Florida Holocaust Museum offers free admission during weekend of Ye concerts
Museum offers free alternative to concert
Following controversy of Kanye West performing at Raymond James Stadium, the Florida Holocaust Museum is offering free admission for the weekend. FOX 13's Heather Healy reports.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - The Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg is opening its doors to the community by offering free admission to all visitors from Friday, June 26th through Sunday, June 28th.
Florida Holocaust Museum free admission
What they're saying:
The free admission days are specifically designed as accessible community counterprogramming, taking place during the same weekend as Ye's sold-out concerts across the bay at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa.
Museum leadership emphasizes that opening their doors for free is about offering a meaningful alternative and making vital history accessible to everyone during a high-profile weekend.
"At the Florida Holocaust Museum, we felt the best response to the Kanye West concerts was to offer free days, June 26th, 27th, and 28th to give people an alternative. Counter-programming that's accessible to everybody," said Eric Stillman, President and CEO of the Florida Holocaust Museum.
Dig deeper:
By removing the cost of entry, museum leadership hopes the open doors will encourage the community to engage deeply with history and confront rising antisemitism at a time when these conversations cannot be ignored. Stillman warned that harmful rhetoric and tropes carry dangerous, real-world consequences.
"People are looking to blame somebody when they're unhappy, they feel like there's something wrong in life, they want to find somebody to be at fault. And unfortunately, it's a really sick and insidious thing to use anti-semitic words, anti-semitic memes or tropes, because it feeds anti-semitic violence," Stillman said.
Ultimately, the museum's educational mission is to use individual stories to help the public understand the massive scale of past atrocities on a human level, guiding visitors to see why remembering this history matters today.
"We really hope people feel that we're in an accessible place that they can come, check it out, learn about the real lessons of the Holocaust, and come away hopefully having a better understanding of why every single human being has worth and value and why we have to all work together to prevent future genocides and atrocities," Stillman concluded
The Source: This article was written using information gathered during live interviews at the Florida Holocaust Museum.