Rabbi Marvin Hier
In 1977,
Rabbi Hier came to Los Angeles to create the Simon Wiesenthal Center, named in honor of famed Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal. Under his leadership, the Center has become one of the foremost Jewish human rights agencies in the world, with a constituency of more than 400,000 families, and offices throughout the United States, in Canada, Europe, Israel and Argentina. In 1993, an article in the Los Angeles Times noted that Rabbi Hier had made the Wiesenthal Center, "the most visible Jewish organization in the world" and, in 2007, an article in Newsweek named him the "number one most influential rabbi in America."
The Center's educational arm,
The Museum of Tolerance, opened in February 1993 to worldwide acclaim. Founded to challenge visitors to confront bigotry and racism and to understand the Holocaust in both historic and contemporary contexts, the Museum hosts over a half million visitors a year, including 110,000 students. Because of the success of its diversity training programs, the New York Tolerance Center opened in Manhattan in February 2004. The Wiesenthal Center is also in the process of creating the Center for Human Dignity-Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem, a 400,000 square foot site located in the heart of the city, designed by renowned architect Frank O. Gehry.
