Yad Vashem is a museum of the Shoah. Shoah is the Hebrew name for the Holocaust, the mass extermination of Jews by Hitler's regime. Six million European Jews were shot, burned, gassed, and died of torture, starvation, and disease in concentration camps. The Yad Vashem memorial complex is dedicated to the memory of their names - it is not without reason that its name translates as "memory and name" or "place and name". These are words from the Old Testament: "... to them I will give in my house and within my walls a better place and a better name than to sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will not be destroyed" (Isaiah 56:5).
The idea of not destroying the names of the dead and those who risked their lives to save Jews began to be considered during the war. In 1948, the first Holocaust museum was founded on Mount Zion, and in 1957 Yad Vashem opened.
It is very difficult to be on its territory, even grown men cry in the historic building. If you plan a visit to the memorial, it is better to take a whole day: it takes several hours to explore it, and afterwards it is impossible to switch to something entertaining.
The 18 hectares include the Valley of Destroyed Communities, the Children's Memorial, the Wall of Remembrance of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Hall of Remembrance... The cattle car in which Jews were sent to the camps symbolically stops on the rails in front of the cliff. The monument to Janusz Korczak shows the famous Polish writer and teacher with his orphans - he went with them to the concentration camp even though he could have saved himself. A functioning synagogue preserves Torah cabinets and other items salvaged from the Nazi-destroyed synagogues of Europe.
The memorial complex includes video and training centres, an archive, a library, the International Research Institute of the Shoah, and an art museum containing thousands of works created in the ghettos and camps. A special unit is dedicated to the Righteous Among the Nations, a title awarded to non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust. In honour of the heroes, name trees have been planted in the Walk and Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations. Their number has not been finalised, the museum continues to accept information about cases of rescue.
An important aim of Yad Vashem is to personalise the Shoah, to show that six million individual murders took place. This idea is embodied by the main building of the complex, the historical museum, which opened in 2005. Its unusual design was created by the famous architect Moshe Safdie. The 4,200 square metre concrete building looks like a two hundred metre long arrow piercing the Mount of Remembrance, where Yad Vashem is located. In the underground corridor, the history of the Jewish genocide is shown in chronological order - through thousands of personal belongings of victims and survivors, documents, letters, films. In the centre of the Hall of Names at the end of the corridor are more than 600 photographs of the victims.
Shocked visitors who have walked this path of horror arrive at the "tail" of the arrow building. There, the observation deck offers a beautiful panorama of the mountains and of modern Jerusalem: light, space, life that goes on, despite everything.
