has acquired a rail car of the type used by the Nazis during the Holocaust to transport millions of Jews to their untimely death. This rail car will be available for public viewing in 2009.

The Center has achieved international acclaim and recognition for maintaining the largest, self-produced, standardized oral history library collection nationally and internationally.  Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Raoul Wallenberg Project, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center have all sought the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center’s expertise in developing their oral history projects. The Center continues to seek eyewitnesses, Survivors, liberators, and rescuers, to videotape their stories to become part of the museum. The Center is also collecting artifacts from the Holocaust including documents and photographs.

The Holocaust Documentation and Education Center has been lauded by the Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach school boards for its outstanding educational outreach programs. The highlight of these are our Student Awareness Days, which began in 1986 and which to date have touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of middle, high school, and college and university students and tens of thousands of teachers.

The most profound and compelling achievement of the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center, which impacted every aspect of Holocaust education in the state of Florida, came when Governor Lawton Chiles signed the Florida State Statute 1003.42 mandating that Holocaust education be implemented in all public schools in the state from kindergarten through colleges and universities.

The Center also features a reference and research library which contains over 6,000 volumes of Holocaust-related books, hundreds of DVDs and videos, and which subscribes to a dozen periodicals.

The Center maintains a Speakers’ Bureau, which reaches approximately 15,000 per year. In addition, the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center also sponsors an Annual Visual Arts and Writing Contest for students in grades 4 – 12 and colleges and universities.  Each year, the Center holds a university accredited, weeklong course on Holocaust education for teachers in all grade levels.