The Simon Wiesenthal Center, named for the Viennese Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, was established in Los Angeles in 1977 by its founder and dean, Rabbi Marvin Hier. As of 1989, it was supported by approximately 380,000 member families. In 1979 a museum developed by Holocaust historian Efraim Zuroff was opened. A year earlier, the center launched a national outreach project to provide educational programs for junior and senior high school students. During its initial decade of operation, the center's program reached hundreds of thousands of American teenagers.
Since its establishment, the Wiesenthal Center has focused on political issues related to the Holocaust and has specialized in the use of mass media to educate the public about the events of World War II. Among its major campaigns were the efforts to cancel the statute of limitations on war crimes in West Germany, and attempts to force South American governments such as those of Paraguay and Chile to surrender leading Nazi criminals (Dr. Josef Mengele and Walther Rauff). The center has also played a key role in uncovering hundreds of Nazi collaborators of eastern European origin who escaped after World War II to Western …show more content…
The latter was exhibited in Vienna in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss, and three months later it became the first Holocaust exhibition ever displayed in the Soviet Union. It was placed on permanent loan in the Solomon Mykhoels Jewish Cultural Center in