WASHINGTON (JTA) – The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is seeking messages and personal artifacts from Holocaust survivors that will be placed in a time capsule to be opened on the museum’s 50th anniversary in 2043.

The capsule will be on display in the museum’s David and Fela Shapell Family Collections and Conservation Center in Bowie, Maryland, which is scheduled to be opened next year.

“Every day the museum engages in a battle to rescue truth and keep Holocaust memory alive – a battle that will only intensify with each passing year,” Sara Bloomfield, the museum director, said Monday in a statement.

The time capsule will first go to Florida this month, before collecting items from California, Illinois and New York. It will then return to Washington, D.C.

When opened, the Shapell Center is expected to provide enough space to allow the museum’s collections to double in size in the next 10 years.

Currently, the museum houses more than 18,000 objects, 76 million pages of documents, 135 million digital images, more than 88,000 photographs and images, and more than 14,000 oral testimonies by survivors, witnesses and perpetrators.

“We need to be able to tell this story from every perspective,” Bloomfield said.

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