On an early-autumn afternoon on Sept. 9, 1979, about two weeks before the High Holidays, a group of Holocaust survivors and other members of Montreal’s Jewish community took a short, solemn walk from the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in the Snowdon neighbourhood, to the basement of the Jewish community campus on Côte-Sainte-Catherine Road.
Leading the group was Tibor Weinberger carrying an urn containing ashes from Auschwitz-Birkenau, flanked by fellow survivors Aba Beer and Issie Veisfeld, and young community leader Steven Cummings. The urn symbolized both the millions murdered in the Holocaust and the responsibility to preserve their memory, in a campaign to create the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, the first dedicated Holocaust museum in North America.
March of Association of Survivors of Nazi Oppression in Montreal, with ashes to be placed in a new Holocaust museum, September 1979.
Founded by members of the Association of Survivors of Nazi Oppression, the centre reflected the city’s unique postwar history: Nearly 10,000 survivors rebuilt their lives in Montreal, (the third largest survivor population in the world after Tel Aviv and New York City,) and they brought with them photographs, documents, religious objects and deeply personal stories that became the foundation of the centre, which 38 years later was renamed the Montreal Holocaust Museum (MHM).
That urn has served as the final stop on the museum’s permanent exhibition tour, a solemn conclusion to the story of the destruction of European Jewry. It sits perched atop a surviving fragment of a stone column from the entrance to Warsaw’s Great Synagogue of Tlomackie Street, which was destroyed in May 1943, following the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as part of a final Nazi push to obliterate every shred of Jewish presence in the city.
Communications director Sarah Fogg explains the history of an urn, and column from Warsaw. (Credit: Joel Ceausu)
Those artifacts are being removed from the museum ahead of a new journey this fall, as the institution founded in the basement of the Cummings Centre moves to its new, purpose-built downtown location on Saint-Laurent Boulevard.
The permanent exhibition closed on June 30, with staff dismantling displays, cataloguing and carefully packing the invaluable artifacts housed there for nearly half a century. The collection has grown to more than 13,000 artifacts (of which some 400 are on display) and 850 recorded survivor testimonies. The work continues into the fall, when the remaining collection and holdings will be moved to the new 55,000-square-foot museum near the heart of Montreal’s historic Jewish immigrant district.
Scheduled to open in 2027, with a projected cost of $135 million (including a $25 million endowment), the new museum will feature expanded permanent and temporary exhibitions, and public gathering spaces. More importantly, it will place the stories of Montreal’s survivors before an even broader audience of students, visitors and tourists in the heart of the city.
More than an address change
The move represents far more than an address change, but the coming-of-age of an institution founded by survivors who understood that memory must be actively preserved. For decades, the MHM welcomed students, educators and the general public, sharing first-hand testimony that transformed the Holocaust from detachedhistory lesson into lived experience.
The museum has organized seminars, hosted guest speakers and inspired research, with initiatives ranging from a day-long seminar on Holocaust studies for non-Jewish Francophone educators to assisting the translation of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning into Uyghur.
Co-president Jacques Saada says nearly half a century after survivors carried ashes from Auschwitz through the streets of Snowdon, the mission remains unchanged: to bear witness, confront hatred through education, and ensure the voices of survivors, some 3,200 of them residing in Montreal, continue to resonate.
“The museum was founded by people who had a dream, and they set up the fundamentals of a mission,” the former federal cabinet minister told The CJN. “But this mission doesn’t end with a place. A mission travels with those carrying it forward, it grows. It is renewed. And that is what we are doing.”
While the new museum is spacious enough to display more of the thousands of objects in storage, the goal is not simply to fill the new building with artifacts, says MHM communications director Sarah Fogg. The new exhibition is still being finalized, she said on the exhibit’s last day, “but it won’t be dramatically larger. People often assume a bigger museum means many more objects, but that’s not really the goal.”
