A memorial and a name

In the afternoon we went to Yad Vashem the holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. The design of the building is extraordinary. When you enter a film in black and white of Jewish families is playing at the beginning of a long concrete triangular hallway. The hallway branches off into ten rooms which chronologically tell the holocaust story. The Nazis moved in under the world’s eye and began to arrest and organize the Jewish people to keep track of them. They were eventually sent by trains into concentration camps to be murdered. The museum told harrowing stories of families separated and not being able to say goodbye as they passed each other on the way to the gas chambers. You couldn’t help but think of your own kids and the heartbreak of a passing final glance in a crowd. The last stop in the museum is the hall of remembrance. This is a circular room of bookshelves filled with hundreds of soldiers containing names and stories of those murdered in the holocaust. There were six million Jews killed in the holocaust. Let that sink in…six million.

Following the holocaust the United Nations wanted to give the Jewish people their own land to establish and defend themselves. So in the late 1940’s they divided the land between Israel and Palestine. The Arabs, who had previously owned the land, thought this was unfair and fought to defend the land attacking Israel the day after the proposal was supposed to take place. They lost the war and lost their piece of the land.

The end of the hallway leads to a spectacular, peaceful view of New Jerusalem. There is a huge glass window and while you walked through Yad Vashem you were unknowingly ascending a mountain that would lead you to an oversight of the city. Spectacular.

Outside of the main building was a second building which was the children’s memorial. In the first section of this building were silhouettes of children and over the loud speakers name after name and age of children who were killed in the holocaust were read. I heard ages from 6 months to 17 years. The final room of this building is a room with glass windows and thousands of candle reflections surrounding you on all sides. Speechless.

The name Yad Vashem comes from the Hebrew in Isaiah 56:5
“I will give them a memorial and a name that will not be cut off.”

On a story that is a little funny… Yad Vashem has a room that contains an eternal flame. Some years back German Chancellor Schroeder was invited to turn a handle to boost the eternal flame as a sign of friendship between Germany and Israel. In a diplomatic nightmare he turned the handle the wrong way and extinguished the eternal flame.