New Yad Vashem Museum to open
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Etgar Lefkovits, THE JERUSALEM POST Mar. 3, 2005
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More than thirty heads of state and ministers from around the world will attend this month's inauguration of Yad Vashem's new Holocaust History Museum, in what is gearing up to be the largest international gathering of world leaders in Israel in years.
The state of the art museum, which aims to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive in the 21st century even as the number of aging survivors continues to wane, will be officially inaugurated on March 15, with the museum slated to open its doors to the public on March 27.
Among the world leaders slated to take part in the two day by-invitation-only opening events include UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, the Presidents of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Lithuanian, Poland, Serbia and Montenegro and Switzerland, the Prime Ministers of France, Sweden Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and Romania, the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the Vice President of the Dominican Republic, the Foreign Ministers of Germany, Norway, and Spain, the National Security Adviser of the Russian Federation and the Education Ministers of Turkey, Greece Latvia and Slovenia.
The US has still not decided who it will send as a representative, Yad Vashem officials said Thursday, although the expectation is that Israel's closest ally will send a senior cabinet minister at the very least to the event, which will take place under the patronage of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and President Moshe Katsav.
A decade in the making, the $40 million museum, which spans over 4,200 square meters, is more than four times the size of the current 31 year old historical museum which will close down next month.
At a time of increasing Holocaust interest, the new museum presents the history of the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust by focusing on the personal story of the individual victim through original artifacts, survivor testimonies and personal possessions.
Lists of the deported Jews displayed in the museum are interspersed with the pictures of the victims who have been identified; the original cobblestone street, tram rails, and street lamps from the destroyed Warsaw Ghetto interspersed with a Nazi documentary film of the infected camp whose inhabitants are dying of infection and starvation are part of the display on the recreated Leszno Street, the main street of the Warsaw Ghetto; a children's monopoly game from the Terezin Ghetto is in the next gallery; 100 screens of short films with the testimony of 60 survivors are found throughout the museum, as are the original Auschwitz Album and Schindler's Lists along with the hundreds of haunting pictures that line the museum's walls.
"This museum is our obligation for the future generation," said the Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate, Avner Shalev, and the brainchild of the museum, which he called a "cornerstone in the history of the state."
The mostly underground structure constructed in the form of a spike, topped by a skylight, cuts through Mount Herzl, with the omnipresent strong light of the Jerusalem sun almost completely blocked out, save a ray of light, visible all along the length of the building, which gains in force only at the very end.
Visitors who enter the museum are forced by the museum's design to zigzag back and forth through a series of historical galleries in strict order, with each depicting another stage in the destruction of European Jewry.
The architectural concrete used in the building, which is bereft of the soft white Jerusalem stone used in all city structures, only deepens the sense of doom, and dread prevalent throughout the museum.
"There are in this part of the world [Eastern and Central Europe] 6,000,000 Jews for whom the world is divided into places where they cannot live and places they cannot enter," reads a 1936 quotation on the wall in one of the galleries depicting how the world shut its doors to the doomed Jews of Europe from then president of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann.
Across the hall reads a quotation from the Australian delegate, T. W. White, to a 1938 conference on the situation of Jewish refugees amidst ever-increasing pogroms against European Jewry.
"Under the circumstances, Australia cannot do more, as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one."
Children's diaries and poetry from the horrors of Ghetto life afford the visitor a glimpse of young talent obliterated, their voices forever silenced. Their memory, their hopes and dreams, are now dutifully restored.
The pictures of loved ones in the moments before death; the massacre at Babi Yar, make the visitor sense he is walking through, and reliving the darkest chapters in modern-day history.
The museum ends with the new Hall of Names, where the names of the three million known Jewish victims of the Holocaust are stored.
In the middle of the room there is a deep pit, which cuts through the bedrock deep in the earth, mirroring the cone above and ends with a pool of water, which reflects the faces from above.
The abyss represents the three million more Jewish dead whose names remain unknown.
The museum exit emerges dramatically out of the mountainside, the light suddenly once again in full force, affording a panoramic view of Jerusalem, and the modern-day State, which rose up from the ashes of the Holocaust
