Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center
non-profit organization in the USA
The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is a museum located in Skokie, Illinois, near Chicago. According to the Center's mission statement, its founding principle is to "Remember the Past; Transform the Future." Its mission is to preserve the legacy of the Holocaust by honoring victims' memories and to educate in the service of combating hatred, prejudice, and indifference. The Museum fulfills its mission through its collections-based exhibitions and through education programs and other initiatives that promote human rights and the elimination of genocide.
History
In 1981 the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois was founded. Shortly after, a 5,000 square foot museum was opened in 1984, located in a storefront on Main Street in Skokie, Illinois. The foundation and small museum were established as a response to a Neo-Nazi group's attempt to march through Skokie, in which many Holocaust survivors had settled in the decades following the atrocities.
On April 19, 2009, the current museum opened to the public in a new building with festivities including a keynote speech by Bill Clinton with Elie Wiesel in attendance. President Barack Obama spoke through a recorded video message, as did Shimon Peres, president of Israel.
Security arrangements at the museum were tightened after the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting on June 10, 2009. Currently, the museum's volunteers include members of the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace and the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service (since 2009) that work for the museum.
“Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center” enters the record as non-profit organization in the USA. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Illinois, Holocaust and Museum can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q445086. VIAF identifies the subject as 158661339. The Library of Congress control number is no2008063011. Authority coordinates are 42.056, -87.761. 3 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1981, 1984 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.