After a two-year campaign to find a new home for a local Holocaust Museum, the Skokie Village Board on Tuesday evening unanimously approved a 2-acre site at 5346 Golf Rd.
The 7-0 vote came a year after the village had rejected a highly controversial proposal to locate the museum at another site in a residential area.
“The Holocaust Museum is going to be where it deserves to be and where it ought to be, right here in the village of Skokie,” said Mayor George Van Dusen.
The approved site is near the Old Orchard Shopping Center, west of the Edens Expressway and across a road from the Harms Woods Forest Preserve, where a 107-space parking lot is available for the museum.
The Holocaust Foundation of Illinois, which will operate the museum, said the museum will be built at a cost of $15 million in about 18 months to two years, once all funding is in place. The foundation said it already has raised about $8 million, including $5 million in Illinois FIRST money from the State of Illinois.
“We think the site was worth waiting for,” said Sam Harris, foundation board president and a concentration camp survivor. “As we say in Yiddish, it was beshehrt–was meant to be.”
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Designed by architect Stanley Tigerman, the three-story museum building will include permanent exhibit space, a library, a computer center, a 293-seat auditorium and a bookshop. Parking spaces on the site will number 39, plus the 107 spaces on forest preserve land.
Last January, the Skokie Village Board denied a request to locate the museum on a 3-acre site at 7520 Laramie Ave.