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The Atlantic City Boardwalk Holocaust Memorial oganization (ACBHM,
Inc.) is sponsoring an open, two-stage competition to choose a design for a Memorial to the Holocaust. The Memorial
will be located at a prominent public site, an existing seaside pavilion on the world famous Atlantic City Boardwalk, against
the magnificent backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean. Each year approximately 35 million visitors walk on the Boardwalk and at least
10 million pass directly by our site.
The Memorial is intended to commemorate the Holocaust in a way that is universal
and enduring. It is envisioned to be a compelling visual statement at a significant public place, not a museum. To explain
or depict the Holocaust is not our primary goal. Rather, we seek in this Memorial to inspire a vivid and continuing awareness
of the terrible loss to humanity, history and culture which the Holocaust represents. Its purpose is to fix our collective
memory, to bear witness, to embrace the ineffable sense of loss. The committee
sees in this location an unprecedented opportunity to reach out and touch the generally impassive and silent majority, to
inspire awareness among both Jewish and non-Jewish society, and to encourage deep reflection on the consequences of denying
fundamental rights, human hope, and common humanity to any group or individual, particularly so when mass silence and indifference
allows this to happen. The Memorial must speak to visitors of diverse races and origins, and find a means for dealing with
the unspeakable, and some would say the unknowable, nature of the Holocaust. "If done effectively, the Atlantic City Boardwalk Holocaust Memorial could become
one of the most important vehicles in the world for transmitting a universal legacy message of 'common humanity' and 'never
again' to unprecedented multitudes for generations to come." Shaya ben Yehudah, Director,
Yad VaShem, Holocaust Center, Jerusalem, Israel
MISSION STATEMENT
TO REMEMBER the suffering is to recognize the Danger and Evil that are present whenever one group wantonly and unjustifiably
persecutes another. The Holocaust was the ultimate act of malignant and lethal Bigotry. The memory of the Holocaust is the legacy and responsibility of all Humanity.
Our overall objectives in building this Memorial are to witness History and reaffirm the basic Human Rights of our common
Humanity. Those who survived the Shoah require no aids for their indelible Memories. It is those of us who were not there
that Demand such a Memorial, and our Descendants will depend on it even more than We.
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