The Museum of Jewish Heritage was incorporated and chartered in 1984, dedicated in 1986, and built between 1994 and 1997 in New York City's Battery Park City. The museum's $21.5 million building, designed by architect
Kevin Roche opened to the public on September 15, 1997.
David Altshuler was the founding director of the museum, a position he held from 1984 until December 1999, when he left to become president of the Trust for Jewish Philanthropy. Dr.
Jud Newborn (PhD, University of Chicago) served as the museum's founding historian from 1986 to 2000, recruited to use his expertise as a sociocultural anthropologist and Holocaust historian to help shape the parameters and content of the museum's core exhibition as well as seek and interpret artifacts. Between 1946 and the 1960s, government officials lacked interest in building the museum until the American Jewish Community expressed interest and made an intervention for the museum creation; the American Jewish Community's interest was catalyzed by the
Six-Day War in 1967. recommended the creation of a museum. Carter, in 1978, created the President's Commission which placed the issue on the US government's agenda. The funding crisis was when "
Black Monday", which occurred on October 19, 1987, "wiped out" funds of potential donors for the museum as well as dropped real estate prices. From 1997 until 2019, the museum had a Core Exhibition which told the story of 20th and 21st century Jewish life from the perspective of those who lived it. Through a rotating collection that included artifacts, photographs, and documentary films, the Core Exhibition placed the Holocaust in the larger context of modern Jewish history. It was organized into three chronological sections:
Jewish Life A Century Ago,
The War Against the Jews, and
Jewish Renewal—each told on a separate floor. It was housed in the museum's six-sided building, symbolic of the six points of the
Star of David and the six million
Jews murdered in the Holocaust. The original core exhibition was redesigned, opening in June 2022. Although the earlier exhibition provided a comprehensive treatment of the rise of Nazis and the Holocaust on its second floor, the visitors' introduction to the museum was altered. A rotunda at the entrance, with a multimedia exhibition describing the differences of Jewish communities around the world as well as the commonality of Jewish culture, religious observance and values, was replaced by an exhibition wall focusing on April, 1943, when a confluence of key events in Holocaust history occurred. Other design changes eliminated the chronological approach as well as the basic museum path, reducing the context of the Holocaust in terms of Jewish history in favor of an emphasis on the Holocaust itself. Instead of visitors moving along the perimeters of the building, viewing a timeline with artifacts and then interacting chronologically with thematic rooms opposite the timeline, the viewer was given a path through a series of rooms organized by theme and making greater use of photographic enlargements and fewer artifacts. A technological innovation was the use of interactive holographs of survivors, programmed to answer the most likely questions visitors' might have. On the morning of January 8, 2021, a
Confederate flag was tied to the front door of the museum, less than two days after the
January 6 United States Capitol attack by a pro-
Donald Trump mob, some of whom carried Confederate flags into the Capitol building. The discovery of the flag prompted the filing of an aggravated harassment complaint. In August 2022
Inna Vernikov withdrew her $5,000 donation to the museum for allegedly banning
Florida governor
Ron DeSantis from their events, though the museum denied banning anyone. ==Exhibitions and Installations==