It's true - before there was a museum, there was a Midwest regional office, based in Chicago. Now celebrating its 20th year, that office has the distinction of raising more funds for the museum than any other in the country.

With a staff of six led by Weinberg, the office - which covers not only Chicago but the entire Midwest - does much more than raise funds, although that has been and continues to be its primary function. It also hosts educational programs, public events and missions to Washington, D.C. and Europe, and continues to support the museum's ever-expanding activities.

It was Elie Weisel, the country's most famous survivor, who first proposed the idea of a national museum commemorating the Holocaust more than 30 years ago. President Jimmy Carter established the President's Commission on the Holocaust and, based on its report, in 1980, Congress authorized the creation of the museum on government-owned land adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. With an initial fund-raising effort of $190 million, museum founders engaged architect James Ingo Freed to design the building.

In 1989, museum personnel were engaged in setting up regional offices all over the country, not only to raise funds but to "prove to the country that this was truly a national museum," Weinberg said in a recent conversation. When she was approached to head the Midwest office, she was working for the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago and had a two-year-old and a three-year-old at home. It wasn't the right time for her to take on such a demanding job, she felt.

Nevertheless, she agreed to go to Washington to learn about the project. "Even just looking at the plans, looking at a model, I realized what a unique effort this was," she says. "They were only going to build this once, and either I was going to be a part of it or not." She signed on.

Looking back on those early days, Weinberg says, "When we opened this office, I don't think any of us, staff or community, could have ever imagined what the impact of the museum would be on this world. The past 20 years have raced by with never a dull day. We had high expectations, but I don't think anybody then realized the museum's uniqueness. It has truly become a global institution, bringing Holocaust education to millions every year."

An early Chicago supporter, Chicago businessman Judd Malkin, recalls that "when the people from Washington came to Chicago, they basically told me the museum had gotten the land from the federal government and the obligation of the Jewish community was to build and endow it. I thought it was a good deal, especially where it would be located on the Mall."

But up to that time, the Chicago community had not participated substantially in fund-raising for the museum, Malkin says, which he found "embarrassing." He put a group of donors together and began raising money. "The community picked up on it," he says. "I'm proud of the fact that now Chicago is the number one fund-raising community."

Malkin, like many other supporters, is not a survivor and to his knowledge did not lose any family members in the Holocaust. "I ask myself from time to time why I'm so interested in it," he says. "I think it's because people were persecuted just because they were Jewish. I know it continues to go on in the world today, and the best thing we can do is to remind people of what happened in Europe and maybe it will lessen the frequency of it happening again. If we continue to teach and have people remember, maybe it will happen less frequently."

Another foundational Chicago supporter, Hal Gershowitz, had recently seen his historical novel shoot to the top of the Chicago Tribune's best-seller list. A successful businessman, he says that while he was writing the book "I had sort of made a promise that if the book ever got published and earned any money, I would give it away. I forgot about it until the book actually got published and did earn a respectable amount of money."

Around the same time, he happened to meet Weinberg, who explained the not-yet-built museum project to him. Since a good portion of his novel dealt with the Holocaust, he decided to donate the royalties to the museum. Then he became more involved in local fund-raising activities and eventually was appointed by President George H.W. Bush to the museum's governing council. His involvement in its activities continues to this day.

With the help of the Chicago office, the museum was well on its way to becoming a reality. It opened in 1993 and, to the surprise of many, became one of the country's most popular tourist attractions. Today the visitor tally stands at 30 million, including more than eight million schoolchildren and 85 heads of state. It's estimated that 90 percent of the visitors are not Jewish.

Key features of the museum include the Permanent Exhibition, which takes up three floors and traces the history of the Holocaust through more than 900 artifacts, 70 video monitors and four theaters that include historic film footage and eyewitnesses testimonies.

A dramatic element of the exhibition is the Tower of Faces, a three-story tower consisting of about a thousand photographs depicting everyday life before the Holocaust in a European shtetl. In addition, every visitor to the museum receives an "identification card" that explains the story of a real-life Holocaust victim or survivor.

Other features include an exhibition designed to explain the Holocaust to children, called "Remember the Children: Daniel's Story"; the Hall of Remembrance, a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust; and numerous rotating exhibitions that deal not only with the Holocaust but with other instances of anti-Semitism and genocide, such as those in Darfur and Rwanda.

