By Suzanne Vanderhoef

The St. Louis Holocaust Museum is about to get a major facelift. The new St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum is going to be about 36,000 square feet – about four times the size of the current museum. And all that space is going to be filled with a chronology of the Holocaust told through the voices and images of St. Louis survivors, liberators and witnesses to the Holocaust.

 “We made a conscious decision to make sure that the voices of St. Louis Holocaust survivors are telling their story,” says Amy Lutz, Manager of Marketing and Communications for the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum. “So, as you’re going through the museum, and you can actually see quotes, you’ll see photos, you’ll see artifacts from St. Louis Holocaust survivors, some liberators and some witnesses throughout the museum. So, it’s really them telling their own story.”

The new museum will also have something called “activated artifacts,” which are artifacts equipped with sensors so that when you swipe your hand over it, you’ll hear the voice of a survivor explaining the importance of that particular object.

“It’s a reminder that Jewish life was vibrant and diverse and cultured and looked a lot different in a lot different places before the Holocaust,” explains Lutz.

The new St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum is set to open to the public in November 2022.