“We can’t let people ever forget,” said Leo Wolf, chairman emeritus of the St. Louis Holocaust Committee and a Holocaust survivor, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s 1995 coverage of the opening of the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center.

“We have been working [to open] a museum for 20 years, since someday survivors will not be here to tell the story. Many who helped on this museum have died. Now their stories won’t be lost.”

April 23, 2025, marks 30 years since that moment. Wolf, along with most of the 363 survivors and liberators who attended the grand opening, has since passed away. But their legacy endures—in the memories they shared, the community they built, and the stories that continue to be told in classrooms, exhibitions, and family conversations across our region.

The Museum began as a “labor of love,” in the words of Post-Dispatch reporter Patricia Rice, built by its founders like Wolf, Tom Green, William Kahn, Rabbi Robert Sternberg, and countless community members. It was also the fulfillment of a dream of many of the over 900 Holocaust survivors who settled in St. Louis—refugees who rebuilt their lives here in St. Louis. Their goal wasn’t simply to look back at history, but to sound an alarm for the future.

The timing of the opening underscored that urgency. It took place just four days after the Oklahoma City bombing—a reminder that extremism, hatred, and domestic terrorism were not relics of the past. As Tom Green said during the dedication, “We can witness today the results of hatred and violence… these events make it all the more important that we re-double our efforts to teach the lessons of the Holocaust.”

Those lessons remain painfully relevant. According to the FBI and organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, hate crimes, antisemitism, and extremist violence continue to pose a serious threat. While the Oklahoma City bombing remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history, most of the other top incidents—including the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, the deadliest attack on a Jewish community in American history—have taken place within the past decade.

The stories at the heart of Holocaust education are not distant—they are personal. Many come from our own neighbors. In the years following the Holocaust, nearly 900 survivors resettled in St. Louis. Leo restarted his life out of a suitcase, an artifact now on exhibit in the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum. They were teachers, restaurant owners, doctors, small business owners, and parents. Their testimonies bring the Holocaust out of abstraction and into human terms—lessons rooted not only in memory, but in moral responsibility. What the museum founders envisioned and created has become a regional and statewide resource dedicated to fighting bigotry.

As Leo Wolf warned in 1995, “It can happen again. There is so much prejudice. We have to teach our youngsters, have to show them what has gone on.”

This 30th anniversary is more than a milestone—it’s a moment of reflection. Most of the survivors who helped build the Museum are no longer with us. But their mission remains.

The work of remembrance continues. The obligation to speak out remains. Their promise is now our responsibility.

Let us keep it.

Greg Yawitz is the current President of the Board of Directors, and Myron Freedman serves as the museum’s Executive Director.