Holocaust Museum Houston

Holocaust Museum Houston educates about the Holocaust, honors victims, and promotes human rights through exhibitions and educational programs.

Planning your visit

Holocaust Museum Houston was founded in 1996 by survivors who had settled in the city, and their testimony remains central to it. It expanded substantially in 2019 into a much larger purpose-built facility, making it one of the largest Holocaust museums in the United States.

The permanent exhibition, "Bearing Witness", traces the Holocaust chronologically with a particular emphasis on Houston-area survivors, whose recorded accounts run through the galleries. Two objects anchor the visit: an original Danish rescue boat of the type used to ferry Jews to neutral Sweden in 1943, and a restored 1942 German railcar of the kind used for deportations, which visitors can enter.

The museum extends beyond the Holocaust into other genocides — Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur — and into human rights education and contemporary questions of prejudice, which is the explicit purpose behind the exhibitions rather than an appendix to them. A Samuel Bak gallery holds a substantial collection by the survivor-painter.

Allow two to three hours. It sits in the Museum District. The main booking is an entry ticket. Current availability is shown below.