Construction begins on new Montreal Holocaust Museum

Construction on the new Montreal Holocaust Museum began on Tuesday and work is expected to continue until the end of 2025.

The new establishment will be inaugurated at the beginning of 2026 at 3535 Saint-Laurent Blvd. in the Plateau Mont-Royal borough, if all goes as planned.

“It’s a symbol of our conviction that the fight against anti-Semitism requires education, and our museum’s fundamental vocation is education,” said the president of the Montreal Holocaust Museum, Jacques Saada. “We will to be able to serve more people, more students, to raise their awareness about the Holocaust and genocide in general.”

The project was launched in February 2022.

The new museum will be located at the junction of the museum corridor and the entertainment district, on 20,000-square-foot site.

The building however, will have an area of 45,000 square feet, since it will rise on more than one storey.

It will notably have larger permanent and temporary exhibition spaces, a youth area, a room dedicated to interactive hologram testimonies, state-of-the-art classrooms, a 150-seat auditorium, a commemorative space and a memorial garden.

The new museum will place greater emphasis on technology and interactivity, in the hopes of capturing the attention of a younger audience.

Around $3 million will be devoted to this aspect out of a total budget of $120 million.

The Montreal Holocaust Museum has some 13,500 objects in its collection, but the space it had until now only allowed it to present a tiny fraction of them, 350.

In November 2023, the Montreal Holocaust Museum recorded the highest number of visitors in its history.

It is estimated that some 35,000 Holocaust survivors have rebuilt their lives in Canada, including 9,000 who have settled in Montreal.

—This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French and translated by CityNews