(New York, NY)— The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust will present Auschwitz, A Virtual Reality Tour on Sunday, June 16 at 1:00PM.

The 48-minute VR experience developed by the New York City-based nonprofit Spirit of Triumph takes the audience on an immersive, educational tour of the notorious site in Poland where more than 1.1 million European Jews were murdered as part of the Nazi’s “Final Solution” between 1941 and 1945. 

The VR film is designed to foster critical conversation and inspire in its audience empathy and a commitment to combat hatred. VR technology offers an opportunity to promote a profound understanding that transcends traditional classroom learning by transporting those who experience it beyond the confines of their four walls.

“As a Museum of remembrance and education, we are honored to present Spirit of Triumph’s Virtual Reality tour. What has been preserved of the Auschwitz death camp is the ultimate historic artifact. To visit the camp in person, or to explore it now through this extraordinary VR technology, is a deeply moving experience,” says Jack Kliger, President and CEO of the Museum. 

“It is the most amazing footage that you will ever see. I don’t think if you go to Birkenau Auschwitz, alive in real-time, you [will] see what you see in this video, especially the narration and the different stories that are told,” says Rabbi Eli J. Mansour, the Rabbinic Leader at Magen David Yeshivah in Brooklyn.

The VR tour offers audiences who might never be able to visit Auschwitz in person the opportunity to see nearly every area of the camp. The tour includes overhead footage shot by drones that reveal the scale of the camp—something that live, on-the-ground tours have trouble conveying.

The development of the Auschwitz VR tour represents a unique and highly unlikely story unto itself. In 2020, two Orthodox women in Israel wanted to create a VR tour of the camp, but no one had ever been permitted the kind of access they requested. Through a fortuitous accident of timing, the COVID pandemic made the Auschwitz site available for filming. 

To view the trailer, or to purchase tickets for the June 16 Virtual Reality screening at the Museum, visit: https://mjhnyc.org/events/vrlearningauschwitz/

About The Museum Of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust

The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust is New York’s contribution to the global responsibility to Never Forget. Opened in 1997, the Museum is committed to the crucial mission of educating diverse visitors about Jewish life before, during, and after the Holocaust. 

The Museum’s current offerings include Courage to Act: Rescue in Denmark, a new exhibition about the extraordinary rescue of Denmark’s Jewish population in 1943, a story of mutual aid and communal upstanding in difficult times for visitors aged 9 and up; The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do, a major exhibition offering a timely and expansive presentation of Holocaust history, on view in the main galleries; and, Survivors: Faces of Life After the Holocaust, featuring photographer Martin Schoeller’s portraits of 75 Holocaust survivors in his signature style. 

The Museum of Jewish Heritage maintains the Peter & Mary Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Resource Center, a collection of almost 40,000 artifacts, photographs, documentary films, and survivor testimonies, and contains classrooms, a 375-seat theater (Edmond J. Safra Hall), special exhibition galleries, and a memorial art installation, Garden of Stones, designed by internationally acclaimed sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. The Museum also hosts LOX at Café Bergson an OU-certified café serving eastern European specialties.

Each year, the Museum presents over 100 public programs, connecting our community in person and virtually through lectures, book talks, concerts, and more. For more info visit: http://mjhnyc.org/events. The Museum receives general operating support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts. For more information, visit mjhnyc.org.