The museum was conceived by Miguel Krigsner, president of the Associacao Casa de Cultura Beit Yaacov and founder of O Boticario, one of Brazil's largest cosmetics companies. Krigsner partnered with Base7 Projetos Culturais, a firm specializing in cultural exhibitions, to design a space that would use audiovisual testimony to bring the history to life. Historical research began in November 2009 and continued through 2011. Construction started in March 2011, and the entire project moved from conception to inauguration in roughly two years. That Krigsner brought the resources of a major business enterprise to the task of Holocaust remembrance reflects a pattern seen in memorial projects worldwide: individuals with personal connections to the history channeling their means toward ensuring it endures.

The museum draws its audiovisual material from institutions that represent the global infrastructure of Holocaust remembrance. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and the USC Shoah Foundation, which holds tens of thousands of videotaped survivor testimonies, all contributed. So did the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the memorial at Majdanek, and the Memorial de la Shoah in Paris. The Cultural Institute Soto Delatorre provided additional material. Visitors experience the history through these recorded voices and images rather than through physical artifacts alone. The effect is deliberate: testimony centers the individual, giving names and faces to people who were systematically reduced to numbers. Each account preserved here represents a life lived before, during, and in many cases after the devastation.

The inauguration on November 20, 2011, drew approximately 800 people. Brazil's Secretary for Human Rights, Maria do Rosario, attended alongside Parana's governor Beto Richa, Israel's ambassador Rafael Eldad, and Curitiba's mayor Luciano Ducci. Former governor Jaime Lerner, himself a descendant of Jewish immigrants, was present. So were Claudio Lottenberg, head of the Confederacao Israelita do Brasil, and Moacyr Jose Vitti, the Archbishop of Curitiba, whose presence reflected the interfaith dimension of the project. Among the 800 were survivors and their descendants, including Ben Abraham, a Holocaust survivor and author who spent decades in Brazil bearing witness, and George Legmann. Their presence at the opening linked the museum directly to the history it preserves.

Brazil may seem an unlikely location for a Holocaust museum, but the country's Jewish community has deep roots, and many of its members arrived as refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. The museum sits within the Centro Israelita do Parana, the institutional heart of Parana state's Jewish community, and inside the new Beit Yaacov synagogue in central Curitiba. Visitation is arranged in advance, and guided tours are offered free of charge. The deliberate pace of a scheduled visit, rather than the open-door flow of a conventional museum, shapes the experience. There is no rushing through. The museum asks visitors to slow down, to listen to the testimonies, to read the names on the wall and understand that each one represents a choice made under mortal threat. Distance from Europe does not diminish the weight of what happened. If anything, the museum argues, it makes the act of remembering more intentional.