Four stories above Tremont Street, catercorner to the Park Street T stop, an authentic Holocaust-era railcar will be one of the most visible features of Holocaust Museum Boston, under construction and slated to open in spring.
The 12-ton railcar, suspended within a glass enclosure on Tremont Street, introduces questions that will recur throughout the museum: What happened? How did it happen? What choices did people and institutions make, and why does understanding those choices still matter?

The railcar’s highly visible placement is intentional and will be visible to both museum visitors and people passing outside. The museum’s creator, Jody Kipnis, explains that she wants people walking the Freedom Trail and on tours on Tremont Street to see the railcar and consider its significance.

“We want the museum to be connected to the city around it,” she says. “Thousands of people will pass this building every day, including people walking the Freedom Trail and riding Boston’s sightseeing tours. They may encounter the museum before they ever walk through our doors.

“Museum visitors will be able to enter the authentic railcar while learning about deportation during the Holocaust. The museum does not attempt to recreate or simulate the experience of those who were deported. Instead, the railcar is presented as a historical object through which visitors can confront the reality of what happened to individuals and families who were forced aboard trains during the Holocaust.”

Standing on the entry platform next to the railcar, Kipnis motions to the crowds of people and vehicles on Tremont Street.

The museum sits on one of Boston’s busiest sightseeing corridors, steps from the Freedom Trail. Kipnis plans to work with local tour operators so the museum becomes part of how visitors encounter and think about the city’s history.

Kipnis imagines Freedom Trail and sightseeing guides using the visible railcar to prompt questions rather than immediately telling passengers what conclusion to draw.

The museum’s relationship with the surrounding city is also visible from inside. From the upper floors, visitors can see the Statehouse across from the Boston Common and Boston City Hall down Tremont Street. The museum, in turn, is visible from the civic landscape surrounding it. That relationship is intentional, Kipnis says. A museum examining the consequences of democratic fragility will sit within sight of institutions representing democracy and civic life today.

The museum does not draw direct equivalencies between the Holocaust and contemporary events. Instead, it asks visitors to study the patterns, choices and intuitions that shaped the history and to consider why understanding those patterns still matters.

Kipnis, who grew up in Malden and lives in Boston, co-founded the Holocaust Legacy Foundation with Todd Ruderman in 2019. The nonprofit foundation is developing Holocaust Museum Boston, and Kipnis serves as its president and CEO.

As president and CEO, Kipnis is leading the development of the museum, including its exhibitions, educational vision, fundraising, and preparation for opening. She is also leading the foundation’s $110 million campaign to complete the museum and support its long-term operation and educational mission.

“I often say that I hope there comes a time when the need for a museum like this no longer exists,” Kipnis says. “Unfortunately, I don’t believe that day is coming anytime soon. The history of the Holocaust remains deeply relevant, particularly as we continue to confront antisemitism, hatred and threats to democratic values.”

At Holocaust Museum Boston, Kipnis wants visitors to encounter rigorous Holocaust history and consider for themselves what it means to them personally.

“We’re not telling visitors that there is one prescribed lesson of the Holocaust.’” She says. “Our responsibility is to present the history thoughtfully and accurately, ask meaningful questions, and give visitors the opportunity to think deeply about what the history means to them.”

The museum will use immersive and interactive exhibits to present Holocaust history while asking visitors questions that encourage reflection, conversation, and critical thinking.

On the glass-walled sixth floor, a large space will be used for events, lectures and presentations; for smaller groups, it can be partitioned into thirds. “We want this to be more than a place people visit once,” Kipnis says. “We want to be part of the Greater Boston community, and we want this space to be used for education, programs, conversation, and community gathering.”

Visitors start on the fifth floor, where focused sound installations ask: “Who decides who belongs and who doesn’t?” “How are your actions guided by your values?” and “What are our responsibilities to each other?”

“At the heart of the museum are connection, conversation and community,” Kipnis says. “We don’t want this to be a passive experience. We want people asking questions, talking to one another and thinking about what they are encountering.”

Visitors are then introduced to three virtual hosts with different backgrounds, identities, and life experiences. Rather than serving as authorities who tell visitors what to think, the hosts are intended to offer different points of connection and help visitors consider why Holocaust history matters regardless of their own background.

“That is exactly the kind of question we want visitors to be comfortable asking themselves,” Kipnis says. “‘Why am I here? What does this history have to do with me?’ We don’t assume everyone who walks through our doors is going to arrive with the same knowledge, background or connection to this history.”

The hosts and other elements of the museum were developed through extensive visitor testing, including feedback from young people and museum advisers. “We learned that young people didn’t want technology simply for the sake of technology,” Kipnis says. “They wanted it when it helped them engage, learn, and reflect. Technology is a tool here. It isn’t the experience.”

From the introductory gallery, visitors move through five floors of exhibitions exploring the richness and diversity of Jewish life before the Holocaust, the rise of Nazism and antisemitism, the erosion of democracy, persecution, ghettos, deportations, mass murder, resistance, liberation, survival and the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Historical artifacts, photographs, documents, testimony, recreated environments and interactive media introduce visitors not only to what happened, but to the individuals, families and communities whose lives were forever changed.

