Yad Vashem's New Holocaust
History Museum's entrance
slices through the Mount of
Remembrance, guiding visi-
tors deep into its under-
ground galleries. The exit
opens from the mountainside
to a view of rebuilt
Jerusalem.

Photos courtesy of Yad Vashem

1973. It is also home to a vast archive,
a research center, an international
school and a library. Yad Vashem offi-
cials also recently launched a vast
online database of victims' names.
Today Yad Vashem sees vast num-
bers of visitors each year. Its peak year

will be open to the public at the end of
the month. It is vastly different from its
predecessor, a smaller museum, built in
1973, with dimly lit displays that are
heavy on text and symbolism and now
feel dated.
The new museum, with its video art
installations, films and survivor testimo-
ny, aim at telling the plight of the
Holocaust victims in a modern, more
accessible way.

Subtle Competition

Although museum officials play down
any sense of competition, the museum
also seems to be an Israeli answer to the
success of the Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, D.C., and the
Jewish Museum in Berlin.
Notable is the stark structure of the
building itself.
Designed by the internationally
renowned Israeli-born architect Moshe
Safdie, Shalev likens its cutting through
the hillside to "a rupture, a cut into the
continuity of Jewish life and Europe

was 2000, when 2 million visitors
came. Last year, with Israel's tourism
down because of the ongoing intifada,
the number of visitors was 850,000,
according to officials.
Among the visitors are 100,000
school-age students and 50,000 sol-
diers. Both Israeli and foreign teachers
come to Yad Vashem for courses on
how to teach the Holocaust.
The first voices calling for a memo-
rial for the Jewish vic-
tims of the Nazis were
raised as early as 1942,
while the war still was
being fought.
In 1953, following the
passage of a special law
in the Knesset, Yad
Vashem was established
to commemorate the
victims and document
the events of the
Holocaust in order to
educate fUture genera-
tions about its meaning
and legacy.
In the early years of
the state, there was great
ambivalence about how
to handle the memory of
the Holocaust, historians say.
As a young country focused on
building a future, a place where people
had an ideological preference for hero-
ism over victimhood, the Holocaust
was thorny territory.

and the historical flow."
Safdie says the building evokes the
feeling of an architectural remnant,
something that has long been there and
now is waiting to be revealed.
In an interview with JTA, Safdie said
he decided not to cover the concrete
with any other material "because it
smacked of the superfluous."
He said he preferred "the minimalism
of the place, given the material of the
museum and given the outside as well."
The outside world peeks into the
museum through a ridge of skylights.
In the depths of retelling the darkest
of histories, there is the reminder of
sunlight and blue sky.
The architecturally innovative build-
ing itself dangles on either end of the
mountain, suspended over a pine-tree
forest.

New Vision

Inside the exhibition rooms, the chal-
lenge was to highlight the Jewish voice
within the earthquake of the Nazi geno-

The 1961 trial of Nazi Adolf
Eichmann in Jerusalem marked the
beginnings of a sea change in Israelis'
attitude toward the Holocaust.
As Israelis came to terms with what
happened to their people under Nazi
rule, the standing of Yad Vashem, in
turn, took on greater importance to
the Israeli public.
"As the issue of Holocaust memory
became more central in Israel and
Israeli identity, the institution became
more and more sacred," Stauber said,
referring to Yad Vashem. "It's a devel-
opment that took place with the pass-
ing of years. It did not happen all at
once."

New Generation

James Young, a professor of English
and Judaic studies at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, is a leading
expert on memorials, particularly
Holocaust memorials.
He recently sat on the jury to select
the memorial for the World Trade
Center and also was on the jury that
selected the Berlin memorial to Jews
killed in the Holocaust.
Young said that with its new muse-
um, Yad Vashem is poised to speak to
a new generation of Israelis, who are
more interested in the Diaspora expe-
rience than the founding generations
had been. Those earlier Israelis pre-
ferred to cut themselves off from their

tide.
The- task felt overwhelming at first,
said Yehudit Inbar, the curator now in
charge of the museum. The Jews were
victims whose property was confiscated
and destroyed; the photographs taken at
the concentration camps and in the
ghettos usimlly were made by Nazis.
"We asked, `How do you create a
Jewish museum when all the pictures
were taken by the Nazis, and the Jews
look awful and already dead?"' said
Inbar.
Inbar, Shalev and a handful of other
Yad Vashem officials were the first to
start planning the new museum. They
consulted with historians, psychologists,
teachers, survivors and others as they
brainstormed their vision of a new
museum that would put a human face
on the story of the Holocaust.
Among their supporters were Jews
from around the world; Holocaust sur-
vivors and their descendants were par-
ticularly generous.
Philanthropist and survivor Joseph

.

pasts in Europe and so focused on a
highly nationalist and Zionist interpre-
tation of the Holocaust.
In a telephone interview from
Amherst, Young said the Yad Vashem
Memorial Authority is recognizing
that the new generation of Israelis,
including many Jews from the former
Soviet Union, are "validating the Galut
experience in ways the older genera-
tion did not." Galut, the Hebrew
word for exile, is used to refer to the
Diaspora.
"Life in the Galut led only to holo-
caust," according to the Zionist narra-
tive, he said. "The new generation
does not see things that way. They are
willing to look at their former lives in
the Galut" as what they bring as peo-
ple, "as immigrants with whole immi-
grant experiences," he said.
Yad Vashem, according to Young, is
"an essential part of Israel's national
story itself," a story that tells Israelis
why they are here.
Shulamit Imber, pedagogical direc-
tor at Yad Vashem's International
School for Holocaust Studies, said
more Israeli schoolchildren have been
coming to Yad Vashem in recent years,
and therefore the experience is woven
into their understanding of the
Holocaust.
Built on Har Hazikaron, Hebrew for
Memorial Mountain, Yad Vashem gives
people a feeling, she said, that "they are
coming to a place with meaning."

❑

Wilf and his family are among the
largest donors to Yad Vashem and the
new museum.
Mark Wilf, one of his sons, who is a
member of the executive committee of
the American Society for Yad Vashem,
national campaign chairman_of the
United Jewish Communities, a JTA vice
president and a leading member of the
group called Second Generation, spoke
as his family's representative at a recent
news conference in New York.
The new museum, Wilf said,
"through the stories it tells, through the
architecture we see, through the soul-
searching it provokes, will have a critical
role for my generation, and for future
generations, in energizing our identity
as Jews and as human beings."

Personal Stories

At the entrance of the museum, visitors
will see a large video art display of
Jewish life before the war, assembled by
Israeli artist Michal Rover from film
clips of Jewish families.

10 YEARs on page 58

tTN

5/5
2005

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