Weinberg says that the visitor tally, no matter how impressive, represents only a fraction of the museum's ongoing mission.

"It used to be that the visitor was the person who walked through the doors," she says, "and that in itself has been an extraordinary number." Museum founders expected 750,000 visitors a year; the figure today is close to two million, with only one brief decline in numbers right after the Sept. 11 attacks.

But the museum's online presence is even more impressive, Weinberg says, with 25 million visitors a year to the Web site, which is considered the world's leading online authority on the Holocaust.

"That really redefines the visitor," Weinberg says. "This museum is so much more than its location in Washington. It is truly what it means to the world. People from over 100 different countries go to the Web site every day. It is a global classroom. Our Web site is the preeminent part of the museum that has the ability to reach those 25 million visitors a year." Thanks to public demand, the information on the site has been translated into 12 languages, she says, and there have been visitors to the site from people of every country in the world, except for North Korea.

Chicago scholars and teachers have also contributed to the museum's "Voices on Antisemitism" podcast series, and teachers have shared their lesson plans online to help other educators learn strategies for teaching the Holocaust.

In another arena, Weinberg says, the museum is focused on a subject of global impact. "We're working in 40 different countries to rescue the evidence of the Holocaust," she explains. "We are very focused on that now, rescuing the evidence. It is a race against time as the eyewitness generation disappears."

Through the efforts of the museum, many previously sealed records have been opened, and "our first priority is to make them available for the survivors," she says.

The Chicago office has been instrumental in building all of the museum's diverse efforts, according to Bill Parsons, the museum's chief of staff.

"What Jill and her whole gang have done, they have really built community support on a massive scale," he said in a phone conversation from his office at the museum. "If you want something to last, if you believe these issues are important to society - anti-Semitism, genocide, racism - you get the community to own something, and I think it pays off."

Weinberg, he says, "goes after whole communities, nurtures people over a long period of time, gets people involved so that they own it, organizes events. Once you create that ownership within the community, it's lasting. And it's not just Chicago" but throughout the Midwest where the museum has devoted supporters, he says. Her whole approach centers on "relationships," Parsons says. "If you want people to believe in what you are doing, you need to nurture that over time, and that's what she's done."

Weinberg herself says that "the 20th anniversary is a time to reflect on what has happened. I'm very proud that Chicago has consistently been the most generous community in the United States for supporting the museum. It has provided incredible community support from day one."

The Chicago area has more than 30,000 donors and the Risa K. Lambert luncheon, now in its 14th year, is the museum's largest fund-raiser in the country, both in the number of attendees and in money raised. (See separate story on this year's luncheon.)

In addition, Weinberg notes that many Chicagoans have donated artifacts to the museum, and most feel relieved the precious items will be properly preserved. "They will be available forever," she says. "We have the guarantee from Congress that the museum is going to stand for as long as the country stands."

It's not only artifacts that Chicagoans have donated to the museum, but something less tangible but no less crucial: their testimony. Fritzie Fritzshall, a Chicago survivor and tireless supporter of Holocaust education, is one of many from the region who recorded their experiences on video for future generations to review.

Fritzshall has been involved with the U.S. museum for 20 years, she says, "since it was still on paper. I took my husband to Washington so I could show him the drawings of the museum and tell him what it is I'm going to be doing. At the time, I thought it was going to be maybe once a month, but it turned out to be quite often during the week, every week. I did fund-raising and recorded my experiences. My job was to tell my story."

"Truly proud" of her part in helping to create the museum, Fritzshall says that "I feel that only through education can we bring our story across. We tell the story of the past so it doesn't happen in the future."

That's also the thinking of one of the museum's most important Chicago supporters: Mayor Richard Daley. He has been involved almost from the beginning and has consistently given the Chicago office's efforts a huge boost, supporters say. One of his major efforts was to lead a trip of 800 Chicago civic and community leaders to tour the museum soon after it opened.

"I can't emphasize enough the serious, often quiet, often anonymous support that Mayor Daley provided," Gershowitz says. "He responded to this project in a most meaningful way in the early years, but very quietly." He recalls that he was walking with the mayor during the first trip Daley led to the museum. "He had started his mayor's Holocaust Remembrance Day in Chicago, and he said, Hal, I consider that to be one of the most important things I've accomplished," Gershowitz relates. "He recognizes the importance of Holocaust remembrance. Over the years, I've had the opportunity to observe how important that was to him personally."

