RABBI MARVIN HIER

When Rabbi Marvin Hier arrived in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, he had a vision that most people would have called impossible: to build a Jewish institution so powerful and so visible that it would become the global headquarters for the fight against antisemitism and the preservation of Holocaust memory. In 1977, he founded the Simon Wiesenthal Center, named for the legendary Nazi hunter who had spent his life pursuing the architects of genocide. What Hier built around that name became something extraordinary. 

Today, the Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest Jewish human rights organizations in the world, with offices on five continents and relationships with governments and international bodies across the globe. Hier has filed Nazi war criminal cases in dozens of countries, lobbied presidents and prime ministers on Holocaust remembrance legislation, produced Academy Award-winning documentaries seen by hundreds of millions, and turned the fight against antisemitism into one of the most sustained, sophisticated institutional campaigns in American Jewish history. 

The Museum of Tolerance, which Hier created on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, has educated millions of visitors, schoolchildren from across California, law enforcement agencies who have adopted its cur ricula, corporate executives, foreign dignitaries, and heads of state, about the mechanics of hatred and the consequences of indifference. The museum does not present the Holocaust as ancient history. It presents it as a warning: this is what happens when hatred goes unanswered. 

Hier has addressed the United Nations General Assembly and delivered the benediction at a presidential inauguration. He has used every platform available to him, for nearly five decades, to make the same argument: that antisemitism unchallenged is antisemitism empowered, and that memory is not sentiment. It is a weapon against forgetting. 

What makes Hier’s achievement remarkable is not only its scale but its location. He chose Los Angeles, not Jerusalem or New York, as the home base for a global campaign against Jew-hatred. He understood, before most, that Hollywood’s power to shape global culture made it the right place to wage a war of memory and visibility. The entertainment industry could reach billions of people. A museum in its shadow could reach the people who ran that industry. Hier saw the leverage point and he built on it.

“The Wiesenthal Center was built on one premise: that silence in the face of evil is complicity. We will never be silent.” — Rabbi Marvin Hier ”

For nearly fifty years he has refused to let the world forget. He has filed legal cases against war criminals when governments were reluctant to act. He has confronted Holocaust denial at the highest levels of international discourse. He has educated generations of students about what hatred, left unchecked, ultimately produces. The Wiesenthal Center was built to endure: to be there for the next wave of hatred and the one after that, staffed by people who understood the history and had the tools to fight it. 

Rabbi Marvin Hier did not build an institution. He built a conscience. He placed it in the middle of one of the most powerful cities in the world and dared the world to look away. It could not.