Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus

The Zekelman Holocaust Center, found as the Holocaust Memorial Center (The HC), was founded by Rabbi Charles H. Rosenzveig with his fellow members of Shaarit Haplaytah. It took nearly twenty years of planning and grassroots fundraising before being ready to build. Ground was broken for the Holocaust Memorial Center on the property of the Jewish Community Campus at Maple and Drake Roads in West Bloomfield, Michigan, on December 6, 1981. Almost three years later, in October 1984, the HC was opened. When the organization outgrew its original location, it built a new museum on the grounds of the Old Orchard Theatre on Orchard Lake Road in Farmington Hills. The Center's new design received front-page coverage in the Wall Street Journal, with a headline asking, "Should a Museum Look as Disturbing as What it Portrays?".

Each year, HMC reached more than 100,000 people through teacher trainings, virtual museum experiences, virtual programs, and in-person visits to the museum. As the Center continues to grow, so have educational outreach efforts. To aid teachers in meeting the Holocaust education mandate of Michigan Public Act 170, the teacher trainings now reach schools in nearly every county. In addition, development of new relationships with school districts and virtual schools, understanding their needs so that every student in the state has equitable access to Holocaust education.

It replaces an earlier Holocaust Memorial Center installed in 1981–1984 on the Jewish Community Campus at Drake and Maple roads in West Bloomfield Township. Many of the Detroit area's 96,000 Jews live in the northwest Detroit area. This memorial and education center depicts both the vibrancy of the social and cultural life of European Jews before World War II and the horror of the Holocaust.

Built on a nine-acre site, the fifty-thousand-square-foot center resembles a Nazi death camp. The design revolves around the red brick wall harkening back to those of the Jewish ghettos and the wall encircled with cables resembling barbed and/or electrified wire of the concentration camps. The building exudes symbolism. The tall elevator shaft that pushes through the roof recalls a crematorium chimney. Sturdy brick pillars supporting the gaping entrance beneath a towerlike guard structure resemble the gateway at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Striped blue and gray metal panels that clad the exterior walls of the main block above the first story evoke the camp uniforms. Six glass pyramids glow in reference to the six million Jews exterminated. Inside, visitors descend from light into darkness and ascend again to light. Exhibits divide into thematic sections. The second floor holds the scholarship center for genealogical research and offices.

The courtyard landscape is planted with wild grasses and redwoods. Within the circular entrance drive weeds grow out of intersecting railroad tracks suggestive of the trains that crossed Europe to transport victims to the death camps.

Author Mary E. Kremposky explains in the Construction Association of Michigan's CAM Magazine (Fall 2004) that Kenneth Neumann (1939–2007) studied images of the Holocaust in preparation for designing the museum.