Qualla: Holocaust Museum in Curitiba

Holocaust Museum in Curitiba: Introduction

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In a 400-square-meter space within the Beit Yaacov synagogue in central Curitiba, the names of the Righteous Among the Nations line the walls. These are the people who risked their lives to shelter Jews during the Holocaust, and their presence here, thousands of miles from the camps and ghettos where they acted, speaks to the museum's founding purpose: memory does not belong to one place. When the Holocaust Museum in Curitiba opened on November 20, 2011, it became the first museum of its kind in Brazil, a country that received thousands of Holocaust survivors in the postwar years and where the obligation to remember has taken root far from Europe.

Holocaust Museum in Curitiba: A Cosmetics Founder's Act of Remembrance

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The museum was conceived by Miguel Krigsner, president of the Associacao Casa de Cultura Beit Yaacov and founder of O Boticario, one of Brazil's largest cosmetics companies. Krigsner partnered with Base7 Projetos Culturais, a firm specializing in cultural exhibitions, to design a...

Holocaust Museum in Curitiba: Voices from the Archives

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The museum draws its audiovisual material from institutions that represent the global infrastructure of Holocaust remembrance. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and the USC Shoah Foundation, which holds tens of thousands of videot...

Holocaust Museum in Curitiba: Eight Hundred Witnesses

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The inauguration on November 20, 2011, drew approximately 800 people. Brazil's Secretary for Human Rights, Maria do Rosario, attended alongside Parana's governor Beto Richa, Israel's ambassador Rafael Eldad, and Curitiba's mayor Luciano Ducci. Former governor Jaime Lerner, himsel...

Holocaust Museum in Curitiba: Memory at a Distance

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Brazil may seem an unlikely location for a Holocaust museum, but the country's Jewish community has deep roots, and many of its members arrived as refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. The museum sits within the Centro Israelita do Parana, the institutional heart of Parana state's ...