$13 million makeover for Museum of Tolerance

Images of the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Einstein are among the attractions at the Museum of Tolerance’s Youth Action Lab, a high-tech classroom and exhibition space for teaching elementary through high school kids about prejudice. The Los Angeles museum has just finished a $13-million makeover of its auditorium and several exhibits.

Read more by Times Staff Writer Mike Boehm. (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)

Sept. 16, 2014 10:46 AM PT

Second floor Youth Action Lab with large photos of Dali Lama, Martin Luther King and Albert Einstein. The Museum of Tolerance recently finished a $13 million renovation that includes new exhibits.

Museum visitors encounter a cluster of TVs tuned to news stations and websites around the globe. Encouraging a healthy skepticism about what comes at viewers through the media is among the aims of the museum, whose plan for a new wing for conferences and large gatherings is under review at City Hall. (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)

In individual portraits, a museum gallery provides glimpses of a world ravaged by the Holocaust. The institution, which hopes to build another Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem, is dedicated to documenting the human races destructiveness while fighting prejudice. (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)

A Nazi military uniform is among artifacts at the museum. Among other grim remembrances: burlap or striped-cloth garb worn by death camp prisoners, the whips and truncheons they endured, the canisters of Zyklon-B poison that killed them. (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)

Engraved on a museum wall is a statement by Simon Wiesenthal, famed Nazi hunter. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, parent organization of the Museum of Tolerance, was founded 31 years ago by Rabbi Marvin Hier. (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)

The choice presented by this museum feature seems simple. But its point is that everyone has a prejudice -- and only one of the doors opens. (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)

The smooth-talking chap in the video welcomes visitors to the museum. As he offers his compliments, a viewer can see through his manipulative ways -- a reminder of the way that words and images can influence attitudes. (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)

A temporary exhibit of drawings by child refugees who escaped Darfur is on the museum’s second floor. Helicopter gunships and attackers on trucks and horseback are common motifs in the children’s work in pencil and crayon. (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)

Amid the 1950s-style décor of the museum’s Point of View Diner, tabletop jukeboxes spin ethical questions instead of 45s. Also on the menu: a filmed scenario on high school bullying. (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)

A 19th century silver challah plate from Germany is on loan from the Alan and Lisa Stern Judaica collection. (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)

A haunting artwork at the museum. Despite conditions in concentration camps, prisons and ghettos, the human imagination found an outlet in art, its creators sometimes resorting to the use of stolen paper, food dyes and even rust. (Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)