US Holocaust museum to collect items for time capsule

Memorial seeking messages and personal artifacts from Holocaust survivors for 50th anniversary time capsule to open in 2043

By JTA 23 February 2016, 7:03 pm

Edit

File: The US Holocaust Memorial Museum honors the victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution at the US Capitol building in Washington D.C., April 30, 2014. (Allison Shelley/Getty Images/JTA)

WASHINGTON – The US Holocaust Memorial Museum is seeking messages and personal artifacts from Holocaust survivors for a time capsule to be opened on the museum’s 50th anniversary in 2043.

The capsule will be on display in the museum’s David and Fela Shapell Family Collections and Conservation Center in Bowie, Maryland, which is scheduled to be opened next year.

“Every day the museum engages in a battle to rescue truth and keep Holocaust memory alive – a battle that will only intensify with each passing year,” Sara Bloomfield, the museum director, said Monday in a statement.

Starting this month in Florida, the capsule will move on to collecting items in California, Illinois and New York before returning to Washington, DC.

The Shapell Center is expected to provide enough space to allow the museum’s collections to double in size in the next 10 years.

Currently, the museum houses more than 18,000 objects, 76 million pages of documents, 135 million digital images, more than 88,000 photographs and images, and over 14,000 oral testimonies by survivors, witnesses and perpetrators.

“We need to be able to tell this story from every perspective,” Bloomfield said.