Online Exhibitions

VHEC online exhibitions present an interactive digital record of a physical exhibition. Access to information presented in the following exhibitions is no longer restricted to those with the ability to travel to our museum but is available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection.

Faces of Loss: Remembering Those Who Perished

Faces of Loss: Remembering Those Who Perished is an online memorial exhibition on the victims of the Holocaust, whose families later immigrated to Canada and lived in Vancouver. Families touched by the Holocaust loaned their precious few pre-war photographs of family members. In many cases, no photographs remain of those who perished. This online exhibition serves to remember and mourn these victims, while restoring the human, personal element to what has become an abstraction of numbers.

Exhibition Curator (2005): Roberta Kremer
Website Development (2022): Sarah Ruediger

With support from Starbucks, L’Chaim Catering, Harvey Sandler, and the members of the community who lent photographs of their family.

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“Enemy Aliens”: The Internment of Jewish Refugees in Canada, 1940–1943

The “Enemy Aliens” online exhibition explores a little-known chapter of Canadian history through artefacts and eyewitness testimony.

This online exhibition features a comprehensive teaching resource, the Learning Object Collection, which was developed in partnership with Dr. Peter Seixas, Director of UBC’s Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness. The Learning Object Collection includes exhibit-based lesson plans and educational tools, which facilitate student engagement with historical context and primary source materials. This teaching resource was developed as part of the Virtual Museum of Canada’s Teacher’s Centre, an online space in which educators can access engaging historical content for classroom use. The website is also an interactive space in which former internees, their families and their friends can contribute stories and source materials related to internment, making the website a living historical document.

The VHEC gratefully acknowledges the financial investment by the Department of Canadian Heritage in the creation of this online presentation for the Virtual Museum of CanadaFunded by the Canadian Heritage Information Network and produced in partnership with 7th Floor Media at Simon Fraser University.

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More Than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics

The More Than Just Games online exhibition presents five lessons that encourage students to critically examine the history of the 1936 Games and Canada’s response to Nazism. The exhibition is an educational opportunity for students of Canadian history and as a model for developing historical thinking.

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Nuremberg: Justice in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

Over 60 years after the Allies established the International Military Tribunal to try Nazi leaders for their roles in the systematic murder of millions of people during the Holocaust and Second World War, the Nuremberg trials stand as a watershed moment in the ongoing pursuit of international justice. The Nuremberg online exhibition traces the history of the trials, highlighting their accomplishments, controversies and legacies, and considers human rights issues that demand response and resolve from the international community today.

The online Nuremberg exhibition offers access to primary documents related to the pursuit of justice in the aftermath the Holocaust. Accompanying classroom support material guides student discussion and activities about the Nuremberg trials and their ongoing implications.

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Open Hearts – Closed Doors

Following World War II, a group of young Jewish orphans immigrated to Canada from the devastation of Europe. Open Hearts – Closed Doors: The War Orphans Project is an online and bilingual teaching exhibition that chronicles the lives of these orphans as they emerged from the events of the Holocaust into displaced person camps and eventually to new lives in Canada. This multimedia website uses the orphans’ own words and artefacts as well as documents and photographs to provide students with a powerful learning experience about the Holocaust and the broader history of Canadian immigration during the 20th Century.

The site provides extensive support for students and teachers in middle and secondary school, social studies and language arts classrooms. The teacher’s guide, web links, maps, biblio-videographies and pop-up glossary terms can be browsed online or downloaded as printable classroom materials.

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English
French

Rhodes and the Holocaust: One Survivor’s Story

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Jews had lived on the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea for over 2,300 years. Ninety percent of the Jewish population of Rhodes perished during the Holocaust. This online exhibition presents the testimony of a Vancouver-based survivor from the island, Rosa Israel Ferrara.

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