The International Freedom Center, part of the cultural complex to be built on the World Trade Center site, has tapped a longtime Wall Street Journal executive to be its first president.

Richard Tofel, 47, a vice president and assistant publisher of the Journal, is leaving the newspaper on October 15 to lead the day-to-day operations of the center, expected to be completed by 2009.

Replacing Mr. Tofel at the Journal will be Penny Abernathy, who will take over business operations for the newspaper’s international publications, including the Asian Wall Street Journal, the Wall Street Journal Europe, and the Far Eastern Economic Review. She will also be involved in the planning of the Journal’s Weekend Edition, set to debut in less than a year.

The center is one of four cultural institutions approved to be built on the World Trade Center site. It will be located on the southwest corner of Greenwich and Fulton streets, which will be extended across the site. The center will be part of a reportedly 250,000- to 275,000-square-foot museum complex that will also include the Drawing Center, featuring six gallery spaces.

Estimating the total cost of building the center to be $250 million, Mr. Tofel said he would help lead an effort to raise private money to support the construction. He is the center’s first paid employee. What the center will look like and what exactly it will feature have yet to be determined. Plans call for rotating exhibitions to appear at the center, which will also feature lectures, film, and other programs that will be developed in partnership with arts, cultural, press, and academic institutions.

The founders of the center, Tom Bernstein, president of Chelsea Piers, and Peter Kunhardt, who heads a documentary production company, have said they envision that it will “serve as a magnet for the world’s great leaders, thinkers, and activists to participate in lectures and symposiums that examine the foundations of free and open societies.”

They said they are using the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia as models for their planning.

Mr. Tofel, a friend of Mr. Bernstein’s, said that since September 11, 2001, he has thought deeply about the “struggle between freedom and fear” and said he looks forward to participating in that struggle by taking the reins of the center.

“I’m convinced that in the International Freedom Center we can create a powerful forum for courage, and a museum of conscience on behalf of individual freedom, free societies and freedom around the world,” he said in an email. Mr. Tofel, who is leaving a conservative newspaper, said the center will not “take sides” on political issues dividing America, but said the “heart of the center is going to be on what unites us. I don’t just mean Americans.”

He said the center will “elucidate those issues within the world of freedom about which reasonable people can differ” and will be a “forum for debate.”

Before becoming assistant publisher, Mr. Tofel was in charge of corporate communications at the Journal, serving as its spokesman from October 2000 to April 2002. Earlier he was director of international development and administration at Dow Jones. He was involved with the planning of the Personal Journal section and the newspaper’s Web site.

Mr. Tofel received a bachelor’s degree, law degree, and master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University. He is the author of “A Legend in the Making: The New York Yankees in 1939” and “Vanishing Point: The Disappearance of Judge Crater, and the New York He Left Behind.”