Our Story
About the Spungen Family Foundation
The Florence and Laurence Spungen Family Foundation was established in 2006 by Florence Spungen and reflects the individual and collective philanthropy of the founders, their children, and their grandchildren. The Foundation focuses its grantmaking typically in Santa Barbara, CA and Lake County, IL. One of the Foundation’s strategic areas concentrates on the Holocaust and genocide education. The Spungen Family Foundation has one of the largest collections of Holocaust artifacts in private hands, mainly consisting of postal history, such as letters, post cards, stamps, along with money, children’s artwork, and more. The collection has been used for Holocaust education all around the world.
The mission of the Foundation is to improve the quality of life of individuals and families facing health challenges, and to address issues that particularly affect the Jewish community.
History of the Holocaust Exhibit
The Spungen Family Foundation has arguably the largest and most extensive privately-owned Holocaust collection and exhibit in the world. The collection consists of thousands of individual philatelic and numismatic pieces as well as other rare documents. These artifacts are genuine witnesses to the Holocaust, each with their own story to tell – stories about what they have seen and what they mean for today’s world.
A portion of the collection is organized into an award-winning exhibit titled The NAZI Scourge: Postal Evidence of the Holocaust and the Devastation of Europe, which features hundreds of objects from all major concentration camps and ghettos. It also includes rare objects from lesser-known sites that will reveal new information even to advanced students of the Holocaust.
The Scourge exhibit was originally curated by renowned philatelist Ken Lawrence over a period of 30 years. It was then purchased in 2007 by collector, businessman, and philanthropist Danny Spungen. Danny donated the majority of the collection to the Spungen Family Foundation. Since then, he has continued to add rare pieces to both the collection and the exhibit.
The exhibit has traveled the world, but it is never exactly the same. Taking into account the audience and venue, the Foundation selects about 400 items from its archive to tell the story that begins in 1933.
The exhibit originally ended with a document signed in 1946 by US General Clay ordering the hanging of a Nazi who was found guilty in a war crimes trial. Today the exhibit ends with the Tutsi ID card of a young man named William, who was murdered in a church in 1994 during the genocide in Rwanda. Does the story end at this point? Visitors will have a chance to view the exhibit and form their own conclusions.