“For years this museum has stood as a sanctuary of memory. A place where history is not merely preserved but lived,” said Kelley Szany, the museum’s senior vice president of education and exhibitions, during the preview. Szany reimagined the main exhibitions during construction, which now feature about 30,000 artifacts in the museum’s collection.

CEO Bernard Cherkasov said the remodeling focused on improving the visitor experience. Updates include accessible bathrooms on each floor, a new welcome center and lobby, a reflection gallery, wider walkways, and several newly acquired objects and documents. During a recent walkthrough, a docent told Cherkasov that the renovated space feels like it has “neshama,” the Hebrew word for soul or spirit. “I don’t think I could have asked for a more meaningful response because that is what we were hoping to create,” Cherkasov said.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who has financially supported the museum since it opened in 2009, did not attend Tuesday because of a medical procedure. In a pre-recorded video message, Pritzker noted that Illinois was the first state to mandate Holocaust education in its schools. “We continue to stand behind that commitment because remembering is not passive. It is a responsibility we owe to the victims, to the survivors, and to every generation still to come,” he said.

The main Zev & Shifra Karkomi Holocaust Exhibition received what the museum described as “meaningful” additions. One is an untitled oil painting that hung in the family home of the Rothschild banking dynasty in Bad Homburg, Germany. The painting was slashed and looted by the Nazis during Kristallnacht in 1938. After the war, it was reunited with Marianne Rothschild Schwab, the sole survivor of her family, who was 19 when the Nazis broke into her home. Her cousin recovered the painting and brought it to her in the U.S., and she gifted it to the museum in 2016. Rothschild Schwab died in 2024 at 105.

The gallery updates also include portraits and stories of Holocaust victims targeted not only for being Jewish. Among them is Eve Adams, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who wrote “Lesbian Love” in Chicago and ran The Grey Cottage at 10 E. Chestnut St., described on a placard as a “tearoom for lesbians, intellectuals and nonconformists in 1920s Chicago.” Adams is featured alongside 27 other individuals whom Nazi Germany targeted because of their race, ethnicity, religion, disability, or political resistance. The site of her old tearoom is now a parking garage, said Leah Rauch, the museum’s director of education.

The Western Europe Gallery now holds three artifacts from children who survived in hiding, including a doll, a street sketch, and a domino set. Another gallery traces the Nazi euthanasia program that killed hundreds of thousands of people with physical and intellectual disabilities and mental illness.

Attendance at the museum had soared before the renovation. Annual attendance had ranged from 60,000 to 80,000 visitors, but it grew to nearly 300,000 visitors in the 12 months before construction began last August, according to a museum spokesperson. While the Skokie building was closed, the museum operated a satellite location at 360 N. State St. in Chicago, which remains open through Dec. 31.