ST. LOUIS COUNTY — The Holocaust museum here, about a week after losing $130,000 in funding due to Trump administration spending cuts, on Wednesday announced an anonymous donation. Officials at the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum said the $125,000 gift would allow them to continue their work digitizing
some 300 interviews with Holocaust survivors who settled in St. Louis and American veterans who helped liberate concentration camps. The organization had completed half the work, paid for by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, before getting the termination notice last week. Helen Turner, the St. Louis museum's director of education, said she was “blindsided.” “These testimonies are absolutely crucial to combat antisemitism, denial and hate,” Turner said. “They're the greatest source of evidence that we have of what happened during the Holocaust.”
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President Donald Trump has
targeted the IMLS for elimination , along with six other federal agencies, to reduce bureaucracy. As part of that initiative, he has tapped billionaire businessman Elon Musk to spearhead the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE has since cut entire federal departments, hundreds of government property leases and thousands of employees. The effort says it has saved $155 billion so far. But the rollout has been tumultuous. Some federal employees were fired, then rehired; some real estate leases were canceled only to be reinstated. The
Holocaust museum , off Lindbergh Boulevard and Scheutz Road, is one of a dozen or so local institutions that received IMLS grants in recent years. Last week,
Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville said it lost $250,000 in IMLS funding that was to go toward student training. The Missouri Historical Society, which operates the
history museum in Forest Park , also said it lost funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and expected to lose additional funding from the IMLS. In 2022, the IMLS awarded the Holocaust museum $225,000 for the museum's work to digitize its audio and video interviews; 80 of those were inaccessible before the grant came in, Turner said. The museum had $130,000 in grant money still to be spent when it was notified by email last week that the funding would be immediately canceled, she said. The timing, Turner added, couldn't be worse: This year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the 30th year of the St. Louis museum. “It makes me think about where's Holocaust education, Holocaust museums in memory?“ Turner said. “Where will we be in the next 30 years if this kind of funding slash continues?” The nonprofit museum
launched an “emergency fundraising campaign” to make up for the loss. The museum said on Wednesday that additional donations would go to general operations.
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