As the history progresses, visitors encounter the conditions that made persecution possible: the weakening of democratic institutions, the rise of Nazi ideology, propaganda, antisemitism, increasingly discriminatory laws and the gradual exclusion of Jews from German society.

Throughout the galleries, technology deepens, but does not replace, that history. Interactive media allow visitors to explore historical material, while survivor testimony keeps individual voices at the center of the experience. For example, USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony allows visitors to ask questions and hear relevant responses drawn from extensive recorded interviews with Holocaust survivors.

The same philosophy informs the museum’s presentation of the railcar suspended above Tremont Street. Visitors will be able to enter the railcar while learning about the deportation of Jews and other victims during the Holocaust.

As visitors continue through the Holocaust, the museum repeatedly returns to questions about human behavior and choice.

How does propaganda influence what people believe? What happens when prejudice becomes normalized? How do democratic institutions become fragile? What role do individuals and institutions play when groups of people are increasingly excluded from society? Why do some people conform while others resist?

For Kipnis, those questions are not an attempt to turn the Holocaust into an analogy for contemporary events.

“The Holocaust was a specific historical event, and we have a responsibility to teach it accurately,” she says. “We are not saying that what is happening today is the Holocaust. But when we study this history, we can recognize patterns in human behavior – antisemitism, propaganda, exclusion, the erosion of democratic norms, bystander behavior, resistance and moral courage. We want visitors to recognize those patterns and think critically about them.”

Rather than telling visitors what conclusions to reach, exhibits repeatedly ask them to examine evidence, consider sources, and question how information is created and spread.

The museum also makes clear that antisemitism did not begin with the Holocaust and did not disappear with the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. As visitors move closer to the present, they encounter contemporary antisemitism and are given tools to recognize its changing forms.

“If we are going to teach Holocaust history responsibly, we also have to help people understand antisemitism,” Kipnis says. “It existed before the Holocaust, it was central to Nazi ideology and persecution, and it continues today. Understanding what antisemitism looks like and how it spreads is part of understanding why this history still matters.”

But Kipnis emphasizes an important distinction: recognizing patterns does not mean declaring two historical moments equivalent. “We’re not telling visitors what to think about the world today,” she says. “We’re giving them history, evidence, and questions and asking them to think more deeply.”

That emphasis on individual and institutional choice becomes increasingly important as visitors move through the museum. The Holocaust was not carried out by a handful of Nazi leaders alone. Government agencies and institutions participated in persecution, and individuals across professions and communities made profoundly different choices.

“Government officials made choices. Judges made choices. Police officers and physicians made choices. Businesspeople and ordinary citizens made choices,” Kipnis says. “Some participated in persecution. Some collaborated or facilitated it. Some looked away. Some resisted. And some demonstrated extraordinary moral courage. Those distinctions matter.

“We all make choices. The circumstances are not the same, but we still make choices about how we treat other people, what we accept, what we question, when we speak and when we remain silent.”

The visitor journey ultimately moves from history toward reflection and then to a question of agency.

That transition culminates in the museum’s Action Lab. Rather than giving visitors a prescribed list of actions or telling them what political or social positions they should adopt, the Action Lab asks them to consider what they will do with what they have learned.

For one visitor, that may mean becoming better equipped to recognize antisemitism. Another may think differently about the information they consume or share. Others may consider how they respond when someone is excluded, how they participate in their communities, how they engage in difficult conversations or what moral courage can mean in their own lives.

“The Action Lab isn’t about us saying, ‘Here’s what you have to go do,’” Kipnis says. “The question is: Now that you have encountered this history, what will you do with it?”

For Kipnis, that progression from learning to questioning, from questioning to conversation, and from conversation to action captures the larger philosophy behind Holocaust Museum Boston.

“It comes back to connection, conversation and community,” she says. “Our responsibility is to teach the history accurately and honestly. We can ask questions. We can create opportunities for reflection. We can bring people into conversation with one another. But ultimately, they have to do the thinking themselves.”

For Kipnis, the goal is not to change visitors. It is to create an environment in which they can think more deeply.

“I don’t want to tell people what to think,” she says. “I want to give them the opportunity to think more deeply, to think about who they are, the choices they make and what responsibilities we have to one another.”

Eventually, visitors leave the galleries and return to the same city they could see from the museum’s upper floors: the Statehouse, City Hall, Boston Common and the streets surrounding the museum.

“We are not asking visitors to leave here thinking that today is the 1930s or that every injustice is the Holocaust,” Kipnis says. “That would diminish the history. We want them to leave understanding what happened, understanding more about how it became possible and thinking more deeply about the world they are walking back into.

“My hope is that when people leave this museum, they think a little more deeply about the choices they make, the responsibilities they have to other people and the role they play in their communities.”

The museum experience ends by leaving visitors with one question: “Who will you be?” Θ