Daley also sponsors a breakfast where "with very little publicity, he brings hundreds of high school kids to listen to Holocaust survivors," Gershowitz says. "He has a commitment to Holocaust education that I would guess is unparalleled by any other mayor in the country." He attributes much of Daley's support to the effectiveness of the Chicago office.

"All that support coming together at the same time, it's really worked," he says, noting as well the popularity and large attendance at the annual luncheon. "It almost doesn't matter who the speaker is - people (come because they feel) a kinship to the museum and its mission."

He calls Weinberg "incredibly dynamic" and says she "has really earned the deep admiration and respect of all the people (involved), including some very top business people who she approached early on and introduced to the early leaders of the effort in Washington. Each of those people at the time had their own constituencies, people they were involved with. They knew we believed that this was a project that was very very worthwhile, and it just spread."

Now, as the museum's mission continues to grow, so do the programs of the Chicago office. Weinberg and her staff of five continue their fund-raising mission, but have also inaugurated a speaker series (coming up in early December: a talk by Northwestern University professor and Holocaust expert Peter Hayes) and continue to organize special trips to the museum, including family trips and "next generation" tours for people in their 20s and 30s.

Some of the trips go beyond the usual museum tour: visitors often go behind the scenes and meet with curators and preservationists, Weinberg says.

Particularly popular are the grandparent trips. (The next one will leave Nov. 14.) Malkin, the early Chicago supporter, has been on several and found that "when I took my grandkids there, my granddaughter was so taken by (the museum) that when they had the luncheon, she got up and spoke and talked about her impressions." Now Malkin leads a grandparents mission every other year; his granddaughter, Clara, "wants to keep going," he says. One year she spoke to the group, and when she celebrated her bat mitzvah, she asked family and friends to make donations to the museum instead of giving her gifts.

Chicagoans also participate in the museum's international travel programs. "We do work all over the world," Weinberg says. "There's a group going to Romania, meeting with scholars and elected officials. Romania is owning up to its past" during the Holocaust. Family trips to Poland are also popular with locals.

As the Chicago office enters its third decade, there has been a big change to the local landscape: The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center opened earlier this year in Skokie to tremendous fanfare, drawing Weisel, former President Bill Clinton and a host of other notables to its opening ceremony. Chicagoans might be wondering if support for the local museum will dilute enthusiasm, and funds, for the national one.

Weinberg says she doesn't think so. "We don't look at (the Illinois museum) as competition," she says. "It is one of over 100 local Holocaust projects in this country that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum partners with, cooperates with and is engaged with in a mutual mission of Holocaust education and remembrance."

There is much synergy between the two institutions, beginning with a shared project director, Michael Barenbaum, who served that function for both museums. The two institutions partnered to host an educational forum that trained teachers, and the Illinois museum will be hosting a traveling exhibit from the U.S. museum, "Deadly Medicine," in June. Other traveling exhibits have come to other Chicago institutions including the Field Museum, Roosevelt University and the Spertus Museum, Weinberg says, and each partnership enhances both institutions. "We are very happy our traveling exhibitions have made an impact in Chicago," she says.

In addition, Weinberg says, many of the videotaped oral histories featured in the Illinois museum were made for the U.S. museum, which also donated more than 200 photos and a number of artifacts to the Skokie operation.

"There has been an extraordinary cooperation in creating the (Illinois) museum's content," Weinberg says, noting that the new museum's leaders consulted with those from the national one on issues including security, preservation, fund-raising and curatorial matters.

Richard Hirschhaut, executive director of the Illinois Holocaust Museum, said in a statement that "the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is essential to ensuring that the new Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center will most poignantly convey the universal lessons of the Holocaust. ... We are proud to be your partner in this conspiracy of goodness and look forward to bringing your light of hope and understanding to our new museum."

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum made headlines earlier this year in a way that no one would have wished. On June 10, a white supremacist burst into the museum and fatally shot a security guard, Stephen Johns, before he was shot and wounded by other guards.

To Weinberg, the tragic event underscores more forcefully than ever the reason for the museum's existence.

The shooting "was a reminder for all of us about the importance of the museum - that hate has not left us," she says. "It showed its very very ugly head at the doors of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and resulted in this unbelievable tragedy of a man who died while trying to ensure the safety of visitors. That underscores why the museum is so important and the dangers of unchecked hatred. Officer Johns' tragic death is that very serious reminder."