Your visit brings you to Baltimore's Holocaust Memorial, honoring the six million Jewish people murdered by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945 and the survivors who rebuilt their lives here. Baltimore had a significant Jewish population with deep roots — the Lloyd Street Synagogue a few blocks away dates to 1845, and the community grew substantially with each wave of Eastern European Jewish immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After World War II, Baltimore absorbed a significant number of Holocaust survivors who arrived through the network of Jewish relief organizations and the established community that was prepared to receive them.
The Holocaust Memorial was dedicated in 1980, one of the early public Holocaust memorials in the United States, built at a time when the full history of the genocide was still being absorbed into American public consciousness. The memorial design uses geometric forms and inscribed text to create a space for quiet reflection in the middle of the downtown streetscape. It stands near the city's historic Jewish commercial district and within walking distance of the Lloyd Street Synagogue, connecting the memory of destruction to the continuity of Jewish life.
Baltimore's Jewish community has maintained a distinctive identity for nearly two centuries, contributing disproportionately to the city's commercial, cultural, and philanthropic life.