“Given where the world is today, it is absolutely critical,” he added. “My interest and that of the board is how the Holocaust applies today.”

The Auschwitz installation, the first exhibition to feature major loans of artifacts from the former Nazi concentration camp in occupied Poland, is currently on display in Madrid and has drawn some 600,000 visitors. It will open in New York on May 8 — the date of the Nazi surrender in 1945.

The idea originated with Musealia, a Spanish for-profit company and creator of traveling shows including a world tour of Titanic items. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, on the site of the former camp complex, is receiving a fee to help produce the exhibition and it authorized Musealia and host museums to charge admission, a prospect that initially stirred some unease. But many Jewish leaders have endorsed the fees, saying they help to underwrite a highly professional introduction to artifacts that teach people who cannot travel to Auschwitz about the human capacity for evil.

In New York, the museum’s entry fee will rise $4 to $16, with free admission for Holocaust survivors, service members, police and firefighters and public school students and teachers. Leaders of the Heritage Museum said they hope the exhibition will heighten awareness of their institution, which two decades after opening continues to have lackluster attendance — 155,000 visitors a year — in a city with more than one million Jews. Part of the problem, officials suggested, stems from its conflicted identity.

With the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington a huge success, the New York museum at its founding in 1997 tried to distinguish itself with its Jewish heritage branding. Though its subtitle, “A Living Memorial to the Holocaust,” always called attention to those horrors, and temporary exhibitions were typically about suffering during World War II, the museum’s identity seemed generic — about culture, not loss.