Atlantic City Boardwalk Holocaust Memorial

The Atlantic City Boardwalk Holocaust Memorial corporation (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. Official counts demonstrate that 35 million annual visitors to the boardwalk translates to more than 10 million pass by our site each and every year.

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.