Orlando’s new Holocaust Museum for Hope & Humanity will take a decidedly personal approach, telling stories of courage and resilience in the face of hate through the words of Central Floridians who survived the terrors of Nazism.
Supporters of the current Holocaust Center in Maitland were given a sneak peek at the planned methodology for the new museum last week as the center, located at the Roth Family Jewish Community Center, unveiled a completely new centerpiece exhibit, titled “Hope & Humanity.”
The new exhibit, which opened to the public on Sunday, tells nine stories of 10 Holocaust survivors — a pair of brothers is featured in one account — all of whom ended up in the greater Orlando area. Among them: Tess Goldberg Wise, who founded the Holocaust Center, and Henri Landwirth, founder of Give Kids the World Village — the charity that provides vacations for families with children facing life-threatening illnesses.
The idea, said exhibit creator Suzanne Grimmer, is to connect visitors with the Holocaust not with statistics but through the relatable hopes, fears and dreams of individuals and families.
“We just wanted to let them tell this story,” said Grimmer, the Holocaust Center’s senior director of museum experiences. “We provide lots of context — there are things we know now that they didn’t know at the time — but the information is presented through their lens.”
That strategy will be mirrored in the new Hope & Humanity museum, which will be based on the locals’ stories now on view. Previously, Holocaust Center leaders had announced a partnership with the California-based Shoah Foundation, which has more than 55,000 video interviews with survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides worldwide.
The new museum is still on track to open in the former Orlando Chamber of Commerce building on Orange Avenue in the Ivanhoe neighborhood, north of downtown, said interim CEO Emily Sterling.
To date, the Holocaust Center has raised $44 million, about 70% of its $63 million goal, she said. The budget for the proposed museum has varied since the project was announced more than five years ago. At one point, it had ballooned to upward of $100 million, which put a pause on the project to refine the plans.
During a Jan. 15 invited preview of the new “Hope & Humanity” exhibit at the Holocaust Center in Maitland, Joanie Schirm stands near a display in which visitors can use their cellphones to hear letters written by her father, Oswald “Valdik” Holzer, a Holocaust survivor. (Courtesy Holocaust Center)
The hope is to start renovating the building in September, with an expected opening of the new facility in early 2028, Sterling said.
In the meantime, the “Hope & Humanity” preview exhibit has taken over the entire main gallery of the current center. It starts with context of the discrimination Jews have faced since the earliest days of recorded history before moving into the rise of Nazism.
Artifacts, including art looted from one family by the Nazis and later recovered from an art museum in the German city of Potsdam, are on view. Letters about wartime experiences uncovered by the children of one survivor after his death can be listened to via the Snapchat app on a cellphone.
At the new “Hope & Humanity” exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial Research and Education Center in Maitland, visitors can use a color-coded key to follow the true accounts of Holocaust survivors who later settled in Central Florida. The new exhibit, the centerpiece of the Holocaust Center, opened Jan. 18. (Matthew J. Palm/Orlando Sentinel)
Touring the exhibit should take about an hour for most visitors, Grimmer said. They can follow a particular local survivor’s story by using a color-coded system — or read all nine narratives. The exhibit extends the accounts into the survivors’ post-war life in Central Florida, and also includes a section on local anti-Semitism of more recent times, including a photo of a 2023 neo-Nazi rally in Orlando.
That image marks a departure from a deliberate omission in the rest of the exhibit.
“This is the first time to see a swastika in full,” Grimmer said of the photo, in which white supremacists carry flags emblazoned with the Nazi symbol, “to remind you it doesn’t end with the Holocaust.”
Artwork looted from the Hess family by Nazis and later found in a German museum are on view as part of the Holocaust Memorial Research and Education’s Center’s new “Hope & Humanity” exhibition, which opened Jan. 18 at the Maitland museum. (Courtesy Holocaust Center)
Sterling pointed out that thousands of students, mostly middle-school age, will visit the new “Hope & Humanity” exhibit on upcoming field trips.
Grimmer said she hoped they, and all visitors, would be moved by the first-person stories, including the ones from those who were children during the Holocaust.
“Numbers alone don’t change the hearts of our visitors or guide their behavioral choices,” she said. “Empathy is our teaching tool. Empathy creates responsibility. You see these are real people — your neighbors who built their lives here.”
Interim CEO Emily Sterling, right, greets a visitor at a Jan. 15 preview of the new “Hope & Humanity” exhibition at the Holocaust Memorial Research and Education Center in Maitland. The new exhibit gives a glimpse of how information will be shared in the planned Holocaust Museum of Hope & Humanity in downtown Orlando. (Courtesy Holocaust Center)
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If you go
Where: Holocaust Memorial Research and Education Center of Florida at the Roth Family Jewish Community Center of Greater Orlando, 851 N. Maitland Ave. in Maitland
When: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and Sunday; closed on Monday and Saturday
Cost: Free, but you must register for an entry time to the “Hope & Humanity” exhibit at the center’s website
Info: hmrec.org