Current museum practice emphasizes displaying slightly fewer objects so visitors have the time and space to truly engage with them, which is what they are trying to achieve. “The space itself matters, but so does the way people experience it. Our thematic approach also changes how visitors engage with the subject. It’s a different way of telling the story.”
Moving and reinstalling a museum collection is a lengthy and meticulous process because many objects require custom-built crates to ensure they’re protected, and every object must be packed, transported, conserved, and installed in a new space. The goal, says Fogg, is to have the new permanent exhibit ready for next spring. “That’s the plan. The actual move will take place in the fall, but building the new permanent exhibition alone will take between six and eight months, so it’s an enormous undertaking.”
She says the permanent exhibition remained essentially unchanged since 2003. “Once you’ve seen it, there hasn’t really been a reason to come back. In the new museum, we’ll have the new exhibition, a dedicated children’s exhibition, and we can host professionally curated exhibitions from museums around the world. We’ll also have a flexible multi-purpose gallery where community organizations, for example the Rwandan community, could present smaller exhibitions they’ve developed.”
Until now, the exhibition occupied space in the Cummings building lower level, with museum events staged in rooms off the ground-floor corridors. Staff worked in offices on the floors above, alongside other Federation and affiliated spaces. The new, fully accessible museum spans three floors, plus a basement with additional space and a lunchroom for visiting groups.
Holocaust education continues through school workshops and public events, and the MHM will try to continue offering these services throughout the transition into the new building.
The new downtown Montreal Holocaust Museum nearing completion. (Supplied photo)
“We’re going back to our ‘hood”
Co-president and survivor Rae Gropper is beyond excited about the move. “I’m just so completely passionately committed to this. It’s such a reflection of my life, of my family.” The first survivor co-president of the museum, she says it’s “been wonderful to be sort of in the middle of our mishpacha (Hebrew for family)” in this Jewish campus and neighbourhood.
“We’re not severing any relationship with our community, that’s still our core, but there will be expanded opportunities to work with other communities who experience what our community has.
“We’re going back to our ‘hood, which I remember as a child. To where the universities are, the core of tourism and downtown, and we have a greater opportunity to expose non-Jewish people, students, and institutions to us. But it’s like your kids going away to school: You’re glad they’re going, but there’s always that soulful moment about hanging on, because you get used to the comfort of home.”
Fogg agrees the move evokes mixed emotions. “We’ve been looking forward to this moment because it’s an extraordinary new chapter in the museum’s history. It will transform not only the museum itself but also the way Canadians access Holocaust education.”
As the MHM becomes part of Montreal’s broader museum landscape in a building designed specifically for its mission, she says it feels like “leaving our comfort zone, surrounded by our own community, and that’s an important part of our history. But the museum has always seen itself as a bridge between the Jewish community and the broader public. The new location allows us to strengthen that role and reach many more people.”
Survivors remain a familiar presence at Cummings, visiting the library, attending events, or simply passing through. Downtown, the museum will have different neighbours and far greater public visibility. “People won’t have to come to the Jewish community campus to learn about the Holocaust,” says Fogg. “We’ll be in the heart of downtown Montreal, where people already are, and our impact will be amplified in meaningful ways.”
Currently housed primarily on the lower level of the southwest corner of the four-storey Cummings House, its entrance across the lobby from the Jewish Public Library, the museum has long occupied what is considered a safe environment to discuss difficult subjects like antisemitism, hatred, genocide, and the Holocaust.
Moving downtown raises new security concerns: Montreal’s Jewish institutions have faced frequent anti-Israel demonstrations and antisemitic incidents over the past two years, making security a central consideration in museum planning.
“We’ve worked closely with Federation from the beginning to develop a comprehensive security plan,” says Fogg. “Even design decisions reflected those conversations.” One example is a wall bearing names of cities and towns destroyed during the Holocaust. “We discussed whether displaying the names could invite vandalism but ultimately decided they were essential. They’re part of our identity. Security is something we think about constantly, but so is the importance of bearing witness.”
