The story of the Holocaust cannot be told in one simple way, there are many complex individual stories that make up the more complete Holocaust. Museums thus struggle with the issue of trying to decide how to represent the Holocaust and encounter the dilemma of trying to decide what information to include and what to omit. Los Angeles is a prime example of this struggle because they have two Holocaust museums, only a few miles apart, which have completely different backgrounds and motives, therefore leading them to represent the Holocaust in very different ways. The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, founded in 1961 by Holocaust survivors and their families, serves stark contrast to the government-funded Museum of Tolerance due to the different stories they tell and different motives that they possess.
The Museum of Tolerance is a good introduction for the average person …show more content…
For this reason, their goal is to have every tour group, and hopefully every visitor, meet a survivor because their generation will not be around much longer and they will need people to carry on their stories and their legacies. Meeting survivors is also their way of making such a horrific and almost unbelievable situation seem more real and relatable. However, the museum does have to generalize Holocaust stories to an extent in order to appeal to audiences who are not educated about the Holocaust and because they cannot possibly tell everyone’s stories because of the limited space and inability to get everyone 's stories. They do attempt to show individual stories though with 70 television screens showing individual testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation in a tree of testimonies, an obvious analogy to the tree of life, along with having a small, enclosed room dedicated to listening to individual testimonies that appeal to that specific
The Museum of Tolerance is a good introduction for the average person …show more content…
For this reason, their goal is to have every tour group, and hopefully every visitor, meet a survivor because their generation will not be around much longer and they will need people to carry on their stories and their legacies. Meeting survivors is also their way of making such a horrific and almost unbelievable situation seem more real and relatable. However, the museum does have to generalize Holocaust stories to an extent in order to appeal to audiences who are not educated about the Holocaust and because they cannot possibly tell everyone’s stories because of the limited space and inability to get everyone 's stories. They do attempt to show individual stories though with 70 television screens showing individual testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation in a tree of testimonies, an obvious analogy to the tree of life, along with having a small, enclosed room dedicated to listening to individual testimonies that appeal to that specific