The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has received a $15 million gift from David M. Rubenstein to support and expand its collection, the Washington Post reports.

The gift will help advance the museum’s scholarship, education programs, and exhibitions, all of which are based on the collection. In addition, the gift will help to digitize the collection. In recognition of his gift, the museum’s collection, which includes almost 24,000 objects, 23,000 oral testimonies, thousands of hours of historic film, more than 110 million pages of archival documents, and 200 million digital images and photographs, will be renamed in honor of Rubenstein, who joined the Giving Pledge in 2010.

“My ancestors came from Ukraine; I’m obviously Jewish. The Holocaust was an effort to wipe out the European Jews,” said Rubenstein, a co-founder of the Carlyle Group. “If you look at the Holocaust and what happened, people say, ‘Why didn’t the U.S. do more? Why didn’t we intervene?’...We are living in a similar moment. Antisemitism is on the rise in the world. People are saying, ‘What can we do?’ There are many things you can do, and reminding people of the Holocaust is one.”

(Photo credit: Getty images/SandraMatic)