Founding president and former Federation CJA president Cummings, now 76,says “bittersweet is exactly the word” to describe the feeling about the move. “I’m happy that as a community, we have the courage to do this. It was nice being at home, so to speak, but at some point, everybody’s got to leave.”
Understanding the specificity
He says the move downtown “is kind of going from one Jewish neighbourhood to another, but the important thing is that it communicate the passion and importance of remembering, of understanding the specificity of the Holocaust, the Jewish Holocaust, and that however you want to look at it, we own it, and we don’t want to dilute it. At the same time, it can be a tool that helps society as a whole be more respectful and tolerant.”
It’s a long way from the earliest planning discussions in 1976: “We were committed to something beyond symbolism,” he told The CJN. “The Holocaust wasn’t talked about that much, but we grew up seeing parents, neighbours and relatives with numbers on their arms. Still, it wasn’t talked about in the community, anywhere, really.”
He was a young father in 1976 when he was struck by a visit to Yad Vashem (the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem), “and the feeling that you couldn’t protect your family was something that haunted me. It brought me back to when (architect of the Holocaust) Adolf Eichmann was captured and understanding that Jews were more than a religion: we were a people.”
That “epiphany” was part of how he began to define himself, he recalls, and it came with “a duty to pass it on and understand how fundamental the Holocaust was for who you were, whether you liked it or not. We were committed to telling a story and had the tremendous resources of Holocaust survivors who could tell that story.” Cummings says thematic exhibits are important “because we endeavoured to not only translate the horror of the Holocaust and of the death camps, but also the culture and the Jewish life that was lost, the generations never born.”
Saada says the new museum will reach more students, strengthen partnerships with universities, and engage visitors from around the world, who he hopes will leave as “ambassadors,” sharing the museum’s commitment to human rights.
Asked whether the museum’s mission has taken on greater urgency since Oct. 7, the Tunisian-born Saada said current events only reinforce its importance. “You can measure crimes committed, but you cannot measure crimes avoided.” Reaching other communities, particularly those that have also experienced genocide, remains central to that mission. “Striving for peace is not naïve; it is an act of courage. We can fight antisemitism through Jewish values, education and solidarity. Antisemitism has existed for millennia, and we have a duty to keep teaching history and conveying the words of our survivors.”
Gropper, 85, agrees. She came to Canada as an 8-year-old, born to Polish parents who survived the bombings of Warsaw, and made their way east into the Soviet Union where they, like thousands of other Jews, were detained and forced onto trains and sent to gulags in Siberia and other areas deep inside the USSR.
In Canada, she enjoyed a long career in education, both in the classroom and as an administrator. “I’m an old lady and not very militant,” she laughs. “My weapon of choice is education, and speaking to groups, schools, and professions, about what this horror meant and represents, is my way of addressing what is currently a very difficult climate for us.”
This “new era, is an incredible opportunity to teach, talk, and show what this has meant to humanity. Does the world of AI and digital media manipulate and distort things? Of course. I just have to open my phone any morning. But my mandate is strong: to my last breath, to be able to tell people what we experienced, and why.”
Speaking in non-Jewish communities, colleges, and universities, and to non-Jewish groups, she says it makes a difference: “Whether it’s long term? A research study will have to be done. But there is a difference when they confront and talk to people like me, and we present our stories and our displays and exhibits. God knows what circumstances in life holds for us, but this is a very important piece of our community here in Montreal and in Canada.”
Joel has spent his entire adult life scribbling. For two decades, he freelanced for more than a dozen North American and European trade publications, writing on home decor, HR, agriculture, defense technologies and more. Having lived at 14 addresses in and around Greater Montreal, for 17 years he worked as reporter for a local community newspaper, covering the education, political and municipal beats in seven cities and boroughs. He loves to bike, swim, watch NBA and kvetch about politics.