Museum director keeps Holocaust relevant as times change

washington | Sara Bloomfield, director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, almost seems too busy to celebrate the upcoming dinner honoring her for the 20 years of work she's done for the museum.

Between courting donors, worrying about maintaining the Jewish community's commitment to the museum, negotiating for access to additional Holocaust records and artifacts and brainstorming new ways to get out the Holocaust message in a changing world, celebratory dinners seem the last thing on her mind.

One thing Bloomfield isn't doing: fighting with her staff and board. Working in partnership with Fred Zeidman, a political appointee who heads the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, she has brought stability to an institution marked in the past by political controversies and internal dissension.

"The museum is a more stable, less contentious place," said a former member of the council. "Sara has shown an ability to work with all factions without diluting the content of the museum and while expanding its role."

The changing demographics of museum visitors are influencing the choice of exhibitions, she said. When it opened in 1993 and for the first few years of operation, about 40 percent of visitors were Jewish; the number is down to 10 percent.

That means finding ways to lay a conceptual foundation for visitors "for whom anti-Semitism is not on their radar screens," Bloomfield said in a recent interview.

An example: An exhibit due to open this month offers a detailed look at the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and how that figured into both traditional anti-Semitism and the propaganda of the Nazi era — and how it continues to produce hatred against Jews in today's world.

The museum, Bloomfield said, is seeking contemporary relevance without injecting itself into politics.

Another element in the museum's effort to become more "transformative" for visitors, she said, is its effort to use the lessons of the Holocaust to generate interest in preventing new genocides. Visiting heads of state are now taken directly from the permanent exhibition to an exhibit on Darfur.

The museum is also expanding its role in Holocaust scholarship and education in an effort to insure these functions do not die out with the survivor generation.

The museum is playing a greater role in "setting the standards and training leaders for Holocaust education," Bloomfield said.

She describes a feeling of urgency unusual in the museum world.

"Our colleagues across the Mall at the Museum of American History know that years from now, American history will be taught, that there will be professors to teach it. We don't necessarily know that when it comes to the Holocaust. So we need to constantly nurture this field, to engage new people who will help us do this work